

List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions - Freebytes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_inventions

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ZeroGravitas
Wikipedia is amazing.

I was going to write "For all its faults..." but I suddenly realised that
Wikipedia has never been anything less than fantastic in anything I've
experienced. All the bad stuff has been related to me 3rd hand and the vast
majority of it seemed to be coming from cranks with axes to grind.

I'm saddened that it isn't celebrated more, but take solace in the fact that
it has, fairly quietly considering, become a fundamental part of the internet
and our society.

~~~
biohacker42
_cranks with axes to grind_

Every wikipedia critic I know used to be a huge wikipedia fan until something
they deeply cared about was either screwed up, vandalized, or deleted.

I bet one internet cookie that if/when this happens to you, you will be as
passionately anti-wikipedia as you are now pro-wikipedia.

~~~
skolor
This seems odd: I don't know any person who is a directly anti-wikipedia, but
I do know several people who are against wikipedia. They don't active talk bad
about it, but they're the type of people who say "You can believe anything
written on there, it was just written by people". Due to the ease of editing,
they feel that it means nothing is fact-checked.

On the other hand, I know one of the administrators there, and he has shown me
several pages of the hate-mongering he gets, mostly for just being an admin.
Some of it has merit (for example, a good chunk of it was because of one
particular article he moderated, and the side that lost did not lose
gracefully), but most of it is just people jumping on him because they feel
they are being denied their right to, well, write.

I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring
wikipedia. Most of what I see is little more than "I hate that admin, he said
I wasn't notable enough for a page. Lets go egg his house!"

~~~
asdlfj2sd33
_I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring
wikipedia._

I see no reason for an internet encyclopedia to copy the shortcomings of a
paper encyclopedia as closely as wikipedia does.

Paper and shelf space are expensive and limited, you have to limit the
articles and the article size.

On the other hand, HD space is cheap and text small and easily greatly
compressed.

Searching in paper is hard. Searching on a computer is easy. There's no reason
to have one article be THE article. Articles could be write only,
unmodifiable, and search-able by their contents, their ranking by the general
public, their ranking by a group of experts, their ranking of any selected
group, by the hash of their text, etc.

There could be some built in redundancy, like a short encyclopedia style
article on top of an incredibly deep Ph.D level dissertation article.

In short, I find wikipedia cludgy and inexplicably mimicking the short comings
of paper.

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catzaa
> I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring
> wikipedia.

Yes, there are a few (such as the examples to improve citizendium). The first
would be to remove anonymity. If the editors are know it would improve quality
and would help to bring in specialists from fields.

Currently WP is now a vehicle for anonymous slander. Lies simply get repeated.
Things do not have to be true – it just have to be on another website.

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mattmaroon
"Franz Reichelt (1800s – 1912), a tailor, fell to his death off the first deck
of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was
his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in
advance he would test it first with a dummy."

He did.

~~~
n-named
I'm having a hard time up modding you for this comment on this site.

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IsaacSchlueter
It's not that tricky. You just click the ^

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n-named
The comment is mean. It's not intellectually stimulating. I meant I don't
think it belongs here. Downmod me if you like for expressing that opinion.

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Tichy
Phew, no computer scientists on the list.

~~~
zandorg
Maybe Turing was killed by a time travelling robot he later invented?

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IsaacSchlueter
Well, he _was_ killed by the government he helped save from Nazi conquest.

Not quite killed by his invention, though.

~~~
duhprey
Actually the time traveling robot's mission was to come back as a young man,
known as Arnold Murray. with whom Turing would become infatuated. The purpose
of this mission was an evolution of the continued misunderstanding of the
philosophical nature of the Turing test and it's human centric definition of
intellect. The robot's inventor figured that if he proved the robot was "at
least as intelligent" as Turing by causing him to fall in love with it, it
would thereby pass the Turing Test.

A similar robot was sent for Church, but he couldn't understand it's lisp.

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seldo
I think in this discussion of the Titanic, the phrase "[the design] proved to
be much more sinkable than he had anticipated" is probably against some sort
of wikipedia guideline. You're not _supposed_ to be laughing...

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tel
_Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) died with 1,516 others when his innovative,
"unsinkable" design for the RMS Titanic proved to be much more sinkable than
he had anticipated._

Seems to be a little violation of NPOV, and a very sad one at that, but I
can't help but grin.

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blogimus
There are less than two dozen names. I expected the list to be longer, given
the breadth of human creativity and propensity for risk taking.

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varjag
Perillos of Athens and his brazen bull are prominently missing. Perhaps one of
the oldest and creepiest stories of that kind.

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vollmond
According to Wikipedia (haha), he was tortured in his device, but it didn't
actually kill him.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull>

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varjag
Oh, OK. It's been a while since I read that story.

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tlb
No robotics section yet...

~~~
dfranke
_There is one very important difference between what can be built as an
experiment and the commercial Segway: The commercial one has a lot of safety
features, redundancy and fool-proofing. Mine has none whatsoever (Well, it
does have a kill switch so it doesn't go zooming away if I fall off, and it
does shut down if it finds itself tipped more than 45 degrees.) Those details
are kind of important, and you should think about them carefully before
considering building such a thing yourself. With a scooter like this, if it
stops working for any reason (software crash, hardware failure, low battery)
you will fall, hard, and probably on your face. Imagine zipping along at 10
MPH, and suddenly the platform you're standing on stops dead. Oh, and there's
a T-bar in front of you to trip you up if you start to run. So you really
shouldn't try to replicate this experiment, and I can't be responsible for
what happens if you read this and try to build something._

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callmeed
_Percy Pilcher, English aviation pioneer died flying a waterlogged glider when
potential investors had been invited to watch._

Talk about a bad demo day ...

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oz
Hoisted by one's own petard...

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vegashacker
Reading this, I kept stumbling over typos and awkward sentence constructions.
The content was interesting, but I feel like the writing was much worse than
your average Wikipedia article. I wonder why.

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varjag
It is peppered with sarcasm and smirks, which is generally not what you find
in a good Wikipedia piece.

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zandorg
Thomas Midgley, Jr. seems like the most unfortunate.

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edw519
Happy to see no software inventors (yet).

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anigbrowl
Nothing wrong with the software, it's the user who's at fault.

