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Sudden Cardiac Death terrifies me. Just the idea that you can be perfectly young and healthy and one day your heart is all "welp, see ya!", leaving you dead in a matter of minutes.
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May 13, 2013 15:06
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KERNOD WEL posted:Sudden Cardiac Death terrifies me. Just the idea that you can be perfectly young and healthy and one day your heart is all "welp, see ya!", leaving you dead in a matter of minutes. Also, while we're talking about government experiments, remember that time the US Army may or may not have released a nerve agent that killed six thousand sheep in Utah?
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May 13, 2013 16:29
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Pick posted:Except at least two, Casey Anthony and Lizzie Borden, legitimately didn't have enough evidence to convict. A media frenzy just cast its own light on the proceedings. I don't know much about Casey Anthony, but I think it's almost a consensus that Lizzie Borden was rightly acquitted on the basis of the evidence that was brought against her. When Stanford University ran a mock retrial in 1997 with a couple of Supreme Court justices presiding, she was acquitted again. Whether she was actually innocent or not - well, that's why people still write books about the case. While I'm here, thanks to the goon (I can't track down their post) who mentioned that a lot of "Most Evil" episodes were available on Youtube. I spent a chunk of my weekend watching or re-watching some of them.
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May 13, 2013 17:41
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Occam's Razor certainly suggests Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother, as nobody else had anything to gain by their deaths and it would be odd for a random stranger-murderer to kill only the Bordens and not their maid, and then never to kill again. But the actual evidence against her was scanty, and she had good lawyers, so. If she did it, she wouldn't have gotten away with it today, because her argument that blood spatter on her nightdress was menstrual blood could be easily disproven. Now I want there to be a CSI: 1892 show, with dudes looking at a magnifying glass and shouting "Enhance! Enhance!"
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May 13, 2013 18:00
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AlbieQuirky posted:Now I want there to be a CSI: 1892 show, with dudes looking at a magnifying glass and shouting "Enhance! Enhance!" This is the nearest equivalent to that I've ever seen on TV. It's not too bad, but sorry for the slight derail as I wouldn't really say it's particularly unnerving.
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May 13, 2013 18:14
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AlbieQuirky posted:Now I want there to be a CSI: 1892 show, with dudes looking at a magnifying glass and shouting "Enhance! Enhance!"
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May 13, 2013 18:21
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That post about medical experimentation in the US is friggin crazy. Has there been anything similar in the UK that's been declassified?
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May 13, 2013 18:24
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AlbieQuirky posted:Now I want there to be a CSI: 1892 show, with dudes looking at a magnifying glass and shouting "Enhance! Enhance!" Copper is good for this and is on Netflix streaming.
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May 13, 2013 18:32
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General Panic posted:I don't know much about Casey Anthony, but I think it's almost a consensus that Lizzie Borden was rightly acquitted on the basis of the evidence that was brought against her. When Stanford University ran a mock retrial in 1997 with a couple of Supreme Court justices presiding, she was acquitted again. It's my understanding that the prosecution's misstep was charging Casey Anthony with first-degree murder. Which absolutely could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt--stories could be invented that fit the known facts, but that's not the same as proving that narrative true. And that's the thing--if there was reasonable doubt, and there was in both of these cases, acquittal is appropriate. Unless there's substantial additional evidence, such as a deathbed confession, those people shouldn't be deemed guilty by some vague external process (e.g. it makes a good story). I think that the defense's position made just as much sense. Casey Anthony was a crappy mom whose kid died probably due to her parental crappiness, and when Casey found out she panicked and tried to hide the body because she knew she'd be criminally implicated, probably in a death by negligence. Which is not first-degree murder. Oh, also a lot of "evidence" such as repeat searches for "chloroform" turned out to be false, which probably affected the jury after the sixth or seventh time it happened. AlbieQuirky posted:Occam's Razor certainly suggests Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother, as nobody else had anything to gain by their deaths and it would be odd for a random stranger-murderer to kill only the Bordens and not their maid, and then never to kill again. How do you know it was random? How do you know this person never killed again? Pick has a new favorite as of 18:43 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 18:33
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FirstPersonShitter posted:That post about medical experimentation in the US is friggin crazy. Has there been anything similar in the UK that's been declassified? I can't think of anything large scale on British civilians (that's what the wogs and yanks are for  ) But Porton Down used to test poo poo on serviceman http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wiltshire/4013767.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4745748.stm and some believe they've done more that's still secret.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruinard_Island didn't result in human deaths but it's pretty crazy to think the government were looking into contaminating the Germans with anthrax despite them seemingly having no real idea how to clean up a large scale contamination.
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May 13, 2013 18:39
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Spalec posted:Did they actually learn anything useful from any of those horrible "experiments"?
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May 13, 2013 19:01
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FirstPersonShitter posted:That post about medical experimentation in the US is friggin crazy. Has there been anything similar in the UK that's been declassified? There was some of the same "soldiers a bit too close to nuclear tests" malarkey that everyone pulled back then as soon as they got the bomb, only with added loving over the Aborigines, and those lovely chaps at Porton Down tested any amount of hilarious chemical weapons on Squaddie volunteers, sometimes telling them it was all about "research into the common cold". One of the more benign and hilarious tests is here.
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May 13, 2013 19:10
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I would love to see the train of thoughts that eventually led to the idea that men with weapons should be given lsd.
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May 13, 2013 19:22
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Pick posted:
They're not arguing the killings were random, just that it's really unlikely that a stranger killed the Bordens since strangers bursting into someone's house and killing them is extremely uncommon. It would be far more likely that someone known to them committed the murders, with Lizzie and the maid being the most obvious suspects since they were in the house at the time.
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May 13, 2013 19:29
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Kimmalah posted:They're not arguing the killings were random, just that it's really unlikely that a stranger killed the Bordens since strangers bursting into someone's house and killing them is extremely uncommon. It would be far more likely that someone known to them committed the murders, with Lizzie and the maid being the most obvious suspects since they were in the house at the time. Every criminologist whose opinion I've read on the subject says the murders were personal, yea. There are only two scenarios where someone would obliterate the victim by hitting them with an ax 30+ times. Either it was a completely disorganized, unhinged, manic killer who would never be able to just blend in or fade away after something like that, or it was someone with a personal connection to the victims. Someone with anger towards them. But back then they couldn't combine all the circumstantial stuff with forensic evidence like we do today, so she had to be acquitted.
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May 13, 2013 20:30
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Alhazred posted:I would love to see the train of thoughts that eventually led to the idea that men with weapons should be given lsd. I love the fact that the commander tried his best to be stoic throughout the whole thing and as soon as he gives up he falls flat on the floor laughing like a maniac.
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May 13, 2013 23:17
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Basebf555 posted:Every criminologist whose opinion I've read on the subject says the murders were personal, yea. There are only two scenarios where someone would obliterate the victim by hitting them with an ax 30+ times. Either it was a completely disorganized, unhinged, manic killer who would never be able to just blend in or fade away after something like that, or it was someone with a personal connection to the victims. Someone with anger towards them. Nah. A few months ago, an old woman in Flanders was murdered during a burglary gone wrong. She was stabbed thirty-four times for no particular reason. The article's here - it's in Dutch, but it basically says that the suspect is 'astonished' by the brutality of his own acts. Most of us are potential murderers, under the right circumstances your instincts will just take over.
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May 13, 2013 23:39
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jalopybrown posted:I can't think of anything large scale on British civilians (that's what the wogs and yanks are for The thing about the pre-WWII and post-WWII world is that it wasn't until the need to use Germany as a defence against the Soviets that rebuilding a defeated enemy took off as a thing one would automatically do (aside from cases where the defeated enemy was absorbed into the winner). Contamination would have been, according to prewar thinking, Germanys problem.
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May 14, 2013 00:09
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Sargs posted:There was some of the same "soldiers a bit too close to nuclear tests" malarkey that everyone pulled back then as soon as they got the bomb, only with added loving over the Aborigines, and those lovely chaps at Porton Down tested any amount of hilarious chemical weapons on Squaddie volunteers, sometimes telling them it was all about "research into the common cold". Oh, this happened in the state I grew up in (probably explains a lot). The whole thing was hosed, especially how they didn't bother to tell the Indigenous population that they were dropping atomic bombs. During Operation Brumby, the British investigation, they flew over the area in helicopters and saw the skeletons of a group of Indigenous Australians. Apparently their deaths had not been recorded, but they were probably killed when the wind changed direction during a nuclear test. Also, the waste wasn't really buried properly, it was just dumped in shallow holes in the ground. Wikipedia posted:Parkinson, a nuclear engineer, explains that the clean-up of Maralinga in the late 1990s was compromised by cost-cutting and simply involved dumping hazardous radioactive debris in shallow holes in the ground. Parkinson states that "What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn't be adopted on white-fellas land." Of course, the problem how to warn people of dangerous nuclear radiation is a pretty interesting field, known as nuclear semiotics. quote:When atomic or fusion bombs are detonated in a war, or nuclear power plants are used in times of peace, an unnaturally high amount of radioactive waste is produced. This material will threaten human life and health for thousands of years. Consequently, nuclear technology necessitates the creation of a secure means of terminal storage for such materials for an unusually long time period. quote:Three parts of any communication about nuclear waste must be conveyed to posterity: There are some really surreal ideas in that article but my favourite would have to be: quote:French authors Francois Bastide and Paolo Fabbri proposed the breeding of so called "radiation cats" or "ray cats".[5] Cats have a long history of cohabitation with humans, and this approach assumes that their domestication will continue indefinitely. These radiation cats would change significantly in color when they came near radioactive emissions and serve as living indicators of danger. In order to transport the message, the importance of the cats would need to be set in the collective awareness through fairy tales and myths. Those fairy tales and myths in turn could be transmitted through poetry, music and painting.
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May 14, 2013 00:41
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In reality any kind of warning is just going to provoke early cultures into thinking that something valuable is hidden there. The best way to do it is to make sure that it's deep/secure enough that the waste is only likely to be accessed by people with advanced enough technology that they already understand radiation and have detectors for it.
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May 14, 2013 00:48
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Some music in the key of MURDER! First heard about this one when people were going crazy over the bath salts zombie. A rapper named Big Lurch who murdered and ate his girlfriend while high on PCP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lurch All around creep and part time music producer Phil Spector who killed actress Lana Carson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Spector One of the more famous murdering musicians, Varg Vikernes who killed his bass player and probably burned several century old churches: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes Vince Neil of Motley Crue, who killed Nicholas Dingley by drunk driving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes Sid Vicious, possibly stabbed and killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varg_Vikernes Jim Gordon, Grammy winning Paranoid Schizophrenic who bashed his mother's head in with a hammer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gordon_(musician) Leadbelly, blues musician who murdered a relative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly And lastly Charles Manson, before the infamous murders Manson was a failed musician and friend to The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, Some speculate that the most infamous of his murders were meant to target someone who had shunned his music career: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Manson
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May 14, 2013 01:00
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Phlegmish posted:Nah. A few months ago, an old woman in Flanders was murdered during a burglary gone wrong. She was stabbed thirty-four times for no particular reason. The article's here - it's in Dutch, but it basically says that the suspect is 'astonished' by the brutality of his own acts. Most of us are potential murderers, under the right circumstances your instincts will just take over. Literally one example doesn't prove that it is common.
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May 14, 2013 01:01
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I'm pretty sure the cost of breeding every housecat on Earth to signify the presence or radiation and then to engineer world culture from the top down to make sure that the signifying cats occupy an appropriate cultural position would far outstrip the costs necessary to inject all nuclear waste into the Earth's core or blast it into the sun. Both are currently impossible, but any culture capable of the former would have the resources to do the latter.
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May 14, 2013 01:02
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Jack Gladney posted:I'm pretty sure the cost of breeding every housecat on Earth to signify the presence or radiation and then to engineer world culture from the top down to make sure that the signifying cats occupy an appropriate cultural position would far outstrip the costs necessary to inject all nuclear waste into the Earth's core or blast it into the sun. You're forgetting the secondary benefits of having awesome genetically engineered cats.
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May 14, 2013 01:12
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TheModernAmerican posted:Literally one example doesn't prove that it is common. When exactly did I say it was common? My point is just that the brutality of a murder does not necessarily point to it being 'personal'.
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May 14, 2013 01:14
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Pick posted:How do you know [the murder of the Bordens] was random? How do you know this person never killed again? Nothing was stolen, including money that was visible on a table in the room where Mr. Borden was killed. So the chances that it was a burglary gone wrong are minuscule. No unsolved murders with a similar MO happened anywhere in the US for decades afterward (I think the 1930s in Minnesota or Wisconsin). And the murderer went upstairs to kill Mrs. Borden, but not to the kitchen to kill the maid. So "passing spree killer" seems vanishingly unlikely. Lizzie's extremely good lawyers couldn't make a case that anyone else would have motive or opportunity to kill either of the elder Bordens. So I don't know what happened, but the most parsimonious explanation given the facts is that Lizzie killed them.
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May 14, 2013 02:11
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I am not a book posted:You're forgetting the secondary benefits of having awesome genetically engineered cats. Yes, let's genetically enhance the predators we've let into our homes. Because cats loving LOOOOOVE humans and would never wipe us out if they had the chance.
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May 14, 2013 02:35
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Alfredo Pangea posted:
Actually, Varg WAS the bassist, he murdered the guitarist. And he was convicted of several of the church arsons, just not all of them. 
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May 14, 2013 02:48
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Phlegmish posted:When exactly did I say it was common? My point is just that the brutality of a murder does not necessarily point to it being 'personal'. Why bring up an example of a horrendous unexplainable murder happening in everyday, common life if you didn't mean to use that example to imply such brutality happens with some degree of regularity?
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May 14, 2013 03:14
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Last Chance posted:Why bring up an example of a horrendous unexplainable murder happening in everyday, common life if you didn't mean to use that example to imply such brutality happens with some degree of regularity? I read his post. The same one you did. To me he was saying "those experts who claim to understand the nature of crime, who say things like 'This HAD to be perpetrated by someone who knew the victim, this much anger, this much brutality, it was personal', those experts are not reliable. In fact here is a case where a person did in fact commit a horrible and brutal act without any personal connection..." That's what I got out of his post man. Only because of the words though.
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May 14, 2013 04:33
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Larch posted:I read his post. The same one you did. To me he was saying "those experts who claim to understand the nature of crime, who say things like 'This HAD to be perpetrated by someone who knew the victim, this much anger, this much brutality, it was personal', those experts are not reliable. In fact here is a case where a person did in fact commit a horrible and brutal act without any personal connection..." Except he meant it to be generalized to the entire body of murders. The point that one occurrence does not make a reasonable doubt is still valid - nobody has disproven to me that random murders with great brutality are not usually acquainted victims and perps.
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May 14, 2013 04:36
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Could we please not try to internet CSI the Lizzie Borden case? This doesn't feel like it's going to do anything but derail the thread. Not really unnerving, but I'm just  at discovering that the Knights of Malta are still a thing, and actually have observer status at the UN, diplomatic relations with like 60 countries, and quasi-sovereign status in International Law. Just the idea that a chivalrous order from the first Crusade is still around, and still treated with respect on the international stage seems insane to me, especially when a poo poo ton of other corporate entities don't.
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May 14, 2013 04:49
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I've always found Nuclear Semiotics fascinating (although kinda stupid). My favourite suggestion is the one where they would build a giant maze of cyclopean cubes to scare people off, R'lyeh style.
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May 14, 2013 05:25
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Jack Gladney posted:I'm pretty sure the cost of breeding every housecat on Earth to signify the presence or radiation and then to engineer world culture from the top down to make sure that the signifying cats occupy an appropriate cultural position would far outstrip the costs necessary to inject all nuclear waste into the Earth's core or blast it into the sun. I want to know who the gently caress invited the bene gesserit to the nuclear semiotics conference.
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May 14, 2013 05:47
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Alfredo Pangea posted:
Woah, neat - He spent some time in my current hometown of Sugarland - at the Imperial Farms no less, I've driven past those hundreds of times. A cool little historical connection that I'd never heard of until now.
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May 14, 2013 05:58
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The Riddle of Feel posted:I want to know who the gently caress invited the bene gesserit to the nuclear semiotics conference. A lot of random artists were invited apparently, because we really don't have any loving idea what to do in this area and artists tend to be good at making weird poo poo I guess. Anyway here's something that's pretty cool but sorta unnerving: naturally occurring nuclear reactors! Wikipedia posted:Oklo is the only known location for this in the world and consists of 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions took place approximately 1.7 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW of power output during that time. So billions of years ago, some uranium managed to initiate a self-sustaining nuclear reaction all by itself in the ground that output enough energy to power an entire suburb for hundreds of thousands of years. It can't happen today due to nuclear decay over the last 1.7 billion years decreasing concentrations and all that, but the idea that it happened at all, all by itself, and lasted that long is pretty I guess I just find nature doing incredibly energetic things all by itself, especially near or on Earth, to be pretty fascinating and uncomfortable - despite the fact that I know that it's pretty par for the course in terms of the universe as a whole what with quasars and hypernovas and all that.
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May 14, 2013 06:06
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Being an older goon with baby boomer parents, I grew up listening to a lot of Motown music among other things, and I always liked the duets of Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye. Then you read up on Tammi Terrell's tragic life and it's just depressing as all hell  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammi_Terrell  Long story short, Terrell joins Motown and records a few solo singles before being asked to record some duets with Marvin Gaye. They hit it big with several, and they each become close platonic friends who work off each other's chemistry by following the old saying "opposites attract" (she was an outgoing extrovert who loved singing to a crowd, he was an introvert who was shy and hated singing in front of people). Terrell suffered from migraines which she thinks are just that, until she collapsed onstage during a concert in 1967 while she and Gaye were performing together. Shortly thereafter, she is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. She went through eight operations, all the while still recording hits with Gaye who stood by her all the way as her health gradually deteriorated until: quote:By early 1970 Terrell was confined to a wheelchair, suffered from blindness and hair loss, and weighed a scant 93 lb. Following her eighth and final operation on January 25, 1970, Terrell went into a coma for the remaining month and a half of her life. Terrell's mom was angry because she thought Motown did nothing to help her daughter or bring her cancer out to the public, instead choosing to release unreleased content without Terrell's consent. Gaye also suffered from depression and drug abuse resulting from her death, and it's been said he never fully got over it until he himself died at the hands of his father in 1984. All I can really say to end this is gently caress cancer. Also, if you've been living under a rock your entire life and don't know who I'm talking about, here's her first and most famous duet recorded with Marvin Gaye in 1967 which is seen here as an early music video filmed at Expo 67. Ain't No Mountain High Enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC5PL0XImjw&hd=1
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May 14, 2013 07:01
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:A lot of random artists were invited apparently, because we really don't have any loving idea what to do in this area and artists tend to be good at making weird poo poo I guess. Even the sun is magnitudes more energetic than anything found on Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis I've always been creeped out by how so much of what we call "matter", all the copper in our computers, all the zinc in our coins, all the lead in our fishing weights, it all originated from an anonymous precocious star which decided to supernova and die and have its corpse drift into a stellar nursery that birthed our own solar system. What marvelous things have died so that we may live? Phobophilia has a new favorite as of 07:13 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 07:07
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You Are A Elf posted:Being an older goon with baby boomer parents, I grew up listening to a lot of Motown music among other things, and I always liked the duets of Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye. Then you read up on Tammi Terrell's tragic life and it's just depressing as all hell I never knew who the woman on that song was. I always see it listed as completely different, more well-known singers on youtube and stuff. Neat to learn. Crazy that she was only 24 when she died.
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May 14, 2013 07:39
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Cordyceps Headache posted:Not really unnerving, but I'm just
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