[Rezwan]

Great idea. Unity countdown clock! Are these set up for other fusion projects? It would be good to set them up for a few.

I agree with Keith, though. Difficult to say where you are.

Still, such a clock would a good conceptual device to talk about fusion goals, if not to measure actual progress.

Now to get the unity countdown clock app for my iPhone.

[Rezwan]

Was that you? Got an email. Definitely “attribute” over “public domain”. I’m just concerned because some pictures feature people, and want to clear that with them. Can you just give me the urls of specific images for now and I’ll clear them?

I want to set up a system with some pics free and clear, and some more protected. Two tier system.

[Rezwan]

A different player in the printed house market moves ahead: http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/the-worlds-first-printed-building/ A reality check on the innovative process: facing bankruptcy, a wife that leaves you, and having to go at your invention with a hammer from time to time.

[Rezwan]

benf wrote: I’m not getting the Gallery images to display in Safari. I click on an image and a new window opens that is blank. They do display in Firefox.

That’s bizarre. I wonder why?

Anyway, I want to switch to flikr for our gallery as it seems a more flexible and globally searchable platform.

If anyone knows of a safari fix, let me know.

[Rezwan]

AaronB wrote: I’m not Twitter averse, just Twitter ignorant.

Twignorant?

Glad to see you’re game to try. It’s so easy. I’ll transfer the account to you. You might even want to set it up to do by phone.

I agree about the stealth mode. Fusion Souffle’.

Also, Aaron, I like that “kids don’t try this at home” avatar of yours.

[Rezwan]

Not sure how to feed their line directly in to the FFS website. What code would I use?

Instead, I’ve set up LPPX (LPP Experiment) as its own twitter feed. http://twitter.com/lppx

Eric is twitter averse, but perhaps Aaron can keep the posts going.

They can keep it simple. As @nickmain_ said:

is there a focus fusion feed we can subscribe to for progress reports without all the editorializing?

[Rezwan]

Yes, we do have captchas. I suspect there are a lot of people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Big unemployment problem.

I’ve changed DPF membership as well to require a second email telling us if they are for real.

[Rezwan]

Rezwan wrote:

I guess you would have to get membership to receive such information on short notice, otherwise the membership itself would not make sense.

Intriguing statement.

So you’re looking at this like a service. You pay money for some news.

I would say that membership is about being a part of something, an organization, that does something you want done. A nonprofit organization with a mission.

I’m getting the sense that people have both unrealistic ideas about the time and money for research to get done, as well as for nonprofit organizations to function. How to put it in hard cold numbers.

Take a look at the website: http://www.dosomething.org – and then take a look at their 990 form. Every nonprofit has to file a 990, this is public information. Fascinating reading. This organization basically leverages their website to link teenagers to action they can take to make the world a better place. They also offer funds to teen initiated projects. Of note, right there on the first page is their 39 employees. In their expenses, $995,776 goes to salaries for those employees. $1,197,006 goes to fundraising expenses. And their website design was $149,641.

I admire their site and their approach, so I looked at their 990 to see what it took. Very enlightening.

Also, I had to fill out our 990s, so I wanted to see what was involved. Of course, I just had to fill out the ez version, 990N – because our organization has averaged less (far less) than 25K in the past 3 years. If you look at membership donations, it was about $4000 this year. That might pay for office supplies for the above organization.

The ~4000 in membership fees for FFS is from about 50 paying members.

Think about these numbers. All those folks who fear for global warming and believe in solar and wind and so forth put their concerns to funding the nonprofits that advocate for these things and volunteering for programs that the funded nonprofits then support. For fun, look up their 990 records. You’ll see how much money is involved, how much is “operation expenses” (salaries, accounting, website etc), and how much is “program”. These things don’t happen by themselves.

So, I’m trying to raise money to hire people to raise more money and to get the stuff done. It’s like any energy thing. You spend a lot of energy just to get the organization working, and the programs are the “net energy” – the surplus. The better your organization, the more the surplus/benefit/efficiency/output.

Sounds like what you’re interested in is a blog by Eric and fellow researchers. Something they’re not interested in doing.

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote:

FYI, The onion design has been temporarily shelved. The current thinking is that it will be more difficult to manufacture than a simple cylinder shape. Look at the picture Rez’ has posted on the topic titled “Dense Plasma Focus (DPF)” on the home page. It’s a small picture but it depicts a cylinder design. Perhaps later generations of the device can have an onion design, which may well prove to be lighter and more efficient.

Meanwhile, maybe we can harass Rezwan into posting a bigger picture of this variant.

My impression was that it was called an onion because of all those layers…

The onion design – Eric has explained this to me a couple of times. Someone else may be better able to turn this into an article. If you recall, we had an earlier animation that showed a cylinder. This was replaced with the electrode animation. This article posted by Rajdeep Singh Rawat on the DPF website gives some of the science behind the benefits of the “birdcage” electrode design over the solid cylinder. Now to just get something about the science behind the “onion”.

[Rezwan]

jamesr wrote: Although this site has close ties with LLP it should not be thought of as a fly on the was of a research lab.

For any quality scientific research, whether by a private company or academic institution, I believe it is right and proper for any substantive developments to be first published at a recognized conference or peer reviewed journal.

While it is interesting to debate and inform a wider community of the science and technology behind focus fusion through this society and its forums. In particular because there are contributors such as Eric himself to enlighten and correct comments made on aspects of the theory and design. We should not expect shot by shot updates of LLP’s ongoing research.

Exactly.

[Rezwan]

Breakable wrote: I guess you would have to get membership to receive such information on short notice, otherwise the membership itself would not make sense.

Intriguing statement.

[Rezwan]

Aeronaut wrote: I’m thinking more along the lines of a new years’ blurb saying something like “The primer paint is dried, now we’re beginning the top coat”.

I was at the ICC workshop and got to listen to Michel LaBerge’s presentation of General Fusion. He showed a movie – I have just sent him an email to get a link to it. Great stuff.

Of relevance to this disparaging remark: Laberge’s video includes a tour of their facilities, starting with the front offices and moving through the lab and to the back offices where the engineers sit. The front door opens on this SCREAMING green room. And he remarks that they wanted to show they’re a “green” company – and that the color didn’t look so extreme on the little card. I found that very amusing because we had a somewhat heated debate about covering the entire lab with screaming green paint. We ended up with a few accent walls in yellow and the rest the standard white. Thank goodness.

[Rezwan]

pluto wrote: G’day

Well, well, well and a frog will follow.

So that makes me an old timer with moving parts.

Congratulations! And I love the frog expression. I shall adopt it for appropriate occasions.

[Rezwan]

Thanks!

[Rezwan]

Brian H wrote: Rezwan;
Your equivalence of “generalization” and “law” doesn’t reflect how the term “scientific law” is used, except by those who are thoroughly immersed in scientific usage and terminology. It is, in fact, used by all others to refer to something (they consider to be) fixed, known as a certainty, having no restrictions or qualifications.

I know. I’m trying to extend this awareness to law in general. People like certainty, they long for laws of the second sort so they can have that certainty.

I like Rushkoff’s take on laws:

A corporation can’t be a place where rules are enforced, as much as taught, in order for them to be challenged, improved, and changed.

You can switch out the words “corporation” for a variety of other institutions (“government” “the Catholic Church”, “x”), and “rules” for “laws”.

Did you note the article’s (well-deserved) slam on government-funded science? It’s always for a purpose–the politicians’ purpose(s). Which is/are very unlikely, despite any and all assurances, to be the same as the researchers’.

Piper-payers never give up the right to call the tune.

And here, you can switch out “government-funded” with “corporation-funded” or any “x-funded” science. If it requires any sort of funding, it will require some sort of catering to a funder.

And you can also question the researchers purposes. Many of them want a paycheck and a steady career, and will often find their results at odds with that.

The blame pie has a slice for everyone. Perhaps the “government” slice is larger, but everyone has a slice with their name on it. The problem is bigger than one institution.

Like Taleb says about the pursuit of science:

Peer Cruelty
Every morning you leave your cramped apartment in Manhattan’s East Village to go to your laboratory at the Rockefeller University in the East Sixties. You return in the late evening, and people in your social network ask you if you had a good day, just to be polite. At the laboratory, people are more tactful. Of course you did not have a good day; you found nothing. You are not a watch repairman. Your finding nothing is very valuable, since it is part of the process of discovery – hey, you know where not to look. Other researchers, knowing your results, would avoid trying your special experiment, provided a journal is thoughtful enough to consider your “found nothing” as information and publish it.

Meanwhile your brother-in-law is a salesman for a Wall Street firm, and keeps getting large commissions – large and steady commissions. “He is doing very well,” you hear, particularly from your father-in-law, with a small pensive nanosecond of silence after the utterance – which makes you realize that he just made a comparison. It was involuntary, but he made one.

… [a lot more here – great essay! But long]

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Schnobel. “How was your year:” brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

Among other things, this brings me back to the whole etiquette thing. No need to be cruel and mocking toward anyone. As if deriding people in any way speeds up the process of discovery.

[Author]

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