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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

The comic is amusing but it's narrative doesn't match history on some points:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/05/18/nikola-tesl...

Also there's a Tesla museum in Serbia. But I like the idea of turning his NY lab into a museum.

I have read quite a few biographies on Tesla. Unless every single one of them are wrong (they all had citations), the inaccuracies of that Forbes article are not even funny. Do they always post articles that haven't been fact-checked?

Edit: Just saw The Oatmeal's response. Good for him, but I doubt many of the people that read the Forbes article are also going to read the rebuttal.

It's weird that the forbes article(and that the guy from the oatmeal agrees) thinks that radar would be useless for tracking u-boats in the 1st world war. They couldn't stay underwater for very long at all(because they had to operate on batteries as there was no way to vent diesel exhaust), radar should have been able to see the uboat before it went underwater to attack, and then saw that it had disapeared.

FYI, tracking items on water with a land (or sea) based radar is very difficult due to atmospheric effects (mainly ducting) and can cause unacceptable levels of false detections. Combine this with the lack of computer processing at the time means that you have a human operator trying to determine from a scope which targets to attack. I think that this makes detecting and tracking u-boats with early radar very unlikely. If you ever make it to Pearl Harbor on Oahu you can see some examples of the radar scope technology from the Pearl Harbor attacks, it was not very easy to use.

fyi alex knapp is full of shit: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response

Man, I'm not trying to take a side here -- history is pretty complicated -- but that writing style is seriously aggravating. In general, if you ever find yourself in the position of saying, "I'm a comedian, you shouldn't take what I say seriously," you should probably take a step back and ask yourself if you ought really to be participating in long-form debate.

That is exactly the problem I have with the oatmeal. A lot of people BELIEVE what he says, no matter what, especially, when he knowingly spreads false information for the sake of comedy. The people who read his site don't know any better.

Personally, I think the oatmeal is a bully, and find him to be too arrogant. I will admit some of his comics are good though.

It's funny how Inman criticizes Edison for not actually inventing the light bulb, just making it practical. However, if you make the same observation about Tesla and AC, then you better keep an eye out for the bear-love posse.

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