To a suspicious extend the internet is full of articles praising the man. With the exception of the stripclub story (which only barely makes the cut) it is as if nothing negative was ever written about him. The www echochamber just doesnt want to hear it.
People get even more mad if you tell them there are many reasons to think Joseph Papp created a mixture of noble gasses, injected into sealed pistons of conventional combustion engines and then those engines would run for 6 months without adding any other fuel.
Feynman was amoung the angry mob. After hearing about it he went to a demonstration involving a big volvo engine funded by the navy.
After 10 min he climbed onto stage pointed at some electronics plugged into the wall, he pulled the plug and playfully dangled it above papp who protested loudly and said it was not safe. Feynman ignored him until papp went into full panic. The plug was returned, papp put it back into the wall and the engine exploded. 7 people were injured, one lost a leg and one audience member died.
The dubious thing to me was that after much media exposure no one was interested in the physics.
Feynman oddly twists the story and said papp unplugged it and gave the plug to him. He wanted to hold it he said.
He also created a fantastic imaginary forensic report where he imagined papp put explosives in the engine.
After papp blamed him for destroying the engine they settled out of court.
I generously give the Papp engine 0.1% odds of being useful technology which means we should be looking at the thousand claims of miraculous tech. If i look at the debunking there is never any evidence against them. Look at them fabricating, its quite amusing. Or do you see a single convincing argument the engine doesnt work even from the highly praised Feynman himself?
none of this matters, the probability of new physics here is essentially nil.
if anyone is irresponsible its Papp who knowingly handed the plug to a productive skeptic, knowing full well the dangers of the device.
if the motor had any merit, he could refuse the out-of-court settlement and demonstrate the working principles of his motor, but he didn't! he took the money, Feymann inadvertently saved him from certain humiliation had this not occured.
hiding rocket propellant in a perpetuum mobile must be one of the most dangerously retarded things to do, people will come closer and inspect and try to figure out the true power source, and they will home in on your panic reactions to get closer (warmer - colder style).
>the probability of new physics here is essentially nil.
I dont function like that. I have true, false and unknown.
If i prematurely promote an unknown to true or false i would feel the need to defend my uninformed conclusion. Since i dont have what it takes to do that i would try to spoof the data. I would also blind myself to everything that contradicts the opinion.
You, feynman, the septic communty, you have sunk to a level that wouldnt even be legal if the man was alive. Claims of fraud and first degree murder?!?!
Unlike the inventor such claims require evidence and until you have it the accused is innocent.
But lets compare the two cobtradicting stories. One claims the other unplugged the device and claimed he really wanted to hold the plug in his hand and politely asked. The other claimed the one to have unplugged it himself and refused to give it back.
Which one of the two would require settling out of court?
The debunking doesnt really talk about Papp. You can copy paste it under any exotic claim.
>if the motor had any merit, he could refuse the out-of-court settlement and demonstrate the working principles of his motor.
No reason to think any demonstration would change information-free debunking.
Well over a thousand geet engines were build, hundreds of youtube demostrations but it is still not considered real.
There are now respectable publications about the pons and fleishman device with 100% successful replication but it is still not considered real.
If you personally build a working Papp engine it would simply not be considered real. People would say you are a fraud and a murderer and that would be the final word on the topic.
Ideally it would have to be a distributed system or take payments from users. It is to tempting for big AI platforms to avoid acting just like the shopping platforms.
The conversational commerce agent can use MCP-UI[0] to show the payment UI (Stripe Elements and Paypal Button) directly in the chat and that taps into the same payment API the shop's storefront uses.
What would be a truly epic application would be their own chat bot to ask about applying edit guidelines. After reading almost all of the guidelines the talkpage debates, even amoung experienced edditors, looked waaaay off. The pattern of revert first make up excuses later seems the worse newbie deterrent possible. This while it should be fine to make mistakes. Many such excuses would get debunked by a bot imediately. It simply wont do any favors. If established editors dont like it they can edit the guidelines.
We are hoarding money to buy many bottles. The chinese are making and filling it while drilling wells that dont seem financally viable. They spoiled their entire bottle buying budget on that? What dumb communist central planners.
There is a 35-story luxury apartment tower in my town, sold with the typical rendery renders, and the pooldeck is actually built on the NORTH side of the tower. Gets sun for maybe 15 minutes a day.
They couldn't rent all the apartments so they took a huge block of floors and started Airbnb-ing them (including allowing amenities access for the short term guests). To the great disgust of all the residents!
Im a professional cleaner, there is lots of wonderful looking design out there that is impossible to clean. There is also a huge difference in how quick it looks dirty. Some things are easy to clean but if you have to do it 3 times per day in stead of once a week its going to be needlessly expensive and still look dirty half the time.
What are some striking examples from your experience?
BTW this is what I love most about HN - the surprising variety of people you can learn from, from billionaire founders to expat bingo-card geeks to Georgian-onion sellers to Dutch pro cleaners...
On a Light surface tiny stains stick out, on a dark floor tiny flecks of dirt stick out as if under blacklight, a concrete color with some smudge patern may get extremely dirty without anyone noticing it (which might also not be what you want) a dark floor with a pattern of tiny white dots can also look very clean while dirty.
Any porous material is a terrible idea, you get lots of surface area that you cant reach. Carpet, curtains, upholstery.
Gaps between things should be big enough for how deep they are. Tiny legs under sofas or closets are not useful for anything. Adjust the size of the gaps between wall panels to your favorite kind of insect or rodent.
The funniest one i've seen was a city with a lot of mosquitos where someone put giant neon letters outside under a roof. In a few days it was completely covered in highly active spider turf war dens enough to make a grown man scream. Apparently spiders love roofs and they obviously know flies like light.
Seems a good investment. ROI is obvious and guranteed. Some might prefer progressing [say] add/fin tech over heathcare but it seems fine to ignore. Its not like they are really suffering.
There is a disrupt joke inthere but i cant think of it right now.
I can think of many marketing formulas that would definitely work but since the game is not legwork but propaganda the industry should just die.
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