At 08:58 PM 12/29/2009, William Beaty wrote:
On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
But there is the tantalizing middle. They find that they "almost"
close the loop.
You're giving them the benefit of the doubt. Count how many times
you have to do that! It's very telling.
Their acting very Newman-esque and using a battery? Rather than
using a five dollar supercapacitor? They're either insane, or
they're scammers.
I've already concluded that they are a variation on the latter. But
there is a *possibility*, I'm pointing out, that they are "sincere."
Still unethical, but that they believe they just need to get some
more money to fix this or that, and that this justifies withholding
the critical information. The critical information is *why* they
believe they have overunity, or, in fact, why they believe that they
have any evidence at all of excess energy. What they showed us, quite
simply, didn't reveal that.
Come on, they looked at some oscilloscope traces and they looked
okay? The amount of energy that would need to be dumped to rotation
would be quite small compared to the heat, as if the toroids were
resistive loads. But, as I recall, I saw some ringing.
So they think that they are actually over unity, but with losses
that maybe with better engineering they can fix. All it takes is more money.
If they're insane, then they'll talk themselves into using a battery
and never actually try a supercap, even in private. They'll have
all sorts of important reasons why they cannot ever try a
supercap. Oh, and by "insane," I mean the same as "fooling
themselves." There is a threshold past which the self-fooing
becomes a complete break with reality.
I don't think they are simply fooling themselves, I think they got
led into a situation where they needed to fool others. Do they know
that the whole thing is bogus? How could they *know* that? They'd
have to do much more careful work, and they are too busy marketing
what they have: a concept, not engineering to *actually work*, just
an idea that there is some anomaly here, and they want to see you the
anomaly. You can figure out how to use it, not their business, they
are in the business of selling you the idea and some of the equipment
you'd use to test it. That way, they make money whether there is
anything real here or not. Quite a business concept, actually.
I'm even doing something a *little* like it, except that I'm fully
disclosing everything. I don't have any supersecret idea, I'm trying
to sell kits to replicate a SPAWAR experiment. In theory, I could
make money even if SPAWAR is bogus, though it would be more
difficult. I could sell you the kits to show that it doesn't work.
(But the problem is, how would I know that my kit wasn't missing some
critical feature, some parameter that I varied, perhaps without
realizing it?) I can say this: if I can't get the kits to work, i.e.,
to show radiation evidence, I might still sell them, but with that
disclosure and all the associated caveats. Maybe somebody else could
figure out the missing link. Quite simply, I have a few thousand
dollars in this, and I could get most of it back by selling my stuff
for other applications. I have no intention of putting myself in a
position where I'd have to lie or deceive in order to escape with my
shirt on. I'd rather eke it out on social security, I'd sleep better.)
Were you here when "Doctor" Stiffler was presenting his LED
overunity device? One of his odd behaviors was, rather than just
sitting down and honestly demonstrating his claims, and always
sticking with straight un-twisted discussions, he claimed to be
making youtube postings to "mess with the heads" of skeptics.
Steorn made a claim like that about one of their prior announcements.
It was to lead the Men in Black astray.
In that case, nobody knew which of his videos were hoaxes
intended to mislead "skeptics", and which were honest
experiments. Steorn mentioned doing something similar.
You noticed.
But this is the real and present tipoff: their development of
extremely low-friction bearings. That is an abandonment of
over-unity and indicates a desire to become ever more and more
sensitive, allowing more spectacular demonstrations where a tiny
effect is accumulated.
Definitely! That's the Newman fallacy: pretending that a whirling
massive flywheel represents a huge energy output. With low-friction
bearings, you can spin a fairly large wheel for months using just a
few 10s of cc of battery volume. That's how the fake PM machine
sculpture built by David Jones of Nature journal accomplished its
feat. (I replaced those hidden batteries myself more than once over
the years.)
Yeah. Classic. I've been reading Park's Voodoo Science. He makes, of
course, some crucial errors, he fails to understand and apply his own
advice. But he's also right about some stuff. Some of the scams he
reports on were truly cheeky. And he seems to think that some of them
started as sincere mistakes. Fraud comes later, as the unfortunate
"inventor" is in deep and realizes he can't demonstrate anything yet.
Though it obviously is. They claim there is no energy going there,
but that hasn't actually been shown except by a gross and coarse
display that would completely miss the tiny amount of energy
expenditure necessary to make that rotor accumulate angular momentum.
Why not just use a supercap and remove the whole battery problem?
Why not indeed?
Watch the capacitor voltage rise slowly as excess energy comes
from nowhere? Stick a Zener across it to keep it from overvoltage.
Sure. Except ... they just need time to get a good generator attached.
It's obvious, I agree.
There's really no sensible excuse for their bizarre setup, unless
it's obfuscation. Their setup looks sensible unless one realizes
what the lack of a supercap implies about their collective mental state.
I'm not at all sure what it shows or implies. But there are so many
indicators that are screaming "scam." The question is "what kind of
scam?" How do they hope to make money on this? And I think it's
fairly obvious. It's what they are doing: they sell a peek at the
technology, and they sell the equipment needed to test it.
