The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ben M:

Steve @34 "This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water."

This process may well exist, but it destroys the metal hydride---the hydride isn't a catalyst, it's a fuel.
You do not, however, a car fueled by water and producing exhaust water. You have a car fueled by water, oxygen, and metal hydrides, and producing exhaust water and metal oxides.

There are lots of ways to "produce hydrogen" with water: try, for example, adding water to some metallic sodium. You'll get hydrogen gas out (which you can run through a fuel cell) --- and, by the way, enough heat to run a small generator. This is not a water-fueled car with a water exhaust, it's a sodium-fueled car with a soda lye exhaust.

At best. At worst, you have a car powered by a carefully-hidden battery or fuel tank, which runs just until it's out of sight of its gullible investors/press, then stops until recharged.

There's a famous case of a math crackpot sueing Underwood Dudley, author of "Mathematical Cranks", for defamation. Dudley's crime, of course, was pointing out the errors in the crackpot's supposed refutation of Cantor's Diagonal Argument.

The crackpot lost, of course, and the decision was upheld in a (very entertaining) appeals court decision by Richard Posner. (Dilworth v. Dudley, 1996. Worth a read.

http://www.law.emory.edu/7circuit/jan96/95-2282.html

#25 Ethan: Wow, the series on life on other planets is awesome. Apparently, life could never evolve (even under the "assumption that macroevolution is real") except on a planet with plate tectonics, a 23-degree tilt, a 24-hour day, and 20% oxygen in the atmosphere. "I could carry on like this for a long time", he says, and he's telling the truth.

Go to his home page, and you'll find a man who joined Chuck Colson's ministry after a 12-year career as an Amway distributor.

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