Swans on Tea

Starts With a Bang: The E-Cat is back, and people are still falling for it!

Ethan critiques a “cold fusion” effort. I have a few comments.

Look, let’s get a few things out into the open first. If there is a cold fusion device that actually works, that can harness the power of nuclear fusion to create energy, it would change the world.

I think this is too strong a statement. The requirement for cold fusion to change the world is more than it simply existing. If the device produces energy but we can’t harness it, it’s not particularly useful — if it can’t boil water to make steam and drive a turbine, thus producing electricity (or the equivalent via some other means), all we’ve made is a nifty hand-warmer. Thus, the bar for cold fusion is a little higher than simply seeing it occur. What we really want is warm fusion, at the very least.

However, this particular claim is about a device that gets hot enough to do so. But Ethan is correct in terms of the tests one needs to run in order to confirm this as legitimate.

[T]hey’re again claiming that this is nickel + hydrogen fusion, which should result in copper. Now, it’s important to know, the last time this was claimed, the nickel that was analyzed was found to contain the isotopic ratios of normal nickel mined on Earth, while the copper (10% of the product) was found to contain the isotopic ratios of copper found naturally on Earth, not the ratio you’d expect to find copper in if nuclear fusion had occurred! (Since only Nickel-62 and Nickel-64 can fuse with hydrogen into copper, it’d be impossible to get a 10% copper product in any case!)

This, to me, is a dealbreaker, though it took me a few minutes to decrypt the statement*. Nickel has several stable isotopes, so at first glance one might think you could get many isotopes of copper. However, absorbing a proton to become Copper is only energetically favorable for two of them, Ni-62 and Ni-64, which would form Cu-63 and Cu-65, respectively (the two stable isotopes of Cu). All the other candidates that might become Cu undergo electron-capture to become Ni again, which means you have to add several MeV of energy to run the reverse reaction — and cold fusion only has a fraction of an eV of thermal energy. Even if by some miracle these reactions occurred, the decays are quick. By the time you assayed the sample, there would be essentially none of those isotopes left.

In a naturally occurring sample of Ni, only about 3.6% is Ni-62, and just under 1% is Ni-64, which why Ethan can correctly say that a sample of nickel could never become 10% copper — there isn’t enough raw material for that to take place! If fusion were actually happening, you would expect the sample to be depleted of only these two isotopes of Ni, and you would expect the Cu isotopes to be present in just short of a 4:1 ratio, rather than the ~7:3 split that we see in a naturally occurring sample.

Given the blatant impossibility of this result, I don’t really care if or how the energy readings were fudged, or if it was an error on their part. It doesn’t work as advertised.

*It turns out I could have gone to his previous post on the topic for the answer, but it was a nice exercise to figure it out. All the details are there. Same result.

Scientific Illiteracy

There is certainly a problem, but when it reaches the level of elected officials it has gone beyond a problem of literacy. I’d venture to say that Paul Broun being Chairman of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology is not so much illiteracy as bordering on the abdication of responsibility on the part of the GOP. That someone like this could be elected is surely a symptom of the illiteracy in the US, but brings with it a whole new level of problems.

When elected officials, the very people we ask to lead our country, are ignorant of how the world works, how can our country be expected to survive much longer?

Also, I can’t help but think that if meteor impacts had been brought up as a point of discussion a few weeks ago, there would have been a backlash of anti-science opposition, attacking the science and scientists involved and accusations of fear-mongoring. (Now, of course, there’s a possibility of an overreaction and advocation of programs that will be nothing but safety theater.) There seems to be a tendency to deny there is any problem until it has reached a crisis level.

Bad Physics, Bad Investment

He incorrectly claims that a cyclist can get more torque by having a crank arm that’s “longer” but bends back towards the center, keeping the pedals the same distance away from the axis as a traditional straight crank. Levers don’t work like that. It doesn’t matter what shape the lever arm is, it only matters how far away the pedal is from the center of rotation.

Good to note that the Kickstarter attempt failed miserably, not so good that there’s a smaller-scale attempt elsewhere.

Just Because I Can

To render those images interpretable, to make them available for communication to each other, we need to perform an act of translation. That’s what’s going on above, when you see images labelled “gamma ray” or “radio continuum” with your own eyes, dressed up in lively shades of red and yellow, purple and blue.

To some (and now I’m getting to it) such coloring is a lie, propaganda with which NASA and space scientists in general trick us into paying for the observatories in space and on earth that generate the data behind the fibs. To sane people, it’s what you do to help you think about and understand what it is you’re looking at/for.

Scientists represent information in (one hopes) useful ways. At a fundamental level, false-color is not any different than a chart or a graph.

A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science

Lots of good stuff here, on some warning signs of dubious science, stemming from some suspect talks at TEDx. It’s directed toward medical/life sciences material, but there are many points that apply to science in general. This is related to an ongoing issue in journalism — whether your task is to just offer material, or whether you have a responsibility to vet the material. I’m of the latter opinion — I think that a “let the audience decide” or “I need to present both sides” approach is a cop-out.

There’s also a list of behavior that one might see if one declines to give a platform to someone peddling the dubious science, and to me, this is old hat. The claims of endangering freedom of speech/bias/suppression and the assertion that they hold a special insight (often despite no formal training) are pretty standard crackpot positions.

From the three you then use one
To make ten ones…
(And you know why four plus minus one
Plus ten is fourteen minus one?
‘Cause addition is commutative, right.)
And so you have thirteen tens,
And you take away seven,
And that leaves five…

Well, six actually.
But the idea is the important thing.

Tom Lehrer, “New Math”

Let’s Get Rid of Zero!

What can we take from this introduction? Well, our author can’t be bothered to define basic arithmetic properly. What he really wants to say is, roughly, Peano arithmetic, with 0 removed. But my guess is that he has no idea what Peano arithmetic actually is, so he handwaves. The real question is, why did he bother to include this at all?

My own experience is primarily with physics crackpots and creationists, but there are obviously math cranks out there, too.

Such as the definition of theory in a scientific context.

KENTUCKY GOP OUTRAGED COLLEGES WANT STUDENTS TO KNOW THINGS

ACT, the state’s testing company, interviews professors to figure out the things most important to student readiness for college, which sounds like a smart thing to do. Unfortunately, those professors have bad news: If you want students to do well in biology classes, they have to know about evolution.

I’m not sure how the Kentucky politicians equated not teaching evolution with better critical thinking skills, but I’m not surprised they don’t see the problem.

Science has been cancelled because your parents prefer to believe in magic

Cartoon lacks attribution, which is unfortunate. I’d prefer to link to the original source.

Apparently, anyway.

How American fundamentalist schools are using Nessie to disprove evolution

Jonny Scaramanga, 27, who went through the ACE programme as a child, but now campaigns against Christian fundamentalism, said the Nessie claim was presented as “evidence that evolution couldn’t have happened. The reason for that is they’re saying if Noah’s flood only happened 4000 years ago, which they believe literally happened, then possibly a sea monster survived.

“If it was millions of years ago then that would be ridiculous. That’s their logic. It’s a common thing among creationists to believe in sea monsters.”

Private religious schools, including the Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, Louisiana, which follows the ACE curriculum, have already been cleared to receive the state voucher money transferred from public school funding, thanks to a bill pushed through by state Governor Bobby Jindal.

Electricity generated from water: BlackLight Power announces validation of its scientific breakthrough in energy production

The “validation” here is that they got some money for further development, and this is reported on a business site. Getting backers does not preclude them being, as Bob Park has put it, “investors with deep pockets and shallow brains”. The purported mechanism is the formation of Hydrinos, which is a state in Hydrogen below the ground state. Which is, needless to say, at odds with basic quantum mechanics.

BlackLight’s continuously operating, power-producing system converts ubiquitous H2O (water) vapor directly into electricity, oxygen, and a new, more stable form of Hydrogen called Hydrino, which releases 200 times more energy than directly burning hydrogen

If it’s “more stable” than regular Hydrogen, one has to wonder why we don’t see it everywhere. Oh, wait, we apparently do:

The identity of the dark matter of the universe as Hydrinos is supported by BlackLight’s spectroscopic and analytical results as well as astrophysical observations.

Except, of course, that spectroscopy means photons, and dark matter doesn’t interact electromagnetically, because if it did, we’d see it. If you can get to this Hydrino state electromagnetically, why doesn’t it happen spontaneously? We should be up to our armpits in Hydrinos.

Willfull Ignorance about Statistics in Government

The survey isn’t cost effective, the data gathered isn’t genuinely useful according to Representative Webster, because it’s not a scientific survey. Why isn’t it a scientific survey? Because it’s random.

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC.