User talk:Ludwigs2

Of interest

I know you ideologically disagree with WP:FRINGE, but I think you and I agree on the principles I outline here: Wikipedia_talk:Fringe_theories#Notability_by_collection. Or maybe not. Anyway, having your input would be appreciated.

ScienceApologist (talk) 23:23, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw that, and I'm pondering it. I mostly agree, but I'm not sure quite what to do with it yet. by the way, I don't have an ideological disagreement with Fringe, just with (what strikes me as) editors who are too aggressive with the guideline. Fringe is useful, but like many useful things it can be abused. --Ludwigs2 01:19, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

{{hex2dec}} - issue

Resolved

Hi, the template you improved greatly has a newly discovered issue, non-hex value input. Maybe you can take a look. -DePiep (talk) 12:22, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Must say, I used your hex2dec (includig the shallow footprint) to wiki's profit & fun nicely in Template:unichar, eg because of its stable & predictable behaviour. Nice working with a tough thing. (I also stole some good ideas, like the prefix-check on 0x) I've put the green thing up here to freshen up this page and your day. OK. -DePiep (talk) 22:51, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Arguments to avoid

Please could you look at WP:VPP#Arguments to avoid and Wikipedia talk:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Just for deletion?. Simply south (talk) 00:25, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi

I see you closed "No Kings" thread. Maybe you are right. Can you please make a closing remark where you write "..it's mere chitchat.." that in India, where OP is located, Native Indians are normally called Red Indians. This is necessary as one user suspects malice in usage of the term.  Jon Ascton  (talk) 16:32, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I didn't close it in favor of one side or another. I closed it because it was wandering off into casual discussion. I'll change the 'chitchat' wording, if you like, but I'm not going to use the closure to continue the argument. that would be improper. --Ludwigs2 16:41, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

You got me wrong, man. I didn't mean to continue this argument as I wholeheartedly agree with you that it is turning in to "chitchat" as you aptly called it. WikiDeo has already given me very valuable information on the topic, precisely what I was looking for, like the names of books especially. My concern was the simple fact that Red Indian is a term still used in India. It was only natural for me to use this term, this should be at least made clear, as one user has expressed suspicion that I maybe trolling (he is not used to its usage, which is natural for you Westerners, but we in India use it exclusively to refer to so-called Indians of Americas ) Thanks  Jon Ascton  (talk) 17:53, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

The more conventional terms (as I suspect you know by now) are 'Native American' or 'American Indian'. That being said, however, I don't believe that this is something you need to defend yourself against, and I don't believe this is something worth continuing the argument over. In case you hadn't noticed, there are a number of people - myself included - who feel that you are engaged in some mild-mannered trolling. If you're not, and you want to prove to us that you're not, then the best thing you can do is to accept the misperception for the moment and make some efforts to behave in ways that other people see as upright and responsible. If you keep doing the things that lead people to think you're trolling (e.g., asking nebulous questions and then drawing out arguments over them to the very last detail) then people will continue to think you are trolling. if you stop doing those things, everyone will forget about it and treat you like an upright citizen (after a while, at any rate).

It's not important so let it go. 'k? --Ludwigs2 18:01, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Agreed.  Jon Ascton  (talk) 03:49, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

On Kundalini Yoga...

Ludwig, thanks for coming in an helping out with a look at Kundalini Yoga!!

Can you please please please explain to gatoclass that he cannot just make stuff up as a basis for his constant reversions??? He has never once contributed to this article, and I have no clue what-so-ever as to where he gets this information he claims to use as a reason for undoing my updates.

I am totally open to making this article better, but gatoclass is just such a HUGE hindrance at every level of this page. Please keep helping!! I had to re-do his undo again today, and it's just not helping to always have to go back to some historic version from months ago just because what is up there doesn't line up with this guys totally fictional world. RogerThatOne72 (talk) 19:40, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Mountainizing molehills

Hi Ludwigs2. I really had no idea that I'd been mountainizing molehills lately. I was all for getting to the bottom of and closing the discussion around Jon's imprecisely worded "No Kings" question. (I said things like "I really see no reason at all for the amount of disagreement in this thread" and "Aye gods it just goes on and on. <sigh>" -- and that one even ran onto my talk page before getting resolved!). So I wasn't too sure what you meant, actually. And I know I am new to the RD, which is a bit different than the rest of WP in a lot of ways, so I still do not have a reliable sense of how things work best there. Attempts I have made on the RD talk page to understand better the workings of things there have so far seemed to come to a satisfactory close before too long. But I do not want by any means to be at serious odds with you at all, Ludwigs2, so if I become bothersome in some way which I may not be aware of there, please certainly let me know! Regards :), WikiDao ☯ (talk) 03:02, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

re your comment on WP:RSN

Thanks for your comment. I agree with you on the principles, but you are also repeating as fact some stuff that is a bit off, and this same (or similar) background opinion has colored the interactions of many editors on this. Rather than take up space on WP:RSN, I'll answer you here on that, and cite this there for anyone interested. I hope this is okay with you. To respond to impressions such as yours can take a lot of words; I apologize for the length. You have no obligation to reply or even to read this. It's just in case you are interested to see if you are holding some misconceptions. Feel free to ask questions of me, here or on my Talk page, I can source any assertions I make, if needed. If I've written too much and you'd like me to summarize, I'll do that, too. I just don't have time to do it tonight.

Changing the temperature at which fusion occurs would be a major scientific advancement, if possible, and no scientist would sneer at the idea if someone managed to do it.

• Nobody has "changed the temperature which fusion occurs." First of all, what is "fusion?" There are different kinds of fusion. The assumption in 1989 was that, if cold fusion was real, it would be deuterium-deuterium fusion, but this presented a huge mystery, because the experiments were totally missing the expected signs of d-d fusion, and, indeed, the "cross-section" for d-d fusion at room temperature is ridiculously low. The density of deuterium in palladium can become extremely high, but it is still way below what might be expected to raise the fusion cross-section to something observable. However, fusion cross section depends on the exact conditions, and one form of low-temperature fusion was already known, and was the first to be called "cold fusion." This is Muon-catalyzed fusion. So what some thought was that what Pons and Fleischmann had discovered was some other kind of catalyzed fusion, but with the same basic result, i.e., two deuterons fuse. Just, say, catalyzed by something else. This is, for other reasons, very improbable. To make a long story short, Storms is aware that nobody knows, still, what mechanism is involved. However, there are plausible theories, he says, which is a major difference from 1989.

• To summarize the rest, it is known, and Storms covers the evidence, that reactions of the kind discovered by P&F are producing heat and helium correlated with each other, at about the right value for deuterium fusion. But the actual mechanism is almost certainly not ordinary deuterium fusion, it just happens to accomplish a similar result. It is probably, Storms thinks, some kind of more complex cluster fusion, and this is now more or less mainstream in the field. (And there are peer-reviewed sources on it, including another paper in Naturwissenschaften).

• But what it is isn't important, because we really don't know. What is important, at this point, is what does the confirmed and reliable experimental record show? And what it shows is helium and heat correlated. The first secondary source I have on this is Huizenga, surprisingly enough. This was the very skeptical co-chair of the 1989 U.S. Department of Energy review of cold fusion, and in the second edition of his book (1993), he comments on the published work of Miles, on the heat/helium correlation, and writes that this, "if confirmed" would solve a major mystery of cold fusion. Storms in his recent paper reviews the evidence on this, as he did before in his book (2007), also independently published. His review is careful and clear. He doesn't present heat/helium as speculation or unclear, because it isn't any more, it has been heavily confirmed. There are other secondary source reviews on this. This isn't some new report.

• Yet people sneered at it and continue to sneer at it, but the sneers aren't passing peer review any more, and haven't been for many years. There are about fifteen other peer-reviewed secondary sources since 2005 that are quite in line with the Storms review, you can see them at Wikiversity:Cold fusion/Recent sources. Lest you think this is cherry-picked, this list is almost entirely from the Dieter Britz bibliography, which is referenced. Britz is a skeptical electrochemist, nobody who knows the field would accuse him of cherry-picking.

• The skeptics on Wikipedia, none of whom know the literature, as far as I've been able to tell, with the exception of the other COI editor bsides myself -- who is a very heavily dedicated skeptic, he's been active as such since the early 1990s -- have been aware of the other reviews, but the material was always excluded on the argument that the authors were fringe or the journals not the most important ones. When I pointed out the recent Naturwissenschaften Review (this isn't presented as an editorial or a piece on a controversy), they again said the same thing. Storms is "fringe." He's a "supporter." As if you'd want a deep review of the field written by someone with no experience in it! I can tell you, I see stuff written by "supporters" who don't understand all the aspects of the field with the depth that Storms does.

The problematical aspects of the cold fusion debate occurred because a couple of scientists (whose names I forget) jumped to publication before they had all their facts in line, and then a whole bunch of 'popular press' and 'conspiracy theory' types jumped on the (unwittingly flawed) research.

• P&F, of course. No, they didn't exactly jump to publication, they were not ready to publish, and they knew it. However, the University of Utah legal counsel required them to announce, for legal reasons relating to patents, this is all well-documented, and people went ape over the news. It's said that half the discretionary research budget of the U.S., for a few months, went into trying to replicate their work. But ... even P&F didn't understand yet how to do it reliably! When they ran out of the original batch of palladium, they couldn't get it to work themselves for a while. Eventually, in the field, it was found how to make palladium rod that would show the effect, but that took, perhaps, the better part of a decade. Nanostructure. There is, now, absolutely no mystery as to why most early replication efforts failed.

• But ... Fleischmann's calorimetry, the core of his report, was apparently good. He had found excess heat, at levels that, as one of the world's foremost electrochemists, he could not explain except through a nuclear process. What process? He later said that it was a mistake to have ever suggested that it was fusion. He didn't have sufficient evidence for that. (And his actual publication correctly referred to a hypothesized "unknown nuclear reaction.") It was an easy mistake to make, though. So easy that almost all the contemptuous skeptical rejection was based on an assumption that, if it was a nuclear reaction, it must be d-d fusion, and don't these idiots know that's impossible? They were (probably) right. It was (probably) impossible. But P&F were not idiots, they were not frauds, and they were not incompetent.

• As to "popular press" and "conspiracy types," there was, in effect, a kind of "conspiracy" that developed, but it was right out in the open. The major journals announced a policy that they would no longer accept papers on cold fusion. Even though, in fact, there remained serious mysteries to be explained. A grad student in Texas found that the extensive work he'd done under the supervision of Brockris (another major electrochemist working on cold fusion) was considered useless, because it must be a mistake, since, after all, cold fusion was impossible .... he had to redo his thesis on some new topic. And when that got around, there went the major source of labor for replication and new research, grad students. This is all well documented, Ludwigs2. It's not a "conspiracy theory." I could go on and on....

• Remarkably, someone like David Goodstein of Caltech writes about this whole affair as demonstrating pathological science, and from the rest of his writings, and from his explicit language, it's clear he's talking about some people on "both sides" of this, and that he considers the matter unresolved, but the skeptics here quote him as if it were proof that "cold fusion," per se, is "pathological science." For years, now, sources have been interpreted out of context, often by editors who don't understand them. The same is true with the study by Bart Simon, the sociologist who wrote Undead Science, about cold fusion and its "afterlife." Simon published in 2002, Rutgers University Press, before what I've been saying was the turning point (roughly 2004 or 2005). But I'm not trying to put this "turning point" into the article, because it is my own original research; I can document it very well, but this hasn't been published and reviewed.... I do understand Wikipedia standards, and I support them. Completely.

A scientist who can get an article published in a peer-reviewed journal is not dismissible simply because he's working in a topic area that has suffered setbacks. Scientists are constantly revisiting outmoded ideas to see if there's anything of value that new technology and methods can dig out of them. This is a normal part of the scientific process, and the fact that a team of other scientists reviewed the article and didn't find it wanting is sufficient indication that the research is acceptable scientific research.

• I agree with this completely.

wp:Fringe only enters into this debate to keep Wikipedia editors from using that (perfectly reliable) scientific article to make claims about the topic or the state of the discipline that the article in no way can or would support. One article does not mean a revival of the concept, but just that there's still some scientific interest in the idea. It's just a matter of balance: does this article add anything of significance to the discussion without unduly skewing the perception of the topic?

• Right. One article would not. But there is not just one article, there is the entire weight of publication since 2005.

• 2007 was still at roughly the nadir on CF publications, there were six papers (and one major book). The papers are all peer-reviewed, the book, by Storms, was published by World Scientific, not a fringe publisher, and there is a very good review of this book by Sheldon, published in a physics journal. Three of these papers and the book are reviews of the field. The book is the best comprehensive review of the field to date, nothing comparable has been published, ever, that covered the science like this. There are "skeptical" books, the only ones that went into the science as distinct from the politics was the careful review by Nate Hoffman, published in 1995, and the polemic by Huizenga, 1992 and 1993. The recent review by Storms is more thorough than the book in some narrow areas, but it is the same basic material.
• In 2008, 22 papers. 6 are reviews.
• In 2009, 25 papers. However, 18 papers were published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, which specifically covers "neglected fields." I haven't considered those papers. Two of them are from Scott Little, who is sometimes considered skeptical, but, in my opinion, he has done some careful work which casts into doubt some cold fusion research. But he's published nothing under mainstream peer review, which is, in my opinion, unfortunate. There were three mainstream reviews in 2009.
• In 2010, 18 papers in 3/4 of the year. 3 were reviews. One paper, by Shanahan, was published as a response to a review by Marwan and Krivit the previous year, copublished with a response, not by Marwan and Krivit, but by Marwan and a series of eight other well-known and widely published scientists in the field (including Storms). Shanahan has complained, on his talk page here, that the journal (JEM) won't let him respond again. Which is pretty much what I'd expect. His criticisms have become fringe, he is being treated like "cold fusion authors" were in the early 1990s and beyond, for over ten years. Nobody accepts Shanahan's theories, they are not being cited except as footnotes rejecting them.

• All the reviews are positive on cold fusion. Shanahan could be considered a review, of sorts, but was really an attempt to impeach an earlier review, and, clearly, the editors didn't think he was successful! Indeed, it looks like they were using him as a device to challenge popular conceptions by presenting his views as thoroughly refuted. He is more or less complaining that they were fooled, and he's said the same thing about the editors of Naturwissenschaften.

• Now, would I try to put this in the article? Certainly not! But ... what I'm saying is that the assumption that Cold fusion is "fringe," if "fringe" refers to informed expert opinion, isn't sustainable any more. We need to use the balance of publication in peer-reviewed secondary sources, which now could imply almost excluding the skeptical position, as to recent science. Don't worry, there is plenty of room for the history of this field and all the condemnation of it as pathological science and the like! There remains a little recent reliable source claiming that "most scientists" still reject cold fusion, but these are shallow, with no specific evidence, these are, apparently, just opinions that continue to be held by some without review of actual evidence. But RS is RS, as to the history and what some think about it. For the science, though, what are the notable theories? There are a number of them, found in peer reviewed secondary sources, missing from the article. What is the main evidence that the reaction is some kind of fusion, if not d-d fusion? It's missing from the article even though amply covered in the sources. Lots of this stuff has been put in the article over the years, but it was always taken out as "undue weight," because, after all, this is "fringe," leaving the article with, say, a section on "proposed theories" that only mentions one: that the whole thing was experimental error. Which is based on no peer-reviewed secondary source reviews at all. Just casual mention in articles generally on other subjects.

• I think you may have seen some of this in other fields. I'm certainly aware that the issue of "fringe" sourcing is much wider than cold fusion! This is how I've understood the proper handling of it:

• Wikipedia requires that each article be NPOV; however, if the article is on a fringe topic, and if this is placed in context such that it is clear that the topic and the sources are not generally accepted, facts which are reliably sourced and which are stated in a balanced way, about "fringe opinion," or "reports that might seem to confirm fringe opinion," will not create undue weight. In an article on Flat Earth theory, it is not necessary to state, with every sentence, "But this is not accepted by most scientists." I have a pile of books on Cold fusion, by skeptics, by "supporters," and even at least one where the author was truly neutral. They cover the history of the "scientific fiasco of the century," as Huizenga called it, and that view just might turn out to be prophetic. Just not in quite the way he thought! If we were to try to stuff into the article all the notable and verifiable facts, covered in reliable sources, that I have multiple sources for, there would be almost no way to balance it properly. Rather, it's going to take a series of articles, I'm sure, with a summary article referring to each of the subarticles in summary style. Because some considered cold fusion inherently "fringe," reasonable forks were deleted or redirected back to cold fusion, causing the skeptic User:Kirk shanahan (the published author) to believe that the creation of a fork, which allowed his theories to be covered (they are the most notable criticism of CF calorimetry, out of balance in the full article, but quite in place in a specialized subarticle), was a deliberate trick to keep his material out. No, it was an editor trying to help him, but that editor then came under attack and was banned. And the fork was deleted as if it were his creation as a POV fork, practically the opposite of the intention.... The whole story of the cold fusion article on Wikipedia is horrific.

Thanks again for your comment. --Abd (talk) 02:17, 28 September 2010 (UTC)