Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic? | Hacker News Reader

Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic?

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19 pointschrisconley20 comments

Richard Davisson (of Manhattan Project fame): "There are no physicists in the hottest parts of Hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of Hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible."

Since the local temperature maxima and minima are the only places without a temperature gradient, it seems logical that the physicists would have to be confined to the hottest parts.

Well, that or the coolest parts. But I suspect the hottest parts, as an additional punishment for trying to game the system.

I like your reply more than the quote I stole.

An uncle of mine received a letter from his local police department with a speeding ticket and an enclosed picture of his car speeding through a photo/radar monitored area.

Maddened, he wrote out his check payment, took a picture of it, and mailed them the picture.

I few days later he received another letter from the police department containing a picture of handcuffs.

Nice correspondence, I think.

People who spread urban legends as fact deserve to find out firsthand if hell is exothermic or endothermic.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/handcuff.asp

that lying uncle!

My point was that this isn't an urban legend, though my parent post is still being upvoted. /boggle

It becomes an urban legend if everyone claims it happened to someone they know, regardless of whether the original event occurred or not.

What the EFF is this doing on the front page? I usually (until this point, I think always) moderate my desire to post 'wtf?' comments.

But seriously, this is a story that's been around for ages and has -zero- to do with HN. This is "news for nerds" content, not "hacker news". Can we get some divine intervention here?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "

~Hacker News Guidelines.

Seriously, calm down. It might be old, but I still found it interesting to reread. Don't like it, don't read it.

This does not gratify one's intellectual curiosity within the context of hacker's news. You forget that this place is explicitly designed to avoid the denigration that happened at other sites.

By your logic, anything that's upvoted would 'count', though that's been explicitly verboten.

Compare and contrast -this- post with the recent post about car detailing. Neither are "about" hacking. But in one, an individual's using all the tools available to do something sublime. In the other, we have a long-circulated e-mail about non-productive slacking. Gee.

A similar story that I heard, though it didn't turn out as well:

A student was taking an exam for his class, and had finished most of the exam, minus the extra credit problem at the end. Because this student didn't know the answer to the question, he got creative. He drew a picture of a man holding a gun to someone (maybe it was a puppy or something cute, I'd have to see the exam again) with the text "Give me the credit, or the (cute animal) dies!"

When he got the paper back, he noticed the teacher's grade to the extra credit problem: 0, with the text "I don't negotiate with terrorists."

I've seen a picture of the exam before on my friends ipod, but I don't remember if he found it online or if it happened to someone he knew. Anyways, it's a funny story that this article reminded me of.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2007/0...

This argument fails in the final stage:

“that it will be a cold night in hell before I sleep with you” and take into account the fact that I still have NOT succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then Option 2 cannot be true

The quoted statement does not imply that the Theresa will sleep with Tim once there is a cold night in hell, simply that this is a prerequisite for their carnal relations, so option two is still possible. The quote would need to read "once there's a cold night in hell, I'll sleep with you" for the analysis to hold up, but I can't imagine any woman actually saying that.

Classic. Never get tired of this one. :)

I remember answering my chemistry exam questions in Python. If you care about your grades, don't write code to solve all your problems, some of them require sarcasm.

an oldie but a goodie

READ: Something that everyone has seen before and provides nothing new.

REREAD: Something everyone has seen before and provides nothing new, but is still pleasant to reread.

Please, paraphrase people correctly :P

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