No, they don't. Most innovations come from people who think farther than the mass. There is an enormous difference between that and what you said.

I'm not advocating throwing him in jail. I'm advocating testing his device. Really testing it, not the arms-length black box testing that has been done so far.

Oh, I certainly agree that it's not necessary that Rossi understands his magic box for it to be real. Just that it's highly, highly unlikely that he managed to build something useful with no conception of how it does what it does. And it's certainly not necessary for us to fully understand it before putting it to use... but I think, again, that it's highly improbable that we would be able to build them without understanding something about how they accomplish what they accomplish.

Of course it does. It's not necessary to have the theory fully elaborated and to calculate the interactions to the nth degree, but you have to have some basis for believing that putting objects together in such-and-such a way will produce such-and-such a result, and why. That's theory.

No, but you do need to understand that different liquids condense at different temperatures... or need to use a design created by someone who does.

No, but you do need to understand that lodestones always point north, and that you can induce similar behavior in a piece of metal. That then gives you the idea of suspending one so it can rotate freely and point directions. Yes, you're doing so without most of the theory as to why lodestones behave the way they do, but you still have a theory of operation of your compass, which is based on the observed behaviors of lodestones plus the notion that configuring one in a particular way would allow it to rotate and act as a pointer.

The key is that there is some theory (which need not be modern physics, or even mathematical in nature) that motivates the engineer to believe that building this thing in this way will accomplish that. In some very rare circumstances (the compass may be such a circumstance, actually), you could notice that materials you found randomly assembled or randomly assembled yourself do something interesting, but that's definitely the exception. Generally, you build a machine because you have ideas about how its parts will collaborate to produce the hoped-for result. That's theory preceding implementation.

All of your examples support my argument. It's not necessary that the theory be fully detailed, but the structure of the processes are generally understood.

In the example of the dynamo and the motor, much of the behavior of electric currents was already understood, and quantified, as was the fact that a current moving through a wire produces a magnetic field and vice versa. From that point it was an engineering effort (a brilliant one, including the observation that the effects could be usefully scaled up) to construct the useful devices. Faraday knew before he built them how he expected them to work, and why.

The steam engine definitely supports my argument. It was designed as a way to harness the power of expanding steam which was already very well understood, even if the Ideal Gas Law and other supporting theories related to thermodynamics, expansion coefficients, etc. were not. Regardless of all that wasn't known, the designers of steam engines (in their various stages) could explain quite clearly how and why they worked, all the way back to Hero's aeopile.

Rossi's inability to offer an explanation of the E-Cat makes me highly, highly skeptical that it works. Oh, he says words which he calls an explanation, but they fly in the face of already-understood theory, and he offers no explanations about why already-understood theory is wrong.

I find that it most situations I can talk to my watch without annoying anyone. I just hold it right next to my mouth and speak softly enough that only someone standing very close could hear, and then not well. This works well even in very noisy environments.

There are some circumstances in which this would be nice because neither talking to the watch nor pulling out my phone are workable. But it's a pretty small set.

I haven't seen that pair of positions at all. I wish I had, because those are consistent. Ebola is so dangerous in Africa because sanitary conditions and medical facilities are so poor there. All of those deaths are a tragedy, and the deaths of healthcare workers sacrificing themselves are a tragedy that tugs the heartstrings.

On the other hand, Ebola is truly not dangerous here, because we do have good public health infrastructure.

There's nothing at all inconsistent about those two perspectives, unless you assume that people worried about death in Africa should only care if they fear that it's going to threaten them personally.

It's not so much that they "choose" something. It's the fundamental difference between "news" and "not news" colliding with the way humans have evolved to give cognitive weight to things they hear about frequently and which can be associated with strong narratives.

C. dificile killing 16K people annually isn't news, because it's been happening for years. It's part of the background, not something which jumps up and begs to be called out. If a few thousand people in Africa had been dying at a steady pace from Ebola, for decades, it would also likely be part of the background... just like malaria is. Outbreaks are news, even if the death rates are small, while a steady year in and year out death toll is not, even if it's killing a lot more people. Unless, of course, there is news about initiatives to eradicate the "normal" disease, or interesting new research or something that makes a change worth talking about.

Ebola is also particularly powerful from a narrative perspective. The graphic imagery it produces, plus the horrific nature of bleeding to death from the inside out, makes for a strong story. Then when you add in self-sacrificing health care practitioners risking their lives and working in horrific conditions to try to help the sufferers, and then themselves suffering the same horrible death, it becomes a really compelling narrative. Throw in government corruption resulting in basic protective measures being unavailable to said self-sacrificing practitioners and it's a blockbuster.

C. difficile, not so much. People don't usually die of diarrhea, and it's an experience all of us are familiar with, and don't really want to talk or think about. Lousy narrative, no great changes to make it news, so it gets ignored, until someone decides to try swallowing human feces as a treatment. That's news, and it has a narrative we can all relate to and be disgusted by. Which is why we're talking about it now.

If you notice the stories that the media "chooses" to scare the public, they're all "news with a powerful narrative". These things resonate with people and get their interest -- including members of the media -- so the media provides them. The nice story plus the repetition of seeing the story daily causes people to dramatically overestimate the danger.

We all need to learn more about how our brains work so we can compensate for our inherent biases.

Nonsense.

Most real inventions go the other direction... first the theory, then the gradual working-out of the engineering processes required to make it work, a a little, then more hard work to refine it into something really useful and usable.

Most claimed inventions without theoretical justification also go a different way... they're thought a hoax and then are proven to be a hoax. The reason they're thought to be a hoax is exactly because nearly all of them are.

It is looking more possible that the E-Cat may not be a hoax. Further study may gradually exclude all other explanations, and eventually we may start to see conjectured mechanisms, one of which may emerge as the best explanation. Perhaps along the way we'll learn some new physics.

Or, we may find that the E-Cat is a hoax. That will be the less surprising (but sadder) outcome. Time, and further study, will tell. But if it does turn out to be real, your snark will still be completely wrong. Most everything that is real is known to be real before it works, and most everything that is a hoax actually is a hoax.

I understood the power transmission thing differently. I thought he wanted to resonate the capacitance of the Earth's atmosphere to transmit AC power. The reason that the idea didn't take off was that you can't meter the consumption. Anyone has access to siphon off the energy from the atmosphere. He had a solution that did not yield itself to a viable business model.

It's not a question of experimentation with uncertain approaches. The alternatives are all well-understood... actually the mathematics is straightforward enough that the characteristics of virtually any approach you can invent can easily be calculated.

The question is whether they should use the approach that provides the fastest route to a given level of certainty at the expense of deliberately leaving a significant percentage of sufferers untreated, or whether to use other methods that provide the treatment to everyone possible but will take longer to achieve the required level of certainty. There's a legitimate question here, particularly if the researchers strongly believe that the vaccine does work. In that case, using randomized treatment will needlessly allow many people -- and, in particular, healthcare workers -- to die. If, on the other hand, the vaccine really isn't very effective, then delaying the discovery of that fact, and therefore delaying evaluation of alternative vaccines (assuming they exist) will cost more lives.

In any case, this isn't a question of experimenting with uncertain approaches. The pros and cons of all of the options are fully understood. It's just a question of deciding which set of tradeoffs is the best for this situation.

Or if we killed NAT. This is one of many ways in which NAT breaks the Internet.

Six, actually. More important than that: His Erdos Bacon Sabbath number is 10.

Barring a federal law that specifies that US courts do take jurisdiction in such cases, that seems like judicial activism to me. I suppose that if I were a judge I'd be tempted towards activism in such a case, but I think it's wrong. Do you have a citation? I'd like to read the opinions.

Your first sentence and second sentences are true, but only within certain contexts. Your third sentence is a non-sequitur.

There is a causal relation driving this correlation, but it's not the one you cynically postulate. Both the appearance of someone in the US with the disease and the attempt to create a vaccine have been caused by the scale of the latest outbreak.