Somewhere there is a guy who says he did all four. I just... can feel it in my bones. You know how wizards can "detect magic" with a kind of sixth sense? Well this is the opposite of that ...

@futurebird I have to vote for the cold fusion one since it's the closest to my area of expertise. I'm pretty sure that these are all going to be directly related to how much you know that contradicts whatever they're saying. Like the heptagon thing I have no clue so it seems innocuous to me.

@futurebird

The Cold Fusion is the one that is going to take me the longest read to find out for sure if it's bullshit. So I picked that one.

I don't understand why heptagon is on here. Isn't that just a 7-sided polygon..? Why would that annoy me?

@TerryHancock

You can't make one with a compass and straight edge... but there is always a guy writing every math department saying he did it.

Even poor community colleges get these letters. My mom used to have me read the crack letters to see if I could find the flaws when I was a kid. It was fun the first three times.

@spacegeck

It's the only one that's *impossible* so you don't really need to even bother to check if they did it.

@futurebird

"I found the aliens" may intersect with all of those.

Since I lately had a conspiracist spam me with the pretense that standing wave modes making polygons in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn was a message from aliens.

... I ... feel a great source of disappointment ... a false beacon of hope of great power, yet with no substance ... a cold light with no warmth ... a black hole for the energy and time of countless people with better things to do.

It's like a wrinkle in the fabric of the world, a fleck of dust in the eye... small but impossible to totally ignore.

@futurebird

By far the most tragic mysterious text for me is:

Rongorongo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

The ability to read this language was permanently lost due to colonialist bullshit in the 19th century. The story is maddening.

It is, or would have been, of extraordinary linguistic importance, as it appears to be a completely independent origin of writing.

It's probably ideographic, and might not be true writing, but more like a mnemonic.

But I guess we'll never know.