First 8 Minutes Transcribed...

It's a lot of work to transcribe interviews! It took about an hour to get the first eight minutes of the interview down on paper. You can read them here. I'll be working on getting the whole interview transcribed over the next few days. Below are some of the interesting parts of the first eight minutes.

Sean in response to whether he thinks that engaging the forums is a waste of time:

Sean: ... I don't see it at all as a waste of time, we’ve been asked by Trinity to do a similar kind of thing, ultimately its part of a process of erosion that people have now distilled the view, that I can understand, we're either for real, that people will say that it is such a small probability its not worth considering, or some kind of fraud. General opinion has actually consolidated into a very black and white vision. At the end of that, the black and whiteness of it will be resolved one way or another. Either we will be proven to be fraud, which we're not, or we will be proven to be right which we are, and then we can actually get on with the business of business.

Sean also clarifies some of the details leading up to the UCD debate, and clarifies comments he made about being lied to:

... eventually we got to speaking to the person who is responsible for issuing approval for filming in the university and he’d never heard of it, and that is specifically what I’m referring to ...

The Trinity visit should be interesting. I think we're going to have plenty of entertainment between now and July.

Dispatches from the front, an SPDC Update

There was a lot of relevant activity today in Steorn's forum. Sean provided some interesting links in this post to some of Steorn's previous work, including links to FraudHalt and DiscMatch. Also today, crank started the thread Dispatches from the front to give us all a developer's club update:

Sean produces a test carried out on a €4000 machine, and within a few days people can replicate his results using parts cannibalised from other equipment.

It sounds like a lot of the SPDC members are very hands on. Here is part of her analysis of the current situation within the SPDC:

I think it's fair to say that there has been some movement towards the fence by hardened sceptics, and fence-sitters are gingerly lowering toes onto the believer side.

In the words of one sceptic "I'm only looking at recipes for humble pie, it's not cooking yet! But my skeptical foundation has just suffered a magnitude 5.5 quake."

pcstru4, an SPDC member and skeptic, mentioned in the thread that he's shifted a bit, from a 0.000001 chance to 0.00000125 chance :-) enginerd, another skeptic in the SPDC, also commented that no fence movement has taken place for him yet.

Make sure to read the whole thread if you have time. Crank goes on to say:

SPDC members now know the identity of the engineer in the Kinetica video, and know more about who has tested Steorn's tech in the past.

If you've listened to the interview from Friday, you'll know that I'm a bit fascinated with the whole SPDC model. I think it's great that there are true skeptics in the SPDC, and it's also great that crank is allowed to post updates like she has. The more informed we all are, the more likely it is we'll be able to figure out where this is all heading.

A Few Points from Sean

Sean may be disappearing for a while from the forums, so make sure you read his latest message. Highlights include Sean's asking that we don't consider Steorn a fraud, and that we accept that this will be a long process before things are cleared up.

As an open minded skeptic, I can offer Sean the benefit of the doubt about this not being a fraud. He points out that there are no clear victims at the moment. I honestly don't know what this is all about. I'm sure we'd all love to believe Sean, but it's his responsibility to prove his position. I'm looking forward to the July demos and more updates on the Jury. We're definitely in for a long, hopefully entertaining, ride.

1000th Visitor!

I've been blogging for a little over two weeks now about Steorn, and I'm proud to announce that we had our 1000th visitor today. Here are some of the highlights these past two weeks:

• Details have emerged about the July Demo being planned
• Dr. Mike has replaced HairyKrishna as the visiting skeptic
• Steorn Started the SPDC
• And More!

Here is a global map of the SteornTrack visitors so far. Click the image to see a better view. Thank you all for your feedback, participation and support!

hairykrishna replacement?

Not much exciting going on in the forums today. The discussion Nominate the next Skeptic to go see Steorn! hasn't produced much, other than a clear statement of what Steorn would be willing to do with said skeptic, and the requirements that skeptic must meet. As for requirements, first they have to be a skeptic which right now isn't easy to come by in Steorn's fan forum :-). Second, they have to be a scientist, which is also hard to come by in the forum ;-(.

If a skeptic is chosen, the visit will be primarily designed for the documentary. The idea is to capture the skeptics reaction to viewing and examining a working prototype. Sean mentions that they can beat on the thing with a hammer, take it outside, etc. Most everyone in the forum would volunteer in a heartbeat to be the next hairykrishna.

Also, Seamus has a long explanation of why they will no longer be tolerating hairykrishna. It comes down to HK's last discussion with crank, where he tried to get the name of one of the original scientists to look at the data:

Simply put we could not trust HK.

Until crank gets to visit Steorn this weekend or possibly next week, we may not have that much activity in the forums. hairykrishna definitely made things interesting for a little while!

The hairykrishna Saga

If you check out Steorn's forum, you may have noticed a bit of activity involving a skeptic "hairykrishna" and Steorn's CEO, Sean. While forum members highlight that this whole thing is a side show compared to the "Validation Process", we all know very little on how the validation process is going. So here is a quick summary as to what is going on.

hairykrishna, who claims on the forum to be knowledgeable in physics and located at some university, initially attacked Steorn by calling them a scam, etc. Steorn's reaction was to engage hairykrishna, and attempt to set up a third party validation of a specific experiment that supposedly demonstrated a net-loss of energy in a closed system, thus violating the law of conservation.

The third party validation didn't work out, and as of 2 days ago hairykrishna was working with Steorn's lawyers on an agreeable NDA. But that is when things may have hit an impasse. hairykrishna refuses to travel to Steorn's company until he has some evidence that this is the real thing. I completely understand his perspective. He doesn't want to be made a fool on film, which is one of Steorn's requirements, and he knows how good cons can be. What he really wants is some sort of scientific paper that would allow him to reproduce the device on his own.

I completely understand Steorn's perspective also. They are holding their IP close until validation day, so the only way they could release this info, in addition to having harykrishna sign an NDA, is also to have him sign a contractual agreement, which would be more in line with what they have done with the validation process.

Unfortunately I don't see a resolution here. And I agree with some of the commenters that point out that Steorn has most likely faced this type of situation before with the universities they claim to have worked with. If you are a scientist, and someone comes up to you and claims free energy, how do you protect yourself from not getting scammed? You're going to be extremely defensive, for good reason. If you are a company that has really discovered free energy, what the heck can you do to get it validated while still protecting your IP?

Needless to say this is very entertaining. Here is my suggestion to get things going again: Steorn, if you really care about persuading hairykrishna, write up a scientific paper on the "net-loss of energy" claim. Send this to hairykrishna or publish it. This most likely isn't part of your core claims, but it would be scientifically interesting and may give credence to what you are claiming!