Talk:Cold fusion/Archive 7

message: When answering someone's POV concerns, please wait for him to say that they have been correctly addressed.  Editors cannot be expected to be always on their PC.  If the POV tagger does not respond for a week, then, yes, you can remove the tag.  What's the urgency to remove the tag anyway ?  Do you expect this issue to be resolved in one hour ? Pcarbonn 18:18, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I strongly agree with the general sentiment, having myself often been on the other side of a similar situation.  However... someone who starts a dispute in good faith must point to the specific items which are disputed, and engage in a dialog about how they can be fixed.  Merely tagging the article and leaving (SCZenz: "I do not have time to fix it", Joke: "I see no possibility of this article ever conforming to anything remotely similar to neutral POV"), or having a general complaint rather than a specific one (SCZenz: "dispute the tone of this article and many of its facts", Joke: "because this article is awful"), do not make up a legitimate dispute.  To be fair to SCZenz, he did point out a number of fairly specific things he considers tobe POV problems - after he was asked to.  The NPOV tag does not bother me at all, particularly since I think there is some bias in the opposite direction (mostly in the form of unsourced and unsorceable statements like "a majority rejects the possibility...", "was written off by mainstream scientists..." and so on).   I will not remove a NPOV tag, and I will attempt to fix anything specific which is pointed out which genuinely appears to be a problem. ObsidianOrder 09:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

text: P.S. I would also take it as a personal favor if SCZenz would respond to at least some of my replies to his comments above, under "Reputable sources", "In defense of the new introduction", "Reply to James S...", and "Specific NPOV problems"...  I have tried to engage in a dialog about a lot of things but have not gotten any response back.  ObsidianOrder 09:25, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Looking back, I have to say that you appear to have addressed my concerns partly, but not completely, and that we still have some points of disagreement.  Hence there appears to me to be a dispute still.  The reason I didn't reply earlier is that every time I say anything on this talk page, I am inundated with many wordy responses (some of them highly non-construcitve), and I just don't know how to deal with all of it. Is there a way that I can contribute to this article without spending 3 hours a day reading the ever-expanding talk page?  -- SCZenz 05:01, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Excellent evasion! You should have been a tap dancer; you dance away from the questions and around the issues so gracefully, all the while making it look like our fault for asking. I assume you still have no comment on the tritium at BARC, the excess heat at Los Alamos, the transmutations at the synchrotron lab, or any of a thousand other definitive experimental results. For you, it is all about tit-for-tat personal arguments and nifty evasions, and never about science. --JedRothwell 18:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Joke - Thank you for the compliment.  I would prefer a more substantive response, however. ObsidianOrder 01:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  please keep POV tag until the tagger is satisfied 

message: Wired had an interesting article on Wikipedia: 
QUOTE:
:But why should I contribute to an article [to Wikipedia]? I'm no expert.
:That's fine. The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: 'Experts are scum.' For some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War -- and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge -- get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment.
So, let's have some humility in what we are doing, please.  Pcarbonn 17:19, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  On the funny side 

message: After looking through this entire talk page twice, I could find only one claims of factual inaccuracy, and only one claim of original research, both of which have already been addressed.  There are only three  tags in the article, having to do only with the early behavior of P&F and Jones.  So, I replaced  and  with . --James S. 19:03, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, the article is looking much much better now. I'm still a little concerned about OR, but if the others are convinced I say take it off. Jefffire 19:06, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see you mentioned in an edit summary that you thought the claims of persecution were OR, but it looks like they are sourced to me. --James S. 19:28, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Could some one find the last 3 requested citations, so that we can remove the POV tag, finally ?  Jed, you are probably in the best place to do it.  As an aside, I'm very happy that we were able to come to an agreement on such a complex issue.Pcarbonn 16:27, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have now found sources for the 3 requested citations.  Unless some one raises other issues, I (or someone else) will remove the article's POV tag soon.  I understand that there is still a POV tag in one section under dispute though, and I'll keep it there until the dispute is resolved. Pcarbonn 22:01, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Please explain why the POV tag is still needed, since all previous issues seem to have been addressed. Pcarbonn 18:17, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Totally disputed and OR tags replaced with POV alone 

message: This article had some chaotic mistakes because energy and power were mixed up. Please be a little more careful. To review:
Energy; measured in joules.
Power; instantaneous measure of energy, measured in watts.
Power density; power per unit of volume. Cold fusion power density often exceeds uranium fission. (Not always, of course.)
Energy density; joules per unit of volume. The energy density of cold fusion, or any form of fusion, far exceeds that of fission. This is why, for example, a thermonuclear bomb produces a larger explosion that a fission bomb.
Scale. The physical size of the device. Cold fusion cathodes are usually less than a gram, and they produce a few watts. Cathodes of 100 grams have been made, that produced 100+ watts, but they were very dangerous because the reaction cannot be controlled, and cells sometimes explode.
The article said:
:". . . the effect would have to be thoroughly controlled and scaled up to larger size before commercialization could be considered. Studies showing the largest power densities make use of palladium, and even those results are not even close to energy levels that are commercially substantial, in fact they are orders-of-magnitude too small to be commercially viable . . ."
The author mixed up power and power density. Power density was high enough in 1989. Actually, power is also high enough for many commercial applications such as powering cell phones with thermoelectric batteries, but the reaction cannot be controlled so this is impossible.
"Energy levels" is probably supposed to mean "power levels." The "energy level" (meaning energy density?) of a cell is astronomically high. 
Also, the term "energy burst" is often used in the cold fusion literature, but it does not always mean a short or transient event. Some "bursts" last for weeks or months. This is confusing. As far as I know, no cell has operated continously longer than about 3 months, producing ~300 MJ I think. This is obviously not long enough for commercial applications. (Although it sure beats a Nicad!) --JedRothwell 13:55, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I just want to say- I agree with Jed. :D Jefffire 13:58, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You mean, you agree with the physics textbooks that define energy and power. Good! --JedRothwell 14:06, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

text: Also -- and sorry to nitpick this to death -- power output during a single "burst" often fluctuates, but it does not return to zero. If it did, we would say that burst ended and another began. During the entire run, however, cells are never endothermic. There is never a significant "energy storage" phase. An effect that is so uncontrolled it produces large fluctuations cannot be commercialized, needless to say. --JedRothwell 15:57, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please use units of power and energy correctly