That's just the thing. In a court of law it's essentially what would convince the average person, but since the average person is a moron, I subscribe to the much more reliable and useful definition of truth which is those statements which are most likely to agree with future/unseen/yet-to-be-revealed observations.

So on the one hand you have speculation and on the other you have concrete observation. Many people might argue that concrete observation constitutes the truth by itself, but they would be wrong because subsequent observations ("verifications", "checks", etc) will rarely be exactly the same. So the truth always lies somewhere between the two (ie between "clairovyant conspiracy theories" and concrete observation) and it is only by engaging both that knowledge is created (ie truth is correctly ascertained).

Take, for example, our little discussion above. "The facts" seemed to indicate that there was something wrong with crackerdog's hub, but speculation suggested that it was the setup. It should be no surprise that the truth, which reality subsequently bore out, was somewhere between the two (after all, there's an exact science to this...I'm not pulling it out of my ass).

Once again, I think the fact that crackdog's bike now works should be quite telling of which one of us is winning this argument...regardless of how much it offends your sense of rationale, the rationale of the average man, or even the law.

Do you have any pictures of this? Alex Moulton's designs are unique in that they tend to be executed correctly.