Wired: 10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets

Along with 9 other gadgets, Wired has selected Steorn's Orbo as one of the 10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets. From the article:

... File this one under deluded: enthusiastically setting up a public display, the inventors were humiliated when it failed to operate. But wait! Steorn gave its deal to 22 scientists who'll "validate" the device. Don't hold your breath, chaps. ...

... Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin' clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you're selling a measurement error. ...

They seem to have sided with Dr. Mike on their opinion of Steorn.

Interview With Dr. Mike

Here is a link to the conversation I had tonight with Dr. Mike Rosing, our official Steorn skeptic. I've highlighted some of the more interesting bits:

SteornTracker: 485%, there isn't really a way to measure that incorrectly is there?
drmike: Nope. That's a pure fabrication.

SteornTracker: How many papers have they shown you? The one we have mostly heard about indirectly is via your experiment.
drmike: Two, both covering the same topic. One is obviously written for investors, the other for engineers.

SteornTracker: 3 days assembling an already designed and tested demo unit doesn't seem too short of a time, they also claimed to have three of these units
drmike: That's the claim. I don't think so. Why have a lathe in the upstairs shop?

SteornTracker: If you were on the Jury, how long would it take for you to be fed up enough to go public about the situation? Or would you just stay quiet like we've seen so far?
drmike: Good question. I'd probably have given up after 3 months.

SteornTracker: So what do you predict will happen to Steorn over the next few months? Sean has said another demo will take place, do you think he'll try again?
drmike: Yes, I think so. But he'll have it set up in secret and it won't work, so he won't actually tell anyone. In the mean time he'll be hoping the jury gets back to him, but he won't realize he hasn't shown them anything.

SteornTracker: Did Sean talk to you and the SPDC members at all about the transition from the start-stop device to the continuous device? He hinted in April that they were making "progress"
drmike: Nope. He mostly tried to "explain the effect". It was interesting because it was one way communication. Not many people asked questions, and Sean did most of the talking.

SteornTracker: You spent some time in London with EarthTech. They seem like an interesting crowd. What were their impressions of Steorn?
drmike: Mixed. Hal was trying to believe, Scott was trying to help, and Marissa was trying to leave :-)

drmike: So there really is a jury, but so what? They don't do anything, nor are they allowed to see anything.
SteornTracker: What evidence do you have that suggests that?
drmike: Sean said on friday during the public admission of failure of the demo that the jury had not seen a working device yet.

drmike: Scott from EarthTech who is not on the jury, said they got plans and could not reproduce any "over unity" effect.
drmike: So I expect no jury member has duplicated it either.

SteornTracker: You're less in the dark then most of us, and your hypothesis seems to make more sense then the documentary ideas, etc
drmike: I think the observations made while upstairs tell me that it was a one man show. A few engineers with a little skill could have done a much better fake!

SteornTracker: I'm guessing you now would give Steorn less then my .001% chance of having anything, is that correct?
drmike: I started with 10^-25 and I'm at 10^-100 now :-)

Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike :-)

In the interview, Dr. mike said he'd be available in the near future for a group chat. Feel free to ask questions here and I'll set up a chat session in the next few days.

The Mysterious Marissa

Today we finally learn who the mysterious user Marissa is. She appeared in Steorn's forum three days ago saying:

"Well, the jury is real, but that's the only refutable comment Mike. Everything
else could be just as you've explained it. Sigh."

crank backed her up with this statement:

"There's an obvious reason how she knows."

And finally we get an even more mysterious answer from Marissa:

"It's not as obvious as you think Crank. But we work in the free energy world.
We hear things. There is a jury - and no, we aren't on it."

So who is Marissa and where does she work? All these comments make sense once you discover that Marissa Little is an experimentalist at EarthTech International (ETI). Dr. Mike gave us a clue when he said "I'm the same age as her father, and I got along well with him too!!". Scott Little is also an Experimentalist at ETI.

It sounds like EarthTech International was in the running to be part of the Jury. We know that they were eventually not selected, but Marissa must have played a role in dealing with Steorn's jury process. So the question still remains, what state is the Jury in today? Are they being strung along, or have they been given unlimited access to Steorn's claims? Have any of the members of the Jury replicated Steorn's experiments? We're all in the dark for now.

Fireworks

I just got back from a wonderful fireworks display, and it seems there were some fireworks going on with Steorn as well. SeamusF left this message on the forums:

... they ran into some technical issues, firstly a problem with the bearings, which was fixed once identified. The next issue appears to be an environmental issue. We think possibly the temperature from the lighting system in the immediate area, but this has to be further assessed in the morning.

The laws of nature are not giving up without a fight!

On another note, this is the only official word we've received from Dr. Mike:

I am in London!

No sign of Mabuse, yet.


It's late, and the beer was good. Time for me to go to bed.

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike

Dr. Mike En Route to London?

Other than some silliness going on in the comments here and on Steorn's Forum, not much happened today as we await the July Demo. One note, Dr. Mike hasn't posted at all today, so there is a chance that he is en route to London. Also in the forums today:

ferg: why do they want to did this? Surely you hardcore forumers who have been dedicated to Orbo and its outcome deserve to know when and wheres it on don't you?

Magnatrix: Quite right... those who are "dedicated" already know (people in the SPDC)

Sv Experiment Photos

Today, Dr. Mike posted photos of his new t-shirt and also a few photos of his Sv Experiment. As you can see, reality is a bit different then CG ;-).

Also today, Dr. Mike had this to say about the experiment:

Given Steorn's claim that power is generated, we should see some interesting phenomena which can not be easily explained with standard CoE physics. Since they get a mechanical gain, I would think we can see it with a mechanical set up.

Since I don't know what to look for, the more eyes and minds looking the better. Suggestions for data collection and doing analysis are welcome. It seems like spread sheet type software can do things like plot and mess with the data. Coming up with algorithms takes a little playing with - you need to try stuff, plot it, try something else, plot it and keep playing to see what pops out or changes. Then, when something looks strange, go back and try another experiment with different parameters to see what happens.

Dr. Mike Sv Experiment Update

While the experiment is still an on-going process, Dr. Mike has provided everyone with a lot of data to keep those interested busy :-). ramuk has published screen shots of excel graphs of the raw data to give us an idea of what we're looking at:

drmike: I'll take a few more blocks of data this evening if I can, then start to think about signal processing.

I'm still at a loss as to how this data may show a loss of energy and a violation of CoE, but I'm not a physicist ;-).

Dr. Mike's First Data, Sean Visits the Forum

Dr. Mike announced here that he has published the first set of experimental data to his website:

First data is uploaded. It's just accelerometer data, packed in a zip file. Let me know if there are problems, this is really just a test run. I've got to add magnets and magnetometers yet.

Also today, Sean chimed in on the "Why hasn't Sean posted any comments for the past two weeks" discussion:

As for the not posting in a while, its pretty simple, have been buried at work and had the flu, sorry its a bit mundane, but true.

He also answered Ping's question on Steorn Nominees:

Ping, agreed on the company structure, and we are preparing to restructure Steorn towards the end of the year, but as I said before in here Steorn Nominees is not for that purpose, it was a vehicle that we used to co-invest into Orbo Ltd. (nothing to do with our technology), it serves no other purpose at all.

The Slowest Week Yet...

You may be wondering why this blog hasn't been updated for a few days. Unfortunately there has been no news to pass along. While we haven't heard a peep from Steorn lately, we are getting updates from Dr. Mike on his experiment:

I got the bearings! So now I get to build the actual experiment. Biggest problem is that the steel rod I got is exactly 0.75" diameter, and the bearing holes are exactly 0.75" in diameter, so it won't go together. I've got the rod in the freezer and I'll stick the bearings outside to warm up, so with luck I'll get .001" clearance be able to assemble my pivot. I don't think it's going to sag much.

The accelerometer and other two inputs (which will soon be magnetometers) are being read at 796 Hz and I can capture to file with no apparent loss using hyperterm. I think collecting data under linux or dos should be trivial.

But mostly, it's just plain fun!

For any of those folks who think validation or experiments, especially during someone's spare time, only takes a couple of days, Dr. Mike's setup shows that even something as simple as a pendulum takes a while to put together. Watching Dr. Mike's process on getting the sensors working, bearings fitted, etc is "just plain fun" for the rest of us also! I can't wait to see some photos and data.

Dr. Mike's Sv Experiment

After a bit of back and forth between Sean and Dr. Mike, which lead to a public approval by Sean for Dr. Mike to publish his experiment, we now have the beginnings of Dr. Mike's Sv Experiment.

Some thought Sean was a bit harsh on Dr. Mike today. There seemed to be some miss communication regarding whether Dr. Mike could publish his version of the experiment. While Sean had emailed Dr. Mike a critique of the proposed experiment, I wonder if Dr. Mike was still expecting a follow up email or communication allowing him to openly discuss the experiment. Once the dust settled, we got our answer from Sean:

Mikes experiment design is his own, he asked my views, I gave them to him, I saw many technical problems with it, if Mike wants to post his experiment, there is nothing that Steorn can or would do about it, other than to comment on the variety of problems that I see with it, although I do now see that Mike is suggesting stainless steel instead of the steel design that he originally mailed to me and posted above, there are lots of issues, I have no problem discussing them in public, IMO the design is not very good, but lets get the issues in the open, but again I do want an explanation of the lapse of memory issues.

While it's always fun to discuss finances and intentions, I prefer physics. The Sv Experiment thread is off to a great start and I'm sure we'll all learn a lot more about magnetic viscosity and Sv in the process.

Dr. Mike's Progress

Over in the thread Few Questions to drMike blueletter asks:

Dr. Mike, How's your Sv testing progressing?

drmike responds:

I'm waiting on Steorn to OK my proposal. I'd like to create a public physics experiment so we can all discuss it, and I'd like for it to be so far off from Steorn's methods that you can't directly see how it connects to anything they are doing. I've got plans, and I've got a few parts listed I'd want to order to build the thing (steel frame mostly) but there's no point in proceeding if Steorn won't let me talk about it.

Hopefully Dr. Mike will get the thumbs up from Steorn soon and can move forward with his experiment.

The Game is Afoot

Dr. Mike has posted this message over in the Few questions to Dr. Mike Thread:

I have received a description of an experiment and some results. It's proprietary, so that's that. If you get the paper listed in References on magnetism about magnetic viscosity you can see where the term Sv comes from.

Anisotropy energy has a time constant in nanoseconds. Sv has a time constant in milliseconds. One of the formula in the above paper shows

Sv = -k*T/(dE/dH)

where k = Boltzman's constant, T = absolute temperature, and dE/dH = change in energy barrier with respect to external field.

What's interesting is that they claim dE/dH should be measured at constant M_irr where "irr" is a reference to irreversible processes. M is permanent magnet field strength (I think). If it's irreversible it's an energy loss and entropy gain. That says
it will be really hard to see any violation of CoE in this process.

But I've got more to read, and lots of questions to ask. So check out that paper and let's see if we can figure out Sv!

Patience, persistence, truth,
Dr. mike

Also in the forums, nleseul asks:

Care to tell us your initial impression of their setup, though? Does it look like an experiment that would answer the question and be worth your time to do?

And Dr. Mike responds:

I've got some questions for them, but I want to read up on magnetic viscosity and how Sv is used in the literature. The main tie in for me is via anisotropy energy - seems like it's quite similar and has the same underlying physics as magnetic viscosity.

I think one of the main problems is that the term "magnetic viscosity" has different meanings in different contexts. I think "domain realignment time" is more appropriate for what Steorn is talking about compared to what ferrofluids or AC motors use the term for. Maybe - I have to read some more.

Dr. Mike also posted this comment here in regards to his trip in July:

No tickets yet. Promise was for next week. But I have something to read up on, so I can wait! For fun, check out:
http://joam.infim.ro/JOAM/pdf6_2/Grossinger.pdf
and read up on Sv.

Now everyone start reading!

Can Dr. Mike Sv CoE?

Dr. Mike, our favorite skeptic, and Sean, our favorite free energy CEO, went at it in the forums today:

drmike: To not have anything to show anyone after all this time from last August's big splash and also to have claimed to have worked on it for 3 years prior to that, just makes it
look like there's really nothing there.

I claim the emperor has no clothes. I'm a skeptic. I'm also an engineer that likes to play with toys - no toys, no play time! That's boring. I'd rather see a toy and get a clue how to build it, that's all.

Steorn: Dr. Mike, You are also a scientist, there is enough there to go and prove us wrong if you feel that you can - go for it, you are a scientist, engineer and skeptic - surely you are in a position to test and demonstrate that an Sv reaction is thermodynamically resolvable?

drmike: Yes, I have all the tools necessary to do that in my own personal laboratory.
How'd you like to send me a toy to hook up to all that equipment?

Otherwise, I'll get together some equipment in London and do it before the demo starts.

I'm sure the forum members would like to watch, so any chance there's an internet connection at the demo site? A web cam would be very cool!

Steorn: lol Mike - as you said in your post above "I'd rather see a toy and get a clue how to build it, that's all." - well you can get that clue in July, but not before. But surely you are in a position to test an Sv interaction and prove via test that it is thermodynamically sound?

drmike: Sure. What's the set up?

Steorn: Try any interaction that includes Sv.

This next comment made me laugh:

Big Oil Rep: So any interaction that involves Sv violates COE? And no one noticed this before? Hmmm

Back to the conversation:

Steorn: look forward to hearing how your own Sv testing goes - will you keep the forum updated?

drmike: Like this paper found by Emeraldsong: http://joam.infim.ro/JOAM/pdf6_2/Grossinger.pdf? Anything in particular or just replicate something at will?

Steorn: Mike, I just mailed you a simple Sv test setup and so on, try to replicate it and then sum the energies!!

As nleseul put it, "Some excitement to fill the time between now and July! Thanks, Sean! Thanks, Dr. Mike!"

In the same thread Sean had some general remarks about the debate:

Steorn: I have to say that I had zero expectations on anything other than a bit of fun on Friday. It was the last day of college before the exams start and I was pretty sure that the whole thing would end up as an student prank. It was not that, so be it. With respect to being laughed at, so what? It is not in my nature to back down, even though we had been repeatedly lied to about the event by the organizers we went through with it, we expected nothing more than the treatment that we got.

I will continue to do this kind of thing because I think that its the right thing to do, if someone asks me to talk about it to a group of people who I think might have a genuine interest in it I will talk to them, if I have the time. They can decide to debate the issues or call names, this says more about them than me.

The UDC thing was just another day in this forum, people get emotive about the claim and revert to cries of foul - this says a lot more about them than me.

And finally, on a lighter note, Spiritual Beggar brings us another in a series of great Steorn Cartoons, which Sean used in the debate to break the ice:

Forum Update, Dr. Mike's Status

Steorn's forum went back to its previous state today, requiring admin approval of new accounts before posting. No comments in the forum itself were made about the subject, but a couple of commenters here mentioned that they were banned. Hopefully all those who were interested in getting accounts were able to get them!

On another note, Dr. Mike updated us on the status of his trip to London:

No tickets (although they say they are working on it, so I believe 'em), no text to read, no idea what I'll see. There was mention of discussions with the spud club, but that is all the NDA parties, so not webbable (is that a word???)

A one way web cam plus the forum would work too. For all of us skeptics that would be a great way to get some idea on how real any of this is. Frustrating because there's only one of me, but hey, it's a start!

Sean to the Rescue and the Forum is Wide Open

pcstru4 started off Sunday's discussions with this question:

Believers - What will your excuse be when Steorn does not demonstrate a working OU device in July?

This caught SeamusF's attention:

LOL do you know something that even Steorn doesnt know?

Dam I may go and cancel everything, the venue, hotels, media, etc seeing as Pcstru4 stated that "Steorn does (will) not demonstrate a working OU device in July?".

Besides all of that pcstru4, where are you based? Are you going to come along and see the demo, or are you happier making random comments about a technology which you actually know anything about?

I guess Seamus took this question personally! pcstru4 later posts that he'll definitely come if Steorn has an OU Device. SeamusF unknownly sets himself up with this statement:

We will see you at the Demo then. I will ensure you have full details on
venue as soon as we announce the dates. Make sure you introduce yourself to me
or Sean when you arrive and we will see who is right or wrong

You'll find out from Sean in a second why Seamus set himself up, but first the discussion turned to whether Steorn has actually announced that their July Demo will be of an OU device at all. SeamusF again starts digging himself a hole:

Information on this will be published as a Press Release. We are not releasing any information on it before that.

So we're now starting to all think that the July demo may not be of an OU device at all, but something else! But wait, Sean to the rescue!

July will be a demo of a real self sustaining OU device.

Sean did bring some bad news for those across the Atlantic:

On the July stuff we are not going to pre-announce the actual dates. ... The
press release will be issued the day the event start ... Its a decision we have
made based on advise from our PR company. And its one that we will not change.
Dr. Mike has a mail with a copy of the advise (and indeed the dates themselves)
however he is under NDA and cant put it in the public domain.

I'm sure that disappoints some folks, possibly even Seamus after his remarks! It's still great to know that Dr. Mike is still planning to go.

Finally, Sean made this announcement:

hehe, well I just reopened the membership thing so you get a change to get pcstru5 thru x now!

I verified that the forums are wide open at the moment. Get your account now before it's too late!

Dr. Mike Update

Here is an update on Dr. Mike's visit. Hopefully we'll get a firm date in the next week or two:

No date set yet, but Sean has informed me that he'll set up a date for the trip when he gets a chance. He wants me to do some reading first

But it sounds like the plan is definitly in for a trip, so hang on to your hats!

Recent Steorn Forum Comments

I've added a quick link list on the left hand side of the blog with links to specific users on Steorn's Forum that I monitor. Check out some of the interesting posts from Steorn, Crank, Dr. Mike, and Others!