I have to agree with windy on this one. Though I like as much freedom as possible, we must take care to not make every thread « idiots, idiots, idiots». That thread is also important, and even your sharp pen is fine. As long as the thread is not already focused on another topic… like this one was quite specifically discussing the paper
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On topic, particularly “This takes us back to the very beginning”. The paper is about Ground-Gen and Fly-Gen. We’ve been on this debate for many years.
The unnecessary sophistication of this scientific publication seems to be a headlong rush away from concrete solutions that do not come. What we’re seeing right now: a recent tweet about a float for a 5MW AWES. Who still believes that such a machine will be built according to the communicated plans? And will it perform better with an aspect ratio of 33.8?
Tallak has contextualized this post well according to technical parameters. Doug only continued to reflect about a significant period of AWE investigations. It has nothing to do with moderation.
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Though the article is maybe well within the topic «no practical progress in AWE», i dont think the original thread was on that topic. So it kind of depends on where you want the thread to go.
I think we have discussed these «meta» topics on many occasions. I think it would be nice to have the option to discuss a subject without reverting to that topic every time.
I believe we must protect especially new forum users from becoming the victim of «idiots, …» rather than getting to the point feedback of whatever they are coming with. I believe many/most people start out as «idiots» then some figure out what makes sense in a while. If Filipo Trevisi was to come to the forum and only saw my harsh feedback then followed up by «idiots, …» I doubt he would be very likely to join the discussion. I know from meeting him that he is a reasonable person.
I think a good option would be to create a new thread then copy a link to the original thread. The forum system will present this in a nice way.
With moderation there is no right and wrong answers, and @Windy_Skies is shaping the way the forum appears. I believe he is with good intent, and I think he is doing a good job with it.
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Thanks for weighing in, guys. I’ll be blunt here: In wind energy there have always been newbies and idiots. Both start out with limited knowledge of wind energy and especially how difficult it is and how common it is for overenthusiastic newbies to think their limited impressions are just repetitive, predictable learning steps on the way to some level of actual understanding of the art. Newbies learn and grow, whereas “idiots” start out overconfident thinking they know everything, and instead of learning anything, they just get worse and worse, typically trying to “enforce” their own level of ignorance in the typical attempt to seemingly raise their own level of “understanding” by bringing the people who do understand down.
Now I did not introduce the word “idiot” and did not use it here - that was Tallak. But it is a typical term experienced wind people use in their frustration to explain anything to those who think their ideas are somehow new and breakthrough, when they are just repeating the ignorant notions of the past. Flygen/groundgen is one of these. As Pierre and Tallak point out, simply applying a few “formulas”, “buzzwords”, incomplete “theories” does not make one an authority in wind energy, and is likely not contributing anything useful.
There is another aspect of such classic situations, and that is the psychological and sociological angles, which are also worthy of mention. These might include how “highly-educated” teams might misuse their credentials to convince investors to back them when they have no idea what they are doing, or to or misunderestimate (a funny word inadvertently coined by George Bush Jr.) the actual difficulties and unique challenges of wind energy. Fluid mechanics in general is a field rife with ignorance. We can build airplanes, but we don’t understand how they work.
Most people have no idea that this level of ignorance exists - that science cannot discern exactly why wings exert lift, although modern airfoils have been in use for 1000 years, as wind turbines were the largest source of non-animal power in medieval Europe.
So we go from the guys at, let’s say MIT, able to study lift but unable to figure out how it works, to guys who want to start chat-groups online deciding they know all about everything from the minute details of how our climate works, to what is a good investment, to what is a good idea in wind energy, and so they place themselves in a position to be able to “enforce” their own level of ignorance, and not allow free speech by those who know better, through their inevitable position as “monitors” of what is allowed to be said on the forums they create.
This same dynamic has become universal across all subjects, across the entire internet. Nothing can be said that people who are psychologically driven to control conversations either cannot grasp, or decide should be covered up. The result is that ignorance is worshipped while facts are mocked and deleted.
This newer aspect seems to have emerged or at least grown as the internet developed, but it is an old concept.
We in wind energy actually look at promoters of bad wind energy ideas as some version of insane - a typr of mental illness. Just as most people can see that someone walking down the street endlessly talking pout loud to themself might just have a screw loose in their brain, experienced wind energy people see the same symptom in a typical promoter of, say vertical-axis turbines. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying pursuit of vertical-axis concepts is crazy, but actually promoting disproven designs is crazy or something similar to crazy.
And I think that extends to the people who want to control the conversation, happily rep[eating and promoting any lying press-release that seems to agree with their own ignorance, while scolding and deleting the posts of anyone who transgresses that “enforced ignorance” even with something as harmless and appropriate as asking how a certain highly-promoted “project” is going. In this venue, for example, the “press-release-breakthrough” of AWE systems being manufactured at an expensive factory and shipped aorund the world is happily repeated, but asking what the result is is prohibited and derided, eventually censored. Just as with the previous “open forum” when I would state factually that, an Alteros, a Makani, or a Magenn (the three horsemen of the apocalypse) was not in fact going to power X hundred homes, period, my posts were deleted. Looking back, one can see that the “million flies” were 100% wrong, while I was 100% right. Doesn’t matter. The crazy people - the “idiots” can be counted on to never learn. They will never learn how wind energy works. They will never learn who understands what. They will never learn to identify lies by those seeking ever-more funding, and they will never even grow to the point of being able to let someone ask how any of these lying projects is going, what the results are in the face of the highly-promotional press-releases they worship. It could be looked at as a type of mental illness I suppose. That would seem to be a matter of definitions I guess. But it is, on the one hand, frustrating for those in the know, but on the other hand, to be expected. It was known in ancient Egypt that the Earth orbited the sun, but over 1000 years later people were still punished for stating the obvious. So, congratulations to the “moderators” and your enforced ignorance. You represent a distasteful aspect of history that people would like to forget, but which is something that we all need to remember lest we endlessly repeat the same mistakes forever.
The field of AWE is a microcosm of the field of regular crackpot wind energy. Always looking at the magical inclusion of one disproven idea after another, whether it is counter-rotating generators, hydraulic accumulators, much-larger-diameter-than-necessary generators, cloth blades, flapping or pulsating motions, drag-based operation, on and on the list goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. Same saying regards a roulette or raffle wheel at a casino or carnival. AWE is like a casino, where everyone entering is almost guaranteed to lose money. A few people who place one winning bet and quickly leave get out “alive”. No contestant yet has discovered “card-counting” which would be equivalent to a system that actually works in spite of the dismal odds. 
I was thinking the same thing about a squirrel trap called “squirrelinator”, which can hold quite a crowd of squirrels, just like a casino hall. I built an enclosure for one to protect it from dogs and coyotes that typically drag any squirrelinator around til it turns upside-down and the squirrels escape. I was thinking of painting it with little casino signs cuz what is it but one more building offering cheap food and entertainment as bait? What happens in Vegas, STAYS in Vegas. What happens in a squirrelinator, STAYS in the squirrelinator. What happens in AWE, STAYS in AWE.
You mean like, quit trying AWE and pursue manned electric drones that look a lot like your failed AWE concept?
Every week or two we get some new (or repeat) “essential” topic to consider, meanwhile, what’s going on in Mauritius? I thought that was where AWE was finally going to begin operating in a meaningful way. Are we now going to just conveniently forget all about that “essential topic” of late last year?
I just noticed another big red flag in this video: It starts out with the history of flight, repeating the same boring old theme of “since time immemorial man has always dreamed of being able to fly”. Yeah, why not just add “blah blah blah”? Powered flight is over a century old and counting.
Why do I cite this as “a red flag”, you might rightly ask?
Well it goes back to the “Professor Crackpot” theme.
One fun activity is to note “symptoms” of the “syndrome”.
And
One symptom I had always noticed about crackpot wind energy promotions is how so often they start out talking about the vast nature of the wind resource - how much energy there is up there to be potentially captured. It is as though they are talking to people who have never heard of wind energy before, so they have to be brought up to speed on the idea that there is even energy there, as though there is no existing wind energy industry powering over 5% of the electrical needs of the world already. In this case they start out as though the idea of flight is brand new. Even the name “Kitty Hawk” fits into this dynamic. Like pretending flight has never been achieved, a whacky-looking aircraft should nonetheless be taken seriously. As in “forget all those other crazy attempts at flying you’re used to seeing (and flying in), we’ve got the real thing right here.” It reminds me of a company called Windtree, years ago, promoting roof-mounted rotating ventilation spinners as “the new answer” for electrical power. All they had were photos of pre-existing standard typical spinning roof vents for removing hot air from attics and loft spaces on hot days. Their promotional material, as was typical, started out “revealing” the immensity of the wind resource, just like this video “reveals” how man has “always wanted to fly”, but in the case of Windtree, the promoters were eventually pursued for fraud, cuz their little roof vents were incapable of capturing any useful amount of electricity.
That is the same exact feeling I got seeing this video at the start: It is substituting “blah blah blah” for anything to sink your teeth into. For me, that is a warning sign. If you are watching a video about a new type of electric aircraft, you already know man has always wanted to fly, and of course you already know we have BEEN flying for 120 years.
Other than that, it SEEMS like a really cool space-age-looking (or was that the 1960’s?) aircraft, but then again you could have said the same thing about Makani…
BTW I have a funny feeling about tomorrow’s Jeff Bezos “space” flight (240 times as high as my yard is long - whoopee-doo). Hope it goes OK. Could a crash trigger the end of the current stock market rally?
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Off-topic. You’ve reached your limit of off-topic posts this round. I’ll give you a time-out.
Hi Doug,
I expected this post to be taken down. Indeed he mentions some truths in a humorous tone. So it would only have its place in the context of intelligent moderation.
On this forum you have to know how to do it. A good answer to the initial topic would be something like: “An essential topic about return of experience”, or “Lessons learn from Makani become lessons for aerospace. The return in AWE will be still more fruitful.”
You can also express some disagreement about technical concerns, but in a way allowing to see a better solution (even if you don’t see any possibility), so supporting the initial topic.
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Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen similar ideas “floated”. Typically it’s just hype, with nothing behind it, leading nowhere, especially in wind energy! Think “Whalebumps”. What was it, 1000 articles on that “breakthrough”? Where is the turbine using whale bumps today? How can a million flies be wrong? Biomimicry! 3-D printing! Wheeee!
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I notice my posts, which are factual, are being removed without notice or explanation. I do not know who is removing them, but I do know why. The reason is people purporting to run open discussion sites have a personality type that is bereft of ideas, and intolerant of facts.
I think the real problem is there is no news in AWE, so people are relegated to posting random links to random articles about slightly interesting fantasies, presented as facts. People want to have something to say about AWE, but have nothing. I guess that’s all we’ve got now.
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Off-topic.
Tedious.
Hi, Profethor Crackpot here. Yeth Cuttlefith form a great opportunity to advanth the conthept of biomimicry! Thith ith a thlam-dunk. Obviouthly nature ith thmarter than any thilly propeller. Thith would have been a perfect thubject for the old forum. “Exthpect all windfarmth to be replathed by flying cuttlefith very thoon!”
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An alternative to just deleting comments like these is giving you another time-out. You haven’t yet reached your limit of off-topic post comments violating the FAQ this round, in part because of mercy killings of comments like the above.
To Whoever you are, I would respond to you, but cannot come up with anything that does not contain mostly swearing and cussing. Whoever you are, I think it is really chicken-shit to say you have a forum, and then just delete posts randomly based on your ignorance, lack of humor, and inability to accomplish anything in the stated field of AWE. This forum is more worthless than the last one. The people promoting it are just as bad as the last ones, maybe worse. Obviously it is a personality type.
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What is the topic of “Random Engineering, Physics, …, Concepts and Ideas”? It sound like there is no precise topic.
Why would this sentence be off topic?
I cannot agree more
See above. It is not that.
Maybe we need some additional Awes media outlets
Howz about an AMA online one on one interview once a month on YouTube with Doug hosting?
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It is possible that moderation is more collegial than it appears.
I think there is a double pitfall: systematically “moderate” what does not go in the presupposed sense of the praise of the AWE, which has the consequence of not taking into account problems that could be real, and therefore to rule out possible solutions; the other pitfall is to systematically denigrate ideas which may seem absurd, whereas in 1 or 2% of cases, these “crackpot” ideas could go towards a solution. One of them, for example, is the reeling system: despite the obstacles this idea, although not very similar to the concept of wind turbines as we know them, is at the origin of the best current successes of AWES (SkySails for example).
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Hello Pierre: Here’s the deal: For over 40 years, we’ve witnessed thousands of supposed “breakthroughs” in wind energy. None has proven to be a real, economically-viable solution . Not a single one. At some point, we in wind energy just call them “idiots”. Actual university instructors promoting Savonius turbines for example - they should have the training to know better. Dabiri promoting windfarms of small turbines placed below normal turbines in a windfarm - and they are vertical-axis! He thinks their wakes will favorably interact sufficiently to rationalize using vertical-axis turbines for the small ones, never touching on why he did not choose regular horizontal-axis turbines. When closely examined, such a concept is nothing but holes in logic, which are never addressed:
- Why use vertical-axis turbines for the small turbines?
- If there is an actual reason, why not use vertical-axis turbines with their supposed wake interactions for the larger ones?
And yet there have been probably 1000 articles citing Dabiri’s half-baked idea as a “breakthrough”. It is idiocy squared - idiocy piled upon idiocy.
And then you have the airborne crowd. They make the “idiots” look like geniuses by comparison. Especially the few who, due to having no ideas or talent to offer, decide their role should be to run “discussion groups” and spend their time making sure nobody is allowed to say anything that actually makes sense. Yet who has flagged these losing companies and their losing ideas, one by one, from the beginning and told the truth, such as “they are only producing group selfies for their mom to see.” Yes it sounds terrible, but it is a case of “shoot the messenger”. For 13 years of this I’ve simply told the truth. For example after Roddy was impressed with one of the guys running the “old forum” telling everyone that single-skin fabric working surfaces were the ONLY way to accomplish AWE, I told Roddy to try using hard defined airfoils. He tried it and immediately made 10x the power. I mention in a post that he had been “listening to the wrong people” Joe censored my post, saying I could not say he had been listening to the wrong people. Fair? Unbiased? No, because he knew I meant the two guys running the forum. I never mentioned them by name, but my post was censored for that reason. I’d estimate they censored 1000 posts. Anything factual. Then they go on and to this day say they never censored any post. I mean this whole thing of AWE chat groups is so bizarre, with the people running them so igniorant and cruel, and in the case of the previous two, patholgical liars, I’ve really never seen anything so absurd. I say, let the idiots be idiots, and it;s not worth my time having anything to do with these stupid chat groups anymore. What do I get out of it? Nothing but wasted time. What do the ignorant people get out of me? One thing they don;t get anywhere else - honesty and facts. Doesn;t matter - they hate honesty and facts. So I am done. This is stupid. I just had a great morning skiing and I turn on the computer and check my email and it is just more idiocy, this time the one person who, in 13 years of this nonsense, has NOT been an idiot, trying to rationalize why these latest idiots might somehow have a leg to stand on with their censorship. Oh well we all have weak moments. I say this entire discussion and forum are a waste of time. There is a saying: “You can’t cure stupid”. I stand by that. As far as I’m concerned, it is now proven. I have no more use for these forums. Don’t want to waste any ore time on idiot-idiot-idiots. Have a McDay.
As with most crackpot wind energyAs I’ve said many times, wind energy is a magnet for crackpots, and AWE is a neodymium supermagnet.
I think you could do a great job interviewing AWES people.
Everyone in AWES would want to watch how @dougselsam
Interviews literally anyone else in AWES.
Just not me. I’ll be in tears at how disappointed I am with progress