"When the Ox is Yoked to the Plow, he must pull."

The underside of the internet has been working like mad trying to paint Andrea Rossi, inventor of the e-cat, as the worst guy since Al Capone.

Rossi, it is true, talks back, having  sometimes characterized his enemies as “snakes” or “clowns.” Rossi, who clearly has a poetic as well as metaphysical bent of mind, enjoys the battle of words. In his version of this modern Aesop’s fable, as he explained to the dedicated, able, and charming “new journalist” Ruby Carat at the ColdfusionNow website, he’s the Ox — and  ”when the Ox* is yoked to the cart, he must pull.”

Those willing to extend to Rossi even the slightest degree of charitable intellect in the midst of so much caterwauling about his controversial past will realize the guy has been pulling pretty damn hard for a number of months now.

In October he staged two separate major tests of the e-cat with international coverage in the blogosphere and multiple international observers, including experts from the Swedish skeptics society (those Swedes can be pretty skeptical, I think : ).

The second test was of a 1 MW plant consisting of smaller e-cat reactors hooked together. It generated 479 KW (just under half its rated power) for over 5 hours.  While the tests have been widely criticized for design flaws, that does not seem to have stopped preliminary sales of Rossi’s 1MW e-cat. According to Rossi, a military organization he did not name promptly ordered 13 of the units at a cost of $1.5 million each.

Asked about his capitalization needs, the laconic inventor replied: “We are a well-armed battleship.”

Rossi went on to hold discussions and negotiations with some of the biggest and most reputable companies he could approach: National Instruments, Siemens, and UL Underwriters. When his comments about his relationship with NI were challenged, NI stepped up to confirm Rossi’s account, underlining its trust in Rossi’s public relations by including a link pointing back to Rossi’s own statement.

He has allegedly been discussing with Seimens plans to use one of their advanced turbines to power an “infinite COP” 15 MW electric plant. COP, for the uninitiated, stands for Coefficient of Productivity, that is the ratio of energy required to run a reaction to the energy gained in output. Such a plant would generate perhaps 45 MW of heat, 1/3 of which would be converted into electricity and the rest used for heating.

How much is 15 MW?  A whole lot. Your average plutonium-belching waiting-for-a-meltdown fission reactor does only about a 1000 MW.

Since the electricity generated would be 6 times the amount needed to sustain the reaction, the machine would effectively seem to be defying the 2nd law of thermodynamics. It could feed a grid 24/7 all year round while supplying abundant “waste” heat for environmental controls — not only heating but also, with appropriate technologies, cooling as well.

I’m sorry, but the people who say that Rossi is such a bad businessman aren’t very convincing to me in the face of evidence like NI’s very public nod towards his reliability. He’s laid plans, if we are to credit what he says, for a major manufacturing plant in the United States, ready to produce via robotized assembly line, a million 10 KW home-use e-cat units a year.

He says he’s waiting for UL to propose the necessary modifications and that when that is done the factory will be cranking them out within months. Is he really?  One doesn’t have to wait that long to know.

What was our government doing during the same time period, you may ask?  Well, maybe more than we know. Listen to President Obama’s March 7 energy speech at Daimler in Mt. Holly, North Carolina.

“Oil is the fuel of the past,” declared Obama.

A week ago Rossi met with representatives of the Florida State Radiation Bureau, who cleared him of some of the wild accusations that had been made against him by a “concerned citizen” who had complained that he had been told that Rossi was “committing many felonies.”

Gimme a break – who said that terrible thing? Anonymous himself! No need to worry about accountability here.

Let me put it this way. If I were going to write a screenplay with industrial psyop in it, I couldn’t have improved on that script. Float an effectively libelous but unattributed rumor in a Florida state document  and crank up the internet machine. Right out of the playbook. Works like a charm.

Joe Citizen went on to allege, incorrectly as it turned out, that Rossi was poisoning south Florida with his unleashed e-cats.

I sometimes wonder how naive do the people who dream up these stunts think the rest of the world really is. Its no wonder that Rossi turns to Aesop for a little help once in a while. And yes, he shouldn’t be  be using ad hominems – even Aesopian ones – but given some of the liberties his extremer critics have taken with the larger truth, it is perhaps unsurprising that he does.

Be that as it may I enjoyed noticing the turn in Rossi’s mind when he compared himself (indirectly) to the Ox, pulling the cart. It’s a repeated theme in his public statements. “What you see as pressure,” he said, “I translate as responsibility.”

I’m sorry, but I have difficulty reconciling this statement with Rossi’s alleged crimes and misdemeanors. I prefer the analysis of Brian Westenhaus, the blogger at Oil Price.com, who commented that  the story of the Florida Radiation Bureau  ”has been picked up by others that at this time won’t be mentioned or linked out of kindness” – and went on to suggest that the reporting of Rossi’s chief critic Steven Krivit was “tedious, obviously unbalanced and suspect in completeness.”

It all surely does make one wonder, on the other hand, if Rossi’s fable can come true.

Will the cart budge from the rut into  which the world’s dependence on oil, coal, and nuclear power has precipitated our civilization? The energy industry has, I understand, historically had the lowest rate of reinvestment into R&D of any sector of the world’s economy.  It seems to have thought that it’s easier to invest in bullets than in substantive, transformative technologies that might make our world a better place to live. There’s not as much money in that.

Is there a path past the environmental violence and bloodshed this industry has brought on, in its blinkered refusal to envision a future where it’s no longer in control?

Whatever the answers to these questions, my own feeling is the one shared by the regular bloggers at http://e-catsite.com/.  The blogosphere would be a better place if some of the most extreme statements about Mr. Rossi hit the roundfile.

Skepticism is fine – God knows the world can always use more of that, in its authentic form. But the blogosphere is a landscape in which charity is in danger of being smothered by a kind of cynical “skepticism” that usually amounts to nothing more edifying than intellectual laziness coupled with a need to curtsy to authority, whether real or just imaginary. But that’s the new ideology of the internet’s volunteer thought police — who seem to keep pretty busy.

I’m really just suggesting that maybe it would be a good idea for everyone to wait until you’re really damn sure that Rossi isn’t doing pretty much exactly what he says he’s doing before rejecting his claims as ipso facto impossible or even wildly improbable.

Rossi’s claims are quite possible.

Twenty years of dedicated scientific research from “Cold Fusion” pioneers have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the alleged anomalous  source of Rossi’s effect is real.

“I know what I’ve seen,” Stanford Research Institute’s electrochemist and “Cold Fusion” researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes on learning that DARPA had substantiated the longstanding claims of his and many others.

This being so, Rossi’s research would merely be taking something that may be still be considered improbable from the state of present knowledge and showing that it is possible.  

It is improbable, moreover, only in the relativistic sense that, if true, it represents a quantum improvement in stability and total energy output (far greater COPs, though on a much smaller scale, have been demonstrated in many labs) over known technologies.

Since when in the history of technology is such a thing in itself seen to be unusual?  It is no more extraordinary in kind than taking a wood fire and turning it into a ceramic kiln by more carefully controlling a natural reaction through careful engineering.

Most people, however, do not understand this.

Indeed, a great deal of confusion lingers over this point precisely because it has been expedient for Hot Fusion scientists on the public gravy train to keep up the jeering about the idea that one can create some sort of wholly novel nuclear effect in a lab beaker at temperatures under the boiling point of water without creating hazardous byproducts.

That’s pure sedition when you are writing grants for hundreds of millions at a crack and promising that your multi-billion dollar hot fusion reactor is just about to finally net a few Kw…tomorrow.

But here’s the deal: you can.

So, if anyone cared about my opinion, it would be this.

Let the man show what he can do.

If he fails, then criticize him. Arguing that he failed in the past (for which there is apparent evidence), is no argument against him at all in the present, partly for the simple reason that the causes of these past failures are far from clear to most of us and may have involved dimensions, favorable to Rossi’s view, yet about which there is scant public record. Yet Rossi’s critics seem appreciate the fine art of leaving out significant parts of the story, such as that after he had been convicted he allegedly obtained a complete pardon from the higher Italian courts.  That stuff matters.

Perhaps — I know this is difficult for many of us to imagine —  Andrea Rossi is one of those rare persons who grows by learning from his own mistakes. Perhaps he knows how to pull even in a room full of jabberers. I’m sorry if saying that makes me a “believer” rather than a “skeptic,”  but until I feel convinced otherwise, I’m going to assume he is, and he can.

Call me mad, call me foolhardy, call me naive, or just label me “skeptical”:….I’m still not convinced otherwise.

*********************************************************************

*Rossi, I believe, actually said “cow.”  But my hunch is, however much some may object, he probably did intend to say “Ox,” since he doesn’t strike me as someone who doesn’t know how a farm runs.

Sonnet 116: Let me not the the marriage of True Minds admit impediments.

I am grateful to Roger Stritmatter for single-handedly getting me involved in Shakespeare authorship research during the past ten years, and for this opportunity to respond to Hank Whittemore’s provocative guest post.

Mr. Whittemore has worked tirelessly to educate the public about the Oxfordian authorship theory. Although he is best known for his book on the Sonnets, he has explored many other facets of the authorship question. For example, his blog is systematically exploring 100 major reasons that support our shared authorship opinion.

When it comes to the Sonnets, Mr. Whittemore and I share the crucial beliefs that they are autobiographical, and that they are written by Edward de Vere.

I hope it is clear that Mr. Whittemore and I respect each other. We share the hope that respectful, Quaker-like discussions of differences among Oxfordians will help sharpen our thinking, and thus advance our shared enterprise of educating the general public about the plausibility of our authorship theory.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been relatively neglected, compared with his plays. When they’re not being ignored, they have generated a wide range of commentary. This is understandable, given their astonishing literary quality and their formidable complexity.

In addition to the many discussions of specific sonnets, there have also been a few ambitious projects that seek to explain the Sonnets as a unified whole. Some of these projects also recognize the many connections between the Sonnets and the long poem with which they were first published in 1609—“A Lover’s Complaint.” Mr. Whittemore is a distinguished commentator on the Sonnets as a unified body of work.

Mr. Whittemore makes the valid point that some of my published comments on alternative readings of the Sonnets lapse into the sort of ad hominem rather than ad rem reasoning that I often decry among the Stratfordians. Mr. Whittemore has indeed held up a “mirror” in front of me, and I don’t like what I see. His point is well taken, and I wish to retract any insinuation I may have made that the only basis for denying de Vere’s bisexuality must be homophobia.

On the other hand, I like much of what I see in Mr. Whittemore’s post. For example, when he writes, “surely we can agree that Oxford and Southampton as individuals were each possibly or even probably bisexual, yet still not know whether or not they were engaged with each other in a sexual affair.” His agreeing that de Vere was “possibly or even probably bisexual,” removes any imputation of homophobia (or perhaps, more accurately, “biphobia”).

C.S. Lewis has a marvelous comment on the”odd story” of the first 17 “procreation” sonnets—

“What man in the world, except a father or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets married? Thus the emotion expressed in the Sonnets refuses to fit into our pigeon-holes” (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), 503-504).

Mr. Whittemore believes de Vere was Southampton’s father; we both think he was Southampton’s potential father-in-law.

Mr. Whittemore quite reasonably asks that we put aside the son/lover crux for a moment, and focus instead on the contemporary history that is the context of the Sonnets. He has a fascinating theory linking many of the sonnets to Southampton’s imprisonment from 1601 to 1603.

I wish to make only one comment on that imprisonment. The historian Paul Hammer, while writing a new biography of the Earl of Essex, found documents that exonerate Essex and Southampton of the charge of treason for the so-called Essex Rising.

Hammer reported this new evidence at a presentation I attended at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2007, and published it the following year in the Shakespeare Quarterly. Hammer’s evidence points to Robert Cecil as having trumped up false charges against Essex and Southampton in a successful power grab in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign.

Hammer’s discovery constitutes a minor paradigm change in our understanding of Elizabethan history. As a result, it is still not widely known or accepted. If Hammer was still able to find this exonerating evidence four centuries after the fact, I would assume that de Vere was well aware of Southampton’s innocence. It would surely have further inflamed de Vere’s contempt for his brother-in-law Robert Cecil. So I would only suggest we read the Sonnets with these recent discoveries in mind.

My own work on the Sonnets has been far less ambitious than has Mr. Whittemore’s. In addition to the 2010 article on the Sonnets that he cites, I have dealt with several sonnets in the context of showing intertextuality between Shakespeare’s works and the Whole Book of Psalms. This was the metrical translation of Sternhold and Hopkins that was set to music, and in which Edward de Vere showed great interest.

The psalms de Vere marked in his copy led to the largest previously unknown literary source for Shakespeare found in the past several decades. I hope this connection between Shakespeare and de Vere will help draw further attention to Roger Stritmatter’s monumental discoveries of still more significant connections between known biblical sources for Shakespeare and marked passages in de Vere’s Geneva Bible.

Whatever our theories of the meaning of the Fair Youth sonnet sub-sequence, I hope further attention to the connections between the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s other work, and marked passages in de Vere’s copy of the Whole Book of Psalms will strengthen our unifying belief that Edward de Vere wrote the works of Shakespeare.

As readers may already know, many of my publications on the Sonnets and other facets of the authorship question are on my website, http://www.oxfreudian.com

The 3rd Earl of Southampton, "supposed as forfeit to a confined doom" in the tower of London, spring, 1603.

For some time now, noted Oxfordian author and freelance scholar Hank Whittemore has had a standing invitation to write a guest post  (or several) for my blog, and after some thought he sent me this post last week. In this essay, Hank offers a friendly challenge to Dr. Richard Waugaman, one of the most prolific and influential Oxfordian scholars on the contemporary scene, and author of several previous guest blogs on this site.

Hank, Richard, and I are on the same side in the authorship debate: having studied the evidence, we agree that a vast preponderance of evidence supports the proposition that Oxford wrote the plays and poems. Beyond that, as is only natural and good, we also have differences. As the Quaker proverb says, “when everybody thinks alike, no one thinks very much.”  I am fortunate to have two such smart and talented friends and intellectual compatriots. Richard now has a standing invitation to respond, either in discussion, or with a post of his own, to Hank’s challenge. Hank’s ongoing series, 100 Reasons Oxford wrote Shakespeare, is available (now on number 36) at his regular online venue. — Ed.

Guest post by Hank Whittemore

“Now, it was quite the custom of the period to enfold in poems a second intention” – Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, 1922

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine, published a paper in Psychoanalytic Review of October 2010 entitled “The Bisexuality of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Implications for De Vere’s Authorship,” in which he explores “the blind spots in previous scholarship on Shakespeare’s sonnets, using a psychoanalytic perspective” based on his “central claim” that the Sonnets “reflect the poet’s bisexuality.”

Dr. Waugaman is an Oxfordian whose website The Oxfreudian has become a valuable resource for Shakespeare authorship studies. He has no doubt that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford was the great author, and also that Oxford was bisexual. He also believes that the bisexuality expressed in the Sonnets “has been strikingly ignored, covered up, or rationalized away by the vast majority of Shakespeare scholars for the past 400 years – including by those who believe, with Freud, that de Vere was the pseudonymous author of Shakespeare’s works.” Open-minded exploration suggests “we have been the victims of severe distortions and blind spots in previous Shakespeare scholarship” and that many such distortions “have been fueled by homophobia.”

In the same article Dr. Waugaman sets about to use “what we know about de Vere’s bisexuality and probable love affair with the Earl of Southampton to examine the history of homophobic scholarly reactions to the sonnets, which have justifiably been called [by Joseph Pequigney in Such is My Love] ‘the grand masterpiece of homoerotic poetry.’” Then In a guest post on this site last November, reviewing Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous, Dr. Waugaman added to the same theme:

Some of us believe the bisexual de Vere had an affair with [Henry Wriothesley, Lord] Southampton,” he wrote. “Others – possibly because of their discomfort with de Vere having been bisexual – instead claim that Southampton was de Vere’s son by Queen Elizabeth. They can then explain the unusual warmth of these sonnets as reflecting paternal love. (My emphases)

Since we are in a psychoanalytic mode, might we turn the mirror so Dr. Waugaman can see a reflection of his own approach? Might he then see how James Shapiro used Contested Will (2010) to attack anti-Stratfordian theories by dissecting the theorists themselves (and concluding, of course, that they must be psychologically flawed)? Professor Shapiro’s theme is basically, “I’m okay – you’ve got a problem.” Is Dr. Waugaman making the same mistake of projecting a psychology upon those with whom he disagrees?

There’s no question that the history of Sonnets commentary has been fraught with homophobia. Undoubtedly many critics have concluded at least privately that the poet recorded a homosexual affair with the younger man, but “discomfort” over a bisexual Shakespeare has driven them to deny it. In recent times more critics have boldly adopted and promoted that view.
Shouldn’t we acknowledge, however, that traditional scholars perceiving a bisexual story have operated entirely within the Stratfordian paradigm? (And that many have advocated it with no particular author in mind?) The point here is that even if William Shakspere could have carried on a love affair with Southampton, he was nonetheless only nine years older than the earl and could not have been his father; and therefore, orthodox critics have been limited to viewing the poet and fair youth as friends or lovers, but with no possibility of perceiving a father-son relationship. For traditional critics, homophobic or otherwise, the bisexual love story has been the only game in town.

Once Oxford is seen as “Shakespeare,” however, the old paradigm is turned inside-out. The “story” must be viewed through a new lens: no longer is the poet a commoner, but the highest-ranking earl in England; no longer is he an outsider, but an insider at the Court of Elizabeth. Moreover Oxford had reached his greatest intimacy with the Queen back in 1573, the very year of Southampton’s recorded birth; so that if he’s addressing Southampton in the Sonnets, their age difference of twenty-three years opens the previously unthinkable possibility that he’s writing to his son whom he regards as a prince.

It’s a cliché among Oxfordians that at one time we were all Stratfordians; and that when we finally left Stratford, it was only natural to carry some old baggage with us before being able to let go. We could not help maintaining some cherished assumptions, even with new ones clamoring for attention. And accordingly, some who had viewed the Sonnets as a bisexual love story continued to see it that way – retaining Southampton as the fair youth while simply replacing Shakspere with Oxford, making it that much easier to experience the paradigm change.

I can fully understand that, for some who journeyed from New Place to Castle Hedingham, the syllogism goes this way:
1. Within the traditional context the poet and Southampton must be lovers;
2. Most orthodox critics who deny this bisexuality are probably homophobic; therefore:
3. Oxfordians who deny the bisexual story must be similarly biased.

“William Shakespeare” appeared first on the dedications to Southampton of Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594). Never again would Oxford use that pen name to dedicate any other work, uniquely linking Southampton to “Shakespeare” from then on. But why would he deliberately call attention to the young earl? Why connect him alone to the new pen name? And why tell the world, albeit from behind a pseudonym, that his “love” for him is “without end”? If it was a homosexual love, in a society that viewed sodomy as a heinous crime, why would he wish to call attention to it?
Oxfordians have been so divided on the Oxford-Southampton relationship that it’s hard to find common ground. Each side can draw upon the known history along with lines of the Sonnets; but surely we can agree that Oxford and Southampton as individuals were each possibly or even probably bisexual, yet still not know whether or not they were engaged with each other in a sexual affair.

If we can agree on that, perhaps we can temporarily move beyond our opposing views of their relationship (lovers or father-and-son) and focus on the contemporary history suggested by Sonnets 1-126, the so-called fair youth series.
It’s a given that we’re talking not about fictional creations but real individuals in real circumstances, often with much at stake. And as far as the best minds can tell, the fair youth sonnets are in at least some roughly chronological order, recording the author’s reactions to real events that occurred in real time. There is, in fact, a story – one story, for which most scholars have identified at least two chronological markers:

1593: Sonnets 1-17: The first seventeen sonnets in which Oxford pleads with Southampton to beget an heir, echoed in similar language in Venus and Adonis of 1593.

Southampton’s guardian Lord Burghley had been pressuring him since 1590 to marry his granddaughter Elizabeth Vere, Oxford’s eldest daughter, of whom he had originally denied paternity.

1603: Sonnet 107: The “dating” sonnet that appears to reflect Southampton’s release from the Tower on April 10, 1603, following the death of Elizabeth and the succession of James without civil war.

So a probable time span for Sonnets 1 to 107 is from 1593 to 1603, a busy decade:

On the domestic front, Oxford retires from Court in 1590 just before Southampton is presented to Queen Elizabeth. Oxford marries Elizabeth Trentham in 1591 and in 1593 his male heir is born; Southampton resists marrying Elizabeth Vere and in 1595 he begins a furtive romance with Elizabeth Vernon, whom he impregnates and secretly marries in 1598 before their daughter is born.

On the military front, Southampton steals across the Channel to Dieppe, France in 1591, without permission, hoping but failing to join Essex; he accompanies Essex on the Cadiz voyage of 1596, without permission; he joins him on the Islands Voyage of 1597; after spending most of 1598 at the French royal court, he joins Essex on the failed Irish campaign in 1599; and in 1600 he returns to Ireland and, under Mountjoy, distinguishes himself in battle.

On the political front, Southampton co-leads the abortive Essex Rebellion of 8 February 1601 and is imprisoned in the Tower. Oxford comes out of retirement to sit as a judge at the treason trial of the two earls. After Essex is executed, Southampton is spared but remains a convicted traitor in prison. He languishes there for the next two years until King James releases him in April of 1603.

Following that high point marked by Sonnet 107, the fair youth sequence moves swiftly (but with increasing emotional and lyrical power) to its end at Sonnet 126. Along the way, Oxford in Sonnet 120 supplies a remarkably clear reference to the “second intention” or partially hidden story. He refers to “how once I suffered in your crime,” which in the same sonnet he also calls a “trespass”. Of course the “crime” that Southampton committed was his participation in the Rebellion of 1601, for which he had been convicted; but if the climax is Sonnet 107, when his imprisonment ends in 1603, at what point in the fair youth sequence does his confinement begin?

Well, I submit that “Shakespeare” was such a great storyteller that he would never insert the climax out of nowhere, without preparation; that is, he would not make Southampton’s release from prison the high point of the sequence without first establishing his incarceration and then leading up to his liberation. And I suggest that this single story begins at least by Sonnet 35, when Oxford tells the younger earl, “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,” referring in the same verse to “thy trespass” and offering an apt description of his own role on the tribunal at the trial:

For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense:
Thy adverse party is thy Advocate…

[When Southampton was in the Tower awaiting execution in February and March 1601, he wrote letters to the Privy Council begging for mercy and referred to his crime as a “fault” or “faults” no less than six times. When King James wrote the order for Southampton’s release in April 1603, he noted that the late Queen Elizabeth, “notwithstanding his fault towards her,” had spared his life.

Although “sensual” has appeared to some readers as referring to sexual matters, the word was used by Lord Burghley in 1584 when he referred to Catholic traitors as “sensual and willful recusants.” I would argue that Oxford deliberately uses “sensual” in opposition to “sense” – that is, “To your irrational crime I bring in rational argument,” followed by his promise to Southampton, “I am your judge who must condemn you to death, but I am also your legal defender determined to save you.” And as it turned out, someone did save him.

This basic scenario requires a radical change in perceiving the time frame and story of the “fair youth” sequence, as I have argued in The Monument (2005), since it means a majority of sonnets must correspond with Southampton’s 1601-1603 imprisonment. If such is the case, it might explain why the Sonnets appear to contain few if any references to Southampton’s earlier known experiences in the 1590’s, such as the Islands Voyage of 1597.

My conclusion is that the main story takes place during Southampton’s time in the Tower from February 1601 to his liberation in April 1603 after being “supposed as forfeit to a confined doom,” as Oxford records in Sonnet 107. Is there another stretch of recorded contemporary history and biography that might supply a chronological foundation for the legal language, not to mention the grief and disgrace, expressed in so many of the fair youth sonnets? I know of none.

Meanwhile, can we arrive at the scenario suggested here without knowing the nature of the Oxford-Southampton relationship? I believe the answer is not only “yes” but, also, that the “love” expressed in the Sonnets could still be viewed as either homosexual or parental. Isn’t it so? Just asking…

Will the Alien Scientist Save Planet Earth?

Over the last ten years the internet has become my primary educational catalyst. I have read widely and experienced many new ideas. Since my specialty is “outside the box” ideas, I spent a lot of time trying to decide which “outside the box” ideas are worth pursuing and which aren’t. I may be deluding myself entirely (Tom Reedy will be the first to assure you that I must be), but I’ve come to think that there is some method to this “much madness,” and that intense study of one controversy may in fact lead to better understanding of many others.

I won’t go into the details of the journey right now, because I have a more immediate interest in mind. In my recent study of the current and very heated online controversy over the existence of “Cold Fusion” or “Lattice Assisted  Nuclear Reaction (LANR) I ran across a You Tube Station created by the AlienScientist.

I haven’t listened to all of the videos, but I have to say that I found AlienScientist’s introductory video to be so impressive that I plan to use it in my ENGL 102 class at Coppin State University as a way of introducing to my students the importance of the idea that you should always do your own research.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the more you are willing to research the kind of subjects that are worth your time, the more you will want to do your own research. At least that’s my idea, and it’s also the opinion, as you can see, of the AlienScientist:

There are few frames of the video I don’t like, such as the one taking what seems to me to be an unfair swipe at President Obama — followed up, one should add, with some equal time for the criminal presidency that preceded him — but the video is a brilliant introduction to basic thinking principles, moving from the realities of physics to an explanation of epistemology that would be apt for any freshman philosophy class.

Imagine my surprise to find that AlienScientist was among the fellow travelers who are increasing my conviction in the reality and imminence of a new Cold Fusion (LANR) industrial revolution. Note that I refer to this “imminence” with full awareness of recent scandalous contradictions in the public relations of Defkalion, one of the two organizations (the other being Andrea Rossi’s Leonardo Corporation, which is faring a bit better in the public relations sweepstakes at the moment) claiming to be on the verge of commercializing the technology.

My confidence is based on what I see is twenty years of increasingly validated and replicable lab experiments proving the phenomenon at a much more basic — if less practical — level. These have come from labs as diverse as Nasa, MIT, SRI, and the Navy’s SPAWAR Unit, as Google can readily satisfy the incredulous.

One of the most interesting recent stories in what is certainly a dramatic and unfolding story, is Steve Krivit’s recent coverage of the Navy’s top-down  November 9 decision to cancel the SPAWAR cold fusion research unit  only twelve days after Andrea Rossi’s well publicized Oct. 28, 2011 Bologna test of his 1 MW e-cat reactor.

What this means is anyone’s guess, but for those who know even a little physics (every action has what?) it will seem rather to confirm than invalidate the theory that we we entering a phase of profound transition in the character of our modern society’s technological base. The program was not eliminated because it wasn’t producing results. It was.

According to the best intelligence on the internet, on the other hand, the US military may have its own reasons, above and beyond protecting the U.S. dollar or the petroleum industry (both of which could be destabilized, to say the least, by the commercialization of the technology), for wanting to scuttle the development of LANR research. Killing the messenger is always useful in such circumstances.

I can’t claim to understand all the AlienScientist’s physics.

For example, without further research I can’t explain his emphasis on the importance of the work of Frank Znidarsic in the video, but the parts I do understand, having to do with somewhat less technical matters, make a lot of sense to me.

The video does an especially good job sketching in brief the troubled history of the technology and arguing for convergent implications in other domains of physics (i.e. cold fusion research is coming up with realities that converge with the most sophisticated, cutting edge theory in physics pioneered by researchers like Znidarsic) that should interest those with the knowledge to evaluate them dispassionately.

The Three Great Pyramids at Giza,

I was musing today about whether people read the books they own or just collect them. I was sitting across from the shelf that contains my philosophy books, and I decided to ask that question of myself. The philosophy shelf looks like it holds about 80-90 books. I went over and counted how many I had read, either wholly or at least enough to have a very good idea of what they contained. I got about 36 — including all the books by Hannah Arendt and Suzanne Langer, Mary Midgley on “man and beast,” J. Glenn Gray on war,  and most of the others I had at least consulted at some point or in the worst case bought because I knew I would be interested in someday.

In the course of this inquiry I came upon a few books that immediately attracted my attention as being from that last category — that of books I would be interested in someday.

These included Richard Parkinson’s Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment, the story of what would seem to be among most significant “decoding” of linguistic signs in human history. Robert Lawlor’s Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice is a book I have read but still have not absorbed. But even more than these, I found myself drawn to Peter Tomkin’s magnificent 1971 Secrets of the Great Pyramids. I opened the book to page 159, where I read:

In his avant-garde book, The Dawn of Astronomy, written at the turn of the century, Sir Norman Lockyer minutely demonstrated how the Egyptians built and used their temples for astronomical observations from the very remotest antiquity. Lockyer show how Egyptian solar temples were so arranged that at sunrise or sunset on the longest day of the year, a ray from the sun shot through a skilfully contrived passage into the dark interior of the inner sanctum of the temple. The illumination from the sun was cut off by means of pylon screens so that a concentrated shaft of light cut through the gloom.

Lockyer was the first English astronomer to conclude that Stonehenge had been accurately aligned in about 1680 B.C. to catch the first gleam of the midsummer sun at its solstice, a fact which was recently corroborated on the basis of computerized data by the astronomer Gerald F. Hawkins in Stonhenge Decoded.

Being just a little bit acquainted with who Gerald Hawkins is helps one to understand the seriousness of the implications that Tompkins is drawing from his survey of the essential literature.

According to Wikipedia’s account, when Hawkins claimed these astronomical dimensions of Stonehenge,

The archaeological community was [at first] skeptical and his theories were criticized by such noted historians as Richard Atkinson, who denounced the book as being “…tendentious, arrogant, slipshod, and unconvincing.” However, Atkinson later reversed his position in the face of intense research by A. Thom and associates, published in Journal for the History of Astronomy, vol 5, 1974.

But whatever the fate of Stonehenge, the astronomical features of the pyramids have not to my knowledge since first being proposed ever undergone any truly credible critique.

Experts disagree about the exact nature of the astronomical dimensions of the monuments — whether, for example, the locations of the three pyramids of the Giza plateau intentionally mirror the stars on Orion’s belt (I think they do) — but that they are carefully aligned according to geometric and astronomic coordinates is not generally disputed, nor to my knowledge has Lockyer’s original observation of the solstitial alignments ever been disputed. They were

so arranged that at sunrise or sunset on the longest day of the year, a ray from the sun shot through a skillfully contrived temple.

That brought me to this remarkable video.

Now, that is worth wondering at.

by Dr. Stoyan Sarg*

February 24, 2012

After the optimism from recent progress in cold fusion, as demonstrated in Italy, Nature surprised us with a severe cold winter in some parts of the world. However, we should not blame climate change for the human suffering when the solution to the problem is in the hands of our civilization.

The expectation that the 21st century will bring improved welfare for humanity seems to be an illusion. We are experiencing global crises in different areas such as economics, politics, ideology, natural resources, and the environment. Is there a fundamental reason for the crises and, if yes, what could be the solution?

More

*************************************************************

* Stoyan Sarg (Sargoytchev) is a Bulgarian-born Canadian. He holds an engineering diploma and a PhD in Physics in the field of space research. From 1976 to 1990 he was involved in space projects sponsored by the program Intercosmos coordinated by the former Soviet Union. He participated also in a collaborative project with the European Space Agency. For his pioneering work he was awarded medals from Intercosmos, Russia and Bulgaria. In 1990 he was invited as a visiting scientist by Cornel University and worked at the Arecibo Observatory, P.R. on a Lidar project funded by the NSF (USA). This was the place where the first SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program was operated before 1985 using the world’s largest radiotelescope – radar. In 1991 he immigrated to Canada, where he worked on projects coordinated by the Canadian Space Agency. Since 2002 he has been with York University, Toronto, Canada. He has over 80 scientific publications and a few patents related to space research.

The Earl of Oxford's "crown signature" from his October 7, 1601 letter to Robert Cecil

An article in the November 2011 de Vere Society newsletter by  Elizabeth Imlay hypothesizes that marginal annotations and drawings contained in copies of Tacitus’ History of Rome and Blondus History of Europe  from Sir Thomas Smith’s library, now in the Queen’s College Library in Cambridge, are by the young Edward de Vere.

Drawings and marginal annotations from volume in Sir Thomas Smith's library, attributed by Elizabeth Imlay to the Earl of Oxford.

Imlay deserves congratulations for following up on a potentially important piece of evidence. The premises of her inquiry are valid ones. As has long been known, and as Stephanie Hughes has documented in her remarkable Concordia University Bachelor’s Thesis, summarized in a 2000 Oxfordian article, Sir Thomas Smith is a very important figure in Oxford’s early education.

By all appearances Smith tutored young Edward from around the age of four until the death of his father in 1561, when primary responsibility for his education fell to William Cecil.  Moreover, the two volumes in question are likely to have interested the young Edward, whose fascination with history is well documented in the Elizabethan paper trail.

It is entirely plausible that Smith’s surviving library and papers might contain evidence pertaining to the Shakespearean question, and in a rational world (alas!) no effort would be spared in undertaking such an inquiry. Unfortunately, as we shall see, in this case Imlay’s interpretation of the evidence leads a great deal to be desired – not only because the annotations, even if they had been by Oxford, cast no evident new light on the theory of his authorship of the Shakespearean canon, but more importantly because, as we shall see, they are not by him.

Karen Begg, the Queens College Curator quoted dismissively by Imlay, is right: the contested sample annotations are by Sir Thomas Smith. On the other hand, despite these limitations, and despite the fact that she endorses a fallacious conclusion, Imlay’s article is significant because it follows up an important angle of inquiry in the authorship question, namely — what can we learn from careful analysis of Oxford’s annotations in surviving books such as his Geneva Bible?

It stands to reason that more such books must exist. Whoever wrote the plays was a voracious reader. Over 300 books survive from Ben Jonson’s library, many of them containing annotations which have proven of some interest to Jonson scholars, even in the absence of a Jonson authorship question. As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has asked, “where are Shakespeare’s books?”  In the interest of encouraging others to pursue such inquiry from a more informed perspective this blog entry invites the reader to examine why these particular annotations are not by Oxford.

Before proceeding, I should mention two obvious caveats: First, I am not a professionally trained forensic paleographer; moreover, the more controversial a conclusion the more it must ultimately rest with disinterested independent professionals. That, of course, is why in completing my PhD dissertation on the de Vere Bible I retained the services of Ms. Emily Will, a board certified forensic analyst, to verify my own hypothesis that the annotations were in Oxford’s hand.

But there is another principle at stake in such inquiry. It’s my personal conviction that every Principle Investigator should know as much as humanly possible about the various areas of specialized expertise which his or her inquiry involves.  A good general contractor may not know as much about electrical systems as an electrician, but the more he knows the more likely he is to hire the right electrician and know whether he’s doing his job or not. When I first began examining early modern documents in the early 1990s, Marc Shell, now Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, advised me to become my own handwriting expert — and I did.

Having also in the interim examined a number of anonymous early modern and 19^th century documents  to determine their writership, I have a pretty solid practical understanding of how professional forensic paleographers go about making conclusions.  I am also co-author, with forensic documents analysts at the University of Buffalo’s CEDAR forensics lab, of two computerized studies of the 19^th century “Hydrachos” document discussed elsewhere on this website.

While the following analysis is no substitute for submitting Imlay’s findings to an independent professional, I therefore think it may well be instructive for the reader.

My first response to this evidence, I will readily admit, was a positive one. I was predisposed to believe Imlay’s hypothesis, and could see a number of features of this italic hand that strongly reminded me of Oxford’s own. The capital A, for example, in “Antonius” seemed a distinct match Oxford’s capital A as I knew it, or at least thought I knew it, from my paleographical study of the de Vere bible annotations and de Vere’s surviving holograph.[i]

I also liked the shapes of the small letter “a” – the way they tended to form angled lozenges, a bit pointy at both top and bottom and slanted at about twenty-thirty degrees.  Moreover, I also thought I could see on first blush clear indications that the annotations were not in Smith’s hand.

But I also know from long experience how easily in handwriting analysis the results can be predetermined by an overly subjective bias on the part of the analyst. With this in mind, any good forensic handwriting analysis must consist of two parts.

First you must try in your own mind to prove that the questioned sample matches another. Without such a hypothesis, you have no reason to proceed and are better off spending your time in-line skating or whatever you enjoy doing to relax.

But if you think the documents might match, this is only your first step. The second step cannot be ignored. Once you think you’ve got a case for the identity of the documents, you must turn your analysis around and work even harder to demolish your own hypothesis. So you’ve found evidence for identity – patterns in the samples that could be attributed to common authorship….what about differences? Pretend your job is to demolish your own hypothesis. Be mean. Don’t cut yourself any slack.  If you don’t do this for yourself, believe, me, someone else will do it for you, and you may not like it…..

In the end, in the absence of assistance from computerized software such as that used by CEDAR, a valid conclusion depends on the relative weight of the two cases, for and against, that you are able to construct in your own mind and in your written analysis.

Imlay’s analysis of the contrast between Smith’s and Oxford’s hands, so far as it goes, seems  plausible. She writes that Smith frequently mixes italic and secretary hands and that his italic tends to display “many secretarial flourishes”; she believes that “you never find any of this happening in the marginal annotations, nor do you find it in Edward de Vere’s correspondence” (16).

Imlay contrasts de Vere’s hand as “rather tight” and “controlled” – i.e., lacking the “secretarial flourishes” visible in Smith’s italic. From this Imlay concludes that “while there are similarities between the handwriting of Edward de Vere and Sir Thomas Smith, there are also sufficient differences to say that it is not Smith’s writing in the margins [of the contested documents]” (17).

While these statements may not be false, they also aren’t very “operationalizable” — that is, they are impressionistic, subjective evaluations that could be applied in so many different ways that they aren’t particular useful for a real forensic analysis. Moreover,  Imlay is apparently unaware of some critical elements of historical context that render her analysis far less convincing than it otherwise might sound.

It is not at all uncommon for early modern English writers to switch back and forth between Secretary and Italic when they are writing in a predominantly Secretary mode. This is exactly the same as modern use of italics, and the convention is readily apparent for Latin phrases or other expressions that the early modern writer wants to set apart.

Of course, this pattern will be evident only in those writers trained in both Secretary and Italic hands. How common this was, we don’t really know, but it is readily documented in such basic handbooks of early modern paleography as Gregg’s English Literary Autographs or Dawson and Kennedy-Skipton’s Elizabethan Handwriting 1500-1650 (see, e.g., samples 25, 32 or 39). In play manuscripts, it was typical for speech prefixes and stage directions to appear in italic, while speeches themselves were written in Secretary hand.

The Italic hand did not appear in England until sometime during the reign of Henry VIII, when sons of aristocrats and royals (such as Edward VI) were first trained to use it. Its use grew throughout the Elizabethan reign. It appears that anyone who wrote in Italic was probably also trained in Secretary, but well into the Elizabethan age many writers were apparently versatile only in the more traditional script.

It is important to emphasize that this same “back and forth” between the two copybook forms is very rarely seen in documents of a predominantly italic character.  For this reason, while Imlay’s description is not inaccurate, her analysis is seriously flawed. A pattern that she attributes idiosyncratically to Smith’s hand is actually a generic characteristic seen in samples of secretary hand from many writers of the period.

The implications of this line of reasoning are pretty clear. The entire basis for Imlay’s attempt to distinguish Smith and Oxford’s hand is faulty. If we had samples of Oxford’s secretary hand of any length (it stands to reason that he had one, but there is no verified sample of it and therefore no basis for comparison with any other hypothetical documents), it is almost certain that it would, like Smith’s, contain some intermixed italic forms.

This larger point would be irrelevant if the distinction that Imlay wants to draw between Smiths “secretarial flourishes” and Oxford’s “tight” or “controlled” italic were valid, but it unfortunately it is not.  Above and beyond the vagueness of the terms, Imlay ignores two essential elements of any good handwriting analysis: she neglects the distinction between natural and systematic variation that is essential to any valid forensic handwriting inquiry. Naturally not being aware of the distinction, she also doesn’t conduct a detailed or systematic examination of the letter forms found in the two documents.

Forensic paleographers depend on this distinction between natural variation  – the variation that exists within a population of writing written by the same hand – and systematic variation – the kind of  that denotes that two samples are drawn from two different writers. Indeed, since in paleography variation is a fact of any sample consisting of more than one element of comparison, the art of successful forensic inquiry consists in the ability to distinguish one form of variation from the other.

Sample size is also important. Because of natural variation, it is easy to be misled – in either direction – by singular comparisons, or even comparison based on only a few exemplars of a letter.  Not knowing that a large amount of Smith’s handwriting is available online at The University of Cambridge’s Scriptorium in the form of his circa 1540s-1570s “Inventory,” I began this analysis using only the samples of Smith’s hand reproduced in Imlay’s article.

Neither set of images is ideal for detailed study that would allow definitive conclusions, but together they constitute an impressive sample that at the least allows the reader to see why Imlay’s conclusions are wrong.

Let’s take a look in practice at how these theoretical distinctions might help us to understand why Imlay’s identification of the annotator as Oxford really is implausible at best.

Capital letters are especially useful for comparison as they are often more complex and can provide more highly-individuated design patterns than their corresponding lower case siblings. The above examples illustrate the single capital “G” from Imlay’s questioned document sample, four examples from Smith’s Inventory,  and one (the only one available to me) from Oxford’s 1603 King James Letter.

In considering this comparison it should be stressed that one exemplar is never sufficient to draw a conclusion. In this case, however, we only have one exemplar from the questioned sample document and one from Oxford’s hand, so we will work with what we have; despite this limitation, comparison with the three exemplars from Smith is instructive.

Smith forms capital G in two ways. One has no flourish and the top and makes a long descender comparable to the one seen in Oxford’s exemplar. The other is very close to the exemplar from the contested document. It has a very round shape, a conspicuous flourish at the top, and no descender.

If for the sake of a heuristic moment we classify the Smith and contested exemplars as group we see that all of them share one characteristic not seen in the exemplar from Oxford’s hand: they are all considerably rounder and less elongated, not both in their body and in the descender.

Given our caveat about limited sample size, it would be rash to draw any conclusions from this comparison, but it does allow the preliminary generalization that we already see little evidence supporting Imlay’s theory that the annotations are by Oxford, and a good bit suggesting that her inference that the annotations can’t be by Smith is also doubtful.

Considering some other letters may help to either confirm or call into question this tentative hypothesis.

Imlay complains that comparison of capital letters is difficult because Oxford writes such long sentences that “there are few capitals in most of the letters” (17).

Again, although this is somewhat true, the handwriting analyst must make do with what is available (always bearing in mind that the confidence of a given conclusion is partly a function of the sample size).

Table Two shows what happens when we piggyback on our analysis of capital G some comparisons of capital C from both Smith and Oxford.

Questioned document

Smith

Oxford

Table Two.

This comparison helps to compensate for the fact that the capital letter G is in fact rare in Oxford’s known handwriting, and reveals an underlying unity of form between capital G and capital C that the analyst can exploit for drawing comparisons.

This time the limiting factor is the contested document sample, which in the reproductions available to me contains no comparable capital C. But we can readily see that this letter is formed in the samples from Smith and Oxford on the same pattern as used for the G. Moreover, these two sets of exemplars show the same contrasting features as documented above for G. Oxford’s capital Cs tend to be greatly elongated, while Smith’s are – usually – almost round and sport the same serif as seen in his open G.

The sensitivity of such conclusions to sample size are illustrated by the last exemplar from Smith, which shows an elongated C quite similar to Oxford’s own.

But in this case the exception verifies the rule; while Smith’s capital C appear most commonly to be of the rounder form with the serif – closely matching the G of the contested sample – Oxford never to my knowledge forms either a capital G or C in this manner.

With this in mind, when we compare these back to the contested document G, this already begins to look like clear evidence for difference that cannot be attributed to the range of variation within the hand of a single writer.

There are several capital letter “M”s in the questioned document (Table Three), so this may provide a more valid comparison with Oxford’s hand. The three M’s that I was able to excerpt from the questioned document are reproduced below alongside three capital M’s from Oxford’s hand that illustrate a typical range of natural variation in his hand.

Questioned Document	Smith	Oxford

 Table Three.

Smith’s Scriptorium Inventory eventually supplied three examples of his capital M.  It can be seen that these letters share certain characteristics in common with the exemplars of G and C from their corresponding samples: the contested sample M’s are very straight, with only slight ornamental serifs at the bottom of both descenders.

Oxford’s M, like his G above, has a more flowing appearance created by balanced assymetry. The ascender on the left shoulder is more rounded,  and because the descender is more straight, the resulting shoulder  is more asymmetrical than that on the right,  which forms a more or less symmetrical upturned v not unlike those seen in the contested and Smith exemplars.

By this point we may be starting to form a reasonable conclusion that the questioned document isn’t likely to be in Oxford’s hand and that, on the contrary, it looks suspiciously similar to Smith’s.

In that case, we will not be surprised to learn that capital letter “R”  (Table Four) furnishes yet another instance of clear discrepancy between the contested sample and Oxford as well as supplying clear evidence for our alternative hypothesis that the annotations are by Smith.

Questioned document	Smith	Oxford

 Table Four.

This is definitely a case where Imlay’s concern over the shortage of exemplars of capital letters in Oxford’s accepted holograph complicates a definitive conclusion. But although a larger sample, especially of Oxford’s hand, would be preferable, we cannot help but notice that such as evidence as we do have corresponds to the pattern we have already seen in the previous examples.The evidence of the contested exemplar matches Smith but not Oxford.

The contested sample shares two prominent characteristics with Smith’s exemplars – 1) In all five exemplars the final descender of the R descends in a very long gentle curve well under a large portion of the subsequent word; 2) In one exemplar from each sample, a long riser extends the back of the R well above the bowl.

The Oxford exemplar  shows a much more restrained final descender, which terminates well before the next letter of the word. The riser goes up above the bowl but instead of ending in a straight line makes a flourishing loop as it returns to start the next phase of the letter.

Not only  is there what appears to be a systematic variation between Oxford’s hand and the questioned document sample, but the latter appears to match Smith’s italic hand in identifiably idiosyncratic ways.

In particular, the large size of the final descender, the way it loops under several or all of the letters in the word it originates is a striking characteristic of Smith’s hand that is matched perfectly in the contested document.

Capital E (Table Five) supplies an excellent further illustration of the importance of sample size, although this time the limiting factor is the contested sample.

Contested Document	Smith	Oxford

Table Five.

Drawing from the exemplars reproduced in Imlay’s article, which include the top E from the Oxford sample, we might be tempted to think that the Oxford and contested samples could be the same writer. But when we add in a few exemplars from Smith and two more from Oxford, we see how much more closely the Smith exemplars match.

Smith’s share in common with the contested exemplar — even more conspicuously — a tendency of all three of the arms of the letter, especially the top one, to jut out for some length to the left beyond the riser. This is in sharp contrast to Oxford’s, which either line up — especially the middle arm — exactly, or nearly so, with the riser, or else in seemingly controlled variation jut outward in a very controlled decorative flourish.

Oxford’s capital E shows a high amount of natural variation. Occasionally he even uses the Greek “Epsilon” capital E, as in the last example. But one feature his capital E’s have in common is that they are usually distinguished by one or another of the decorative flourishes that Imlay wrongly thinks is characteristic of Smith’s italic hand.

In contrast, Smith’s capital E is, like the contested exemplar,  also quite utilitarian in appearance.  None of  the three arms have any decorative elements or flourishes on them.

The more complete analysis on which this blog post depends (although not carefully edited or ready for presentation), includes analysis of all of the other letters for which I could derive plausible exemplars from the questioned document as reproduced in Imlay’s article. These include small letters l, i, p, a, e, and d, and capital letters B and H. Each comparison confirms, although perhaps in more subtle ways, the conclusion that the hand of the questioned document is Smith’s, not Oxford’s.

Against such evidence Imlay would have us believe that  Sir Thomas Smith “did not have time” to be “doodling” in his book, while perhaps a “child in the long winter evenings” might have “little else to do” (15) and assures us that one of her colleagues identified the drawings as “the work of a child of about ten or eleven.”

As attractive as this fantasy might be — and as much as the modern reader might want to believe that the adult Smith lacked a sense of humor that would express itself in doodling the margins of books on long winter (or summer)  evenings — it has no merit when posed against the hard evidence of forensic paleography.

As this blog post is already overly long, I will conclude with only one more letter.

Capital letter “A” furnishes another excellent illustration of the principle of natural variation. The first of the contested document exemplars (Table Six), is distinctly assymetrical, with a low sloping descender with a broad curve and a foot on the right descender. In this case the crossbar terminates precisely at the right descender.

Questioned Document	Smith	Oxford

 Table Six.

This is one of the letters that at first suggested to me that Smith was not the annotator, while Oxford might be. Looking at only the first of the two questioned document exemplars and comparing them to Oxford’s, you can see why.

But if we include the second of the questioned exemplars, and compare them to Smith’s a different picture emerges.

Like his E’s, Smith’s A’s tend to be much more utilitarian in character than Oxford’s, composed primarily of straight lines and lacking the decorative feel of the first contested exemplar. This, as you can see, is exactly the form mirrored in the second contested exemplar.

On the other hand, the third example from Smith shows how tentative such generalizations must be. Although the above description captures most of his capital As, he is quite capable of making one with a bit more flourish to it, typically by supplying a long tail to the lefthand stroke and a small footing to the righthand one.

When we turn to the Oxford exemplars, on the other hand, we can easily see that the questioned document samples are a better match to Smith than they are to Oxford.

Oxford’s capital A’s show the same tendency, observed before in the capital M, to form an asymmetric shoulder, more rounded on the left and more straight and angular on the right. He almost always terminates the right descender with a footing, although somewhat less pronounced than that seen in the first of the questioned document exemplars.

Most interesting of all, although the curving left descender of the Oxford exemplars might superficially seem to match that on the second questioned document samples, it is apparent on closer inspection that the descender in those exemplars descends in a much tighter curve and does not in fact match even the questioned document exemplar with which it shares most in common.

Andrea Rossi, with Swedish Physicists Hanno Essén and Sven Kullander, examining an experimental E-cat. Heat your home with "too cheap to meter" nickel and hydrogen?

Ok, I admit it. I have a new online hobby.

I like to follow websites featuring news about something called either CF (Cold Fusion), LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction), or LANR (Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reaction). At least those are the three most common names for this new and (to most of us anyway)  highly surprising development in modern science don’t seem to be too scarce.

Have I gone off the deep end?……Reader, you should know that I’ve been in the deep end for a few decades now, so its not really possible that I could have descended to any lower level of gullibility or whackability than I had yesterday.

And yet, something there is that doesn’t love a wall….

And when we get to the whacky world of what I’ll call for want of a clearly better term “Cold Fusion,” suddenly the walls are…..well, everywhere. There are walls inside of walls and across other walls and within ceilings and propping up floors that lead to nowhere.

O ya.  There are plenty of living scientists who don’t want the story of the Pons and Fleischman experiments of 1989 to ever be properly contextualized, historically speaking. That’s because given what we now know, based on a multitude of formal and informal studies by top electrochemists around the world, from NASA to SRI,  Pons and Fleishman were correct. Yes, it sure looks that way (again???!!!): The guys who presumed to be defending “science” were actually patho-skeptics addicted to a partial view of reality and a cushy government income.

It is true. Put the right combination of elements — usually Palladium and Hydrogen, or Nickel and Hydrogen — in solution, and run an electric current through it. You can release anomalous amounts of excess heat almost as if you’ve tapped into the fabled “zero energy” field where the 2nd law of thermodynamics is suddenly suspended and you seem to be generating energy from…..nothing.

You’ve achieved the impossible of creating an over-unity device.

This is one reason so many otherwise intelligent people resisted the Pons and Fleischman discoveries. The empirical evidence was contradicting what they already knew was true: you can’t get something out of nothing.

Unless, of course, you happen to live beneath a waterfall, in which case, until you understand the dynamics of the hydrological system, you could easily be persuaded your source of power was magic and a form of “getting something out of nothing.” But in that case you would not have learned the second law of thermodynamics and would not know any better.

This is just an under-educated guess, but if my life depended on an answer as to why cold fusion remains such a knotty one in electrophysics — insofar as it is about science and not about politics — I would have to go back to the 19th century debates over the existence of the “ether” — something today’s top “outside the box” researchers are calling the “atomic wind.” That’s an idea that got pretty thoroughly demolished in the early 20th century. I don’t understand all the scientific arguments, but take my word for it, saying that you believe in “ether” or “atomic wind” is  not a good thing to put on your physics grad school application.

But there were plenty of other reasons why top physicists hated CF as well. Research funding being an  important one.

“Hot Fusion” research was, and still is, big business. You and I have spent billions on it, and seem destined to spend at least many hundreds of millions more, looking at the DOE 2012 funding request, which doesn’t request a penny for CF.  Huge checks are written, both for infrastructure and personnel to perfect Hot Fusion. If you like the idea of an energy future in which energy is still generated centrally and put out over the grid, with all of the huge problems, both environmental and social, which are the consequence of such an arrangement, then Hot Fusion is just your cup of tea.

It’s all about superheating huge jets of plasma contained primarily by a magnetic field – since you can’t let the plasma contact a physical barrier without triggering big problems. Very conducive to the propagation of the technocratic elite who will guard everyone else from dangerous filaments and ideas.

Hmmm…..somehow I think that Buckminster Fuller or E. F. Schumacher would go for “Plan B.” See if you can make cold fusion work. Ha! What a bunch of idealists.

Pons and Fleischman were driven out of academia and Fleischman went to work for Toyota in Spain. Both were highly respected scientists, and Fleischman was at the time one of the most highly respected chemists in the field, second to none in credibility. It made no difference. Overnight he became one of the worst of men to be around: an idealist who had been scorned by the powerful and mighty of the world.

So, what gives when we find out a mere thirty years later that the powerful and mighty were full of hot air? CF has been replicated in dozens of labs all over the world? The proof is in. Pons and Fleischman were not “mismeasuring the heat.” Whatever you call it, and whatever the electrochemistry and physics of the thing is — for it stands at the crossroads between those two formerly distinct fields of human inquiry — its real.

Which brings us — with great apology to all those who worked so tirelessly in the interim and on whose shoulders the energy specialists of tomorrow will surely stand — to February, 2011. Why Now?

Well, there seem to be a growing number of signs that CF technology is about to make a giant step for mankind — out of the lab and into the marketplace.

If you are one of those readers who thinks that this is all about a crazy man in Italy named Andrea Rossi who spent time in jail after earning his PhD from a possibly less-than-reputable institution of higher learning and sounds to some people like a megalomaniac, I’ve got news.

Listen to what Gerald Celente was saying in January, 2011 about an imminent paradigm shift in energy production technology. Right now the spotlight — and not without reason — is on Rossi, and his erstwhile competitors, the Greek Company Defkalion.

Rossi’s the guy who in October, 2011, staged a highly successful test of his CF “E-cat” reactor (at least according to most estimates), with a number of very high profile scientists in attendance, most of whom seemed to think that the E-cat passed with flying colors. Naturally doubts remained among some watchers-on that somehow Rossi was gaming the test, but to my knowledge none of those actually in attendance has made such arguments (with the possible exception of Stephen Krivit, editor of a blog called New Energy Times that has expressed numerous complaints about Rossi’s methodology and ethics, but in whom many watchers do not place too much credibility).

Rossi  now says he’s through testing and is going into production. The goal?  A Florida factory, highly robotized, able to produce a million E-cats a year for the domestic heating and cooling market, sold through…..Home Depot. Cost to consumer $600-800 for a unit that will heat and possibly cool your home (add on some more for plumbing to hook the device up to your existing heat distribution system).

Fuel cost?  The fuel is nickel and hydrogen. Perhaps $20/yr – in a cartridge replaced by a technician or a homeowner every six months.

Sound crazy?  You aren’t alone.

And it gets worse. As nice as it might be for you and I to heat our houses and apartments for 1/10 the cost we currently pay, we have to stop and consider the economic consequences of what some are already calling “Fire 2.0.”   This is not a pretty picture.  The economic dislocations that we are in for if CF is indeed on the edge of commercialization are not going to be easy.  In the long run, the world will be way better off. But getting there will not be a rose garden either.

Anyway, I’ve been holding off writing this blog to wait and see a little longer what would happen. But at this point, it’s “what they hey.” If you don’t already know about this, you should. The only reason you don’t is that the mass media of the United States and probably the rest of the world is so up to its ass in corporate malfeasance (witness the long overdue dismemberment of the corrupt Murdoch news empire taking place now in England) that they can’t be bothered to report anything like this until its so far gone it can’t be stopped anymore.  You can imagine what GE, which has many media holdings, including big chunks of NBC and therefore MSNC, thinks about the E-cat.

By-by nuclear power. By-by $4.00 a gallon gas. By-by war as an energy policy.

Of course, it may all be a mass hallucination. But you don’t have to wait long now to find out. Defkalion is reported to be starting a series of seven independent tests of its Hyperion technology…..next week. Notwithstanding the rumpus between Defkalion and Rossi (they were at one point going to partner, but never made it to the altar), if those tests are positive they will silence the majority of the “skeptics” not only on behalf of the Greek company, but Rossi as well.

Don’t hold your breath just yet, but this could be the best news story of the decade, if not the century….:)

I rather like that.

But then there’s also “if you build it, the energy will come.”

Here’s our weekly dose of how the internet is transforming the “life of the mind” — by empowering people with great ideas but no leverage within the academy with a forum and a means of communicating.

An Old Man and the Sea: Herman Melville. Engraving kindness Barry Moser.

Well, its been a few weeks since I’ve done a post, and I can only plead in my own defense for such lack of productivity that I have in fact been very productive indeed, just not on Facebook or on this blog  (Hey, we old fuddy-duddy scholars have to do real work sometimes…..with such primitive tools as WORD, pencils, and pieces of paper, read and comment on student papers, and all of the usual academic fol-de-rol).

Here’s the News that’s fit to print:

1) I haven’t mentioned here yet that Lynne Kositsky and I have had our Tempest book accepted by McFarland.  The manuscript will be delivered in June.

We are grateful to have the assistance of such a well established and professional academic publisher. So during a good bit of January I stayed with Lynne and Michael to put a few finishing touches on the manuscript.

2) I’ve been working hard on a classified de Vere project to be discussed at the Spring Concordia conference.

3) This is the best.  The internet is a strange and wonderful place, a kind of eddy in time-space where all sorts of rickety old broken pieces from the past seem to be swirling around to the dervish music, diamonds and junk alike.

Having grown up in Washington State, where the tides of the Pacific pile the driftwood high and shuttle on their bouncing waves the Japanese glass fishing floats of yesteryore,  I like to go beachcombing  as frequently as possible. I find  it works on the internet too.

Sometimes you will even find that what were looking for was yourself, and —  there your are.

A few days ago  I accepted Richard Waugaman’s invitation to join Google scholar.

When you join Google Scholar the first thing you will see is a list of all the papers Google scholar has by you as well as those who’ve cited you (whether to cuss you out or add something significant to the conversation).  While I was looking over the list of publications I’ve written and I discovered one I forgot I had written (well, actually, listed as a rather inconsequential co-author along with the folks who actually did most of the work), and didn’t know had been published.  And if you were ever going to find such a paper on the internet, this little gem from the good folks at CEDAR  (Center of Excellence for Document  Analysis and Recognition at the University of Buffalo) would be the one you’d want.

Here’s the abstract:

Over the last century forensic document science has developed progressively more sophisticated pattern recognition methodologies for ascertaining the authorship of disputed documents.

These include advances not only in computer assisted stylometrics, but forensic handwriting analysis. We present a writer verification method and an evaluation of an actual historical document written by an unknown writer.

The questioned document is compared against two known handwriting samples of Herman Melville, a 19th century American author who has been hypothesized to be the writer of this document. The comparison led to a high confidence result that the questioned document was written by the same writer as the known documents. Such methodology can be applied to many such questioned documents in historical writing, both in literary and legal fields.

Of course, I did  already know about CEDAR’s  preliminary findings on the same subject,  written up in a previous paper.  Like the second test, the first one concluded that

The comparison led to a high confidence result that the questioned document was written by the same writer as the known documents.

But that test had one significant flaw in it. Suggestive as it was, it used 20th century controls to test a proposition about a 19th century piece of writing.  Given the resources available to them, this wasn’t a bad place to start, but the experimental design was open to the criticism of not taking into consideration the possibly confounding variable of historical evolution of handwriting styles.

The second test tested to see if this variable was relevant to the outcome of the report. It was not. Unless handwriting lies, the document is by Herman Melville.

What is this document, you ask?

Well, you came to the right place to find out.

For a few sample handwriting comparisons between the manuscript and Melville, check out the pdf.

********************************************

Update 2-7. I just realized that I had the wrong link for the new article – as originally posted this linked twice to the original article. The error has been corrected. I apologize for any confusion. Cheers-RS