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To get away from humans being lovely to each other, here's the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. Open up the full 7MB image, and keep in mind every tiny dot in the picture is an entire galaxy. It's vaguely disturbing to think about how mind-bogglingly massive the universe really is.
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Dec 29, 2012 06:21
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Here's the story of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who murdered and ate a woman in France in the 80's and is now free to be a public speaker, author and an actor. Good on him!  EightDeer posted:To get away from humans being lovely to each other, here's the Hubble Extreme Deep Field. Open up the full 7MB image, and keep in mind every tiny dot in the picture is an entire galaxy. It's vaguely disturbing to think about how mind-bogglingly massive the universe really is.
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Dec 29, 2012 06:32
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E: can't read
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Dec 29, 2012 06:36
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Wendigo psychosis is fascinating to me in that it is a "culture-bound syndrome." Wendigos were a mythical monster in the culture Algonquian-speaking North American tribes. They were humans turned into gaunt, insatiable cannibal monsters during winter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windigo#Wendigo_psychosis Wikipedia posted:The term "Wendigo psychosis" refers to a condition in which sufferers developed an insatiable desire to eat human flesh even when other food sources were readily available, often as a result of prior famine cannibalism. Culture can cause people to think they want to eat you.
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Dec 29, 2012 07:44
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I guess human flesh actually is an acquired taste.
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Dec 29, 2012 07:53
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Christoph posted:Culture can cause people to think they want to eat you. Well, your link also says that it usually occurred in people who had eaten human flesh in prior times of famine. And remember that the Wendigo is not just a random scary beast of the night...they're very specifically people who have succumbed to cannibalism and turned into demons as a result. Seems to me that the intense guilt at having eaten a person + a common myth that outright says "if you eat people, even in times of famine, you will turn into a ravenous monster" is a good way to make someone go kind of batty. Not totally surprising that they would start living up to the reputation. Reminds me of that thing in traditional Australian Aboriginal culture, where someone who has committed an unforgivable crime is not physically punished, but put through an ordeal of ritual cursing and shunning. The person is then ignored -- from the moment the ritual ends, the community en masse just acts as if the person never existed. No speaking to them, no acknowledging their presence, their possessions are left untouched wherever they lie. Traditionally, the shunned person simply sits down and dies shortly thereafter, for no reason other than just the "cultural understanding", for lack of a better word, that they are already dead. Spooky stuff. Sagebrush has a new favorite as of 08:54 on Dec 29, 2012 |
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Dec 29, 2012 08:51
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Well I meant that about the continuing desire to eat people. I can totally see someone who ate another person to survive wanting to consider themself having transformed into a different being instead of thinking of their normal human self doing something so horrible.
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Dec 29, 2012 08:56
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Duskfiend posted:The Arecibo message, as well as the Voyager satellites and any attempt to communicate with extrasolar life, always freak me out. I know a lot of you would disagree but I just want to shout at researchers doing this sort of thing to just stop transmissions. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. You still don't need to worry about aliens since the distance between stars is so vast.
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Dec 29, 2012 09:18
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Christoph posted:Wendigo psychosis is fascinating to me in that it is a "culture-bound syndrome." Wendigos were a mythical monster in the culture Algonquian-speaking North American tribes. They were humans turned into gaunt, insatiable cannibal monsters during winter. There's all kinds of culture-bound syndromes out there that can make people do some pretty incredible (and/or awful) things that they think are completely real. For example, that's where we get the phrase "running amok," from a culture-specific syndrome called amok that causes guys to more or less go on a killing spree.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:11
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Stare-Out posted:Here's the story of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who murdered and ate a woman in France in the 80's and is now free to be a public speaker, author and an actor. Good on him! And that is only a tiny, tiny slice of the universe. The darkest part of the sky they could find.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:32
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Stare-Out posted:Here's the story of Issei Sagawa, a Japanese man who murdered and ate a woman in France in the 80's and is now free to be a public speaker, author and an actor. Good on him! http://www.vice.com/vice-meets/issei-sagawa-part-1 Vice did an interview with him. Pretty sad guy.
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Dec 29, 2012 19:55
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Speaking of eating people, anybody remember something about a small town (in, I want to say eastern Europe? Maybe Russia? maybe around the turn of the century?) turning to cannibalism during a particularly hard year? I remember there being pics of the remains and of the survivors and so on, but I can't remember anything to place or date it  e: Found it, unfortunately on bestgore.com  The wiki article for the famine itself doesn't make mention of the cannibalism, although the wiki article for cannibalism does state that there were reports during both the Russian famine of 1921 and in the Soviet famine of 1932-3. If you're interested, http://www.bestgore.com/natural-disasters/russian-povolzhye-famine-1921-photos/ I don't think I really need to tell you that this is NWS/NMS.
my dog boyfriend!! has a new favorite as of 20:19 on Dec 29, 2012 |
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Dec 29, 2012 20:11
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evanstheone posted:http://www.vice.com/vice-meets/issei-sagawa-part-1 Just fyi, there are some very  shots in there of the murder victim after he carved her up and portioned out her meat onto plates.
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Dec 29, 2012 20:28
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ulilileeloo dallas posted:Speaking of eating people, anybody remember something about a small town (in, I want to say eastern Europe? Maybe Russia? maybe around the turn of the century?) turning to cannibalism during a particularly hard year? I remember there being pics of the remains and of the survivors and so on, but I can't remember anything to place or date it Sounds like the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor There are a number of suggested causes; most suggest that it was a clusterfuck of Soviet policies. Attempts at industrialization, government-mandated shifts away from traditional food crop, poor administration, and issues with collectivization all led to a severe shortage of grain in the region; beginning in the rural farming areas before spreading into the urban centers. HOWEVER, there are a rising number of historians suggesting that the famine was used as a tool by Stalin to crush Ukrainian nationalism, and that it therefore qualifies as an act of genocide (several countries, including the US, Canada, Italy, and Australia, already recognize it as such). As for more recent events, there is the (ongoing) North Korean Famine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine Massive floods in '95, coupled with a crippling over-reliance on outside aid, has led to the DPRK being in a near-constant state of starvation since the mid-90s.
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Dec 29, 2012 20:38
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Argus Zant posted:Sounds like the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933. Yeah the idea of a man-made famine for the purposes of genocide fits p well in with this thread, I think. The famine during the Great Leap Forward, brought about by just colossal amounts of incompetence on the part of the government, also had its share of survival cannibalism. During the Great Leap Forward, people would be so hungry that they'd eat clay from the riverbank--it made you feel full. But their bellies would get big and hard and they'd die after doing that for a bit. I'm sure it's been posted in here by now, but the Rape of Nanjing is some really horrific poo poo. My then-bf and I went to the massacre memorial (doesn't that sound like a great time with your SO?) and I wish I had the pics from it, but my phone was pickpocketed before I got to move them to my computer. Partially excavated mass graves laid open for visitors to just...look at it. The skulls staring at you out of the dirt. The bayonet and bullet wounds plainly visible. Labels indicating in some cases the sex and age of the victims, including the stack of infant skeletons. It is an experience that I still carry with me, and I appreciate the experience, but I can't say I'm "glad" I went.
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Dec 29, 2012 20:49
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Back in the 1600s they didn't have facebook, so when you did something cool, like remove a bladder stone the size of an egg from your body with common kitchen tools, you had to commission an oil painting to share it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Doot
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Dec 29, 2012 21:13
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Arian_Samurai posted:Back in the 1600s they didn't have facebook, so when you did something cool, like remove a bladder stone the size of an egg from your body with common kitchen tools, you had to commission an oil painting to share it. you gotta show the picture  NaturalLow posted:There's all kinds of culture-bound syndromes out there that can make people do some pretty incredible (and/or awful) things that they think are completely real. For example, that's where we get the phrase "running amok," from a culture-specific syndrome called amok that causes guys to more or less go on a killing spree. I can't help but notice that under Others it lists 'blue balls' as a U.S. culture-bound syndrome.
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Dec 30, 2012 01:43
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Clive Wearing has one of the most depressing illnesses I've ever heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing In the middle of his life, from completely out of the blue, his brain's hippocampus was destroyed by an infection. This renders him unable to form new memories and makes it very difficult to remember old ones, so his whole life is spent moment-to-moment, with no recollection of events beyond the past 30 minutes. Here's a video clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y
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Dec 30, 2012 02:18
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Christoph posted:you gotta show the picture I know in one of my anthropology classes, the professor apparently considered eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia to be culture-bound syndromes for the U.S.
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Dec 30, 2012 05:36
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Promethea posted:John Christie Also, how come every attempt at hiding corpses always ends up sounding almost comically inept? Stuff a wall closet full, tape a piece of wallpaper over it and hope nobody notices the large "gap" in the space in the building, or just the smell(and enormous hosts of rats and insects) coming from there, the floorboards and all other empty spaces that a person would fit in? Lastly, what kind of thought process is occurring when one sees a wobbly structure in his garden and instead of a stick, board or a loving rock, one decides to dig up a corpse(that was hidden for a reason), dismember it and use chunks from that?
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Dec 30, 2012 08:50
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NaturalLow posted:I know in one of my anthropology classes, the professor apparently considered eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia to be culture-bound syndromes for the U.S.
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Dec 30, 2012 09:02
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Asehujiko posted:Also, how come every attempt at hiding corpses always ends up sounding almost comically inept? Stuff a wall closet full, tape a piece of wallpaper over it and hope nobody notices the large "gap" in the space in the building, or just the smell(and enormous hosts of rats and insects) coming from there, the floorboards and all other empty spaces that a person would fit in? Probably because no one ever finds the corpses that were actually hidden well. Thousands of people just "disappear" every year in the USA alone, and at least some of them were probably murdered and disposed of by as-yet-unknown serial killers. Fun to think about, huh? Remember, kids, you don't go to jail because you broke the law. You go to jail because you were stupid about how you did it.
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Dec 30, 2012 10:20
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Asehujiko posted:I don't understand situations like this. The femur is probably in the top 3 of recognizable bones in the human body after the skull and jaw and it wasn't exactly well hidden, sticking from under a piece of garden furniture so how did this manage to go unnoticed foe 3 years? It's been a few years since I read '10 Rillington Place' so my memory is a bit hazy but I think at least some of your good questions were also considered by the author. To answer the 'bone as trellis' question, my own reading was Christie thought he was being very clever, hiding it in plain sight, 'Purloined Letter'-style. Presumably it was also frequently hidden by whatever plant was using it as support too. It was insane but access to the garden was restricted to him and his tenants. This became a problem when the new West Indian tenants he initially just disliked because he was a racist showed interest in wanting to garden, something none of the previous tenants had cared about. It's all mad. But he didn't have a car so he was highly restricted in how he could dispose of the corpses. The garden was risky because I *think* it was all in sight of the windows of neighbouring blocks of flats. He wouldn't know if he was being observed burying anyone. Stuffing the bodies in cupboards etc was I suspect all he could think of. I don't think he realised some of your other points, such as just how awful/strong the smell of decomposition gets. Promethea has a new favorite as of 10:59 on Dec 30, 2012 |
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Dec 30, 2012 10:42
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Arian_Samurai posted:Back in the 1600s they didn't have facebook, so when you did something cool, like remove a bladder stone the size of an egg from your body with common kitchen tools, you had to commission an oil painting to share it. 
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Dec 30, 2012 11:57
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snucks posted:They aren't isolated to the U.S., but Americans suffer from eating disorders at a very disproportionately high rate compared to the rest of the world. Yeah it would have been more accurate to say something like the "western world" or something to that effect.
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Dec 30, 2012 14:51
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Hurt69420 posted:There was a TCC thread dedicated to this (like, actually using it). Can I get a link for this? I'm curious.
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Dec 30, 2012 15:29
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Arian_Samurai posted:Back in the 1600s they didn't have facebook, so when you did something cool, like remove a bladder stone the size of an egg from your body with common kitchen tools, you had to commission an oil painting to share it. This was a pretty good move, 400 years later people can read about how he removed a huge bladder stone DIY-style. I bet people have done this with even bigger stones but none of them suckers had a painting of it, eat it losers. 
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Dec 30, 2012 16:13
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ulilileeloo dallas posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rh_factor#Hemolytic_disease_of_the_newborn I am a surviving Rh baby!  The injection wasn't available back then so I was yanked out very prematurely and given an exchange transfusion, 6 weeks in intensive care and survived by the skin of my teeth. My older sister was born with severe brain damage and deafness, however. 
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Dec 30, 2012 16:58
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Christoph posted:you gotta show the picture By sheer coincidence I was watching the "Supersizers Go..." episode where they tackle Restoration Britain. They show how they did the stone operation in a still cringing but not graphic way. Skip to about 7:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDtkmJv2PRo
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Dec 30, 2012 17:40
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What about Green Boots? Green Boots is a name given to a climber, 'cause of his bright green boots  .His dead body is an established landmark on the hike up Everest. Some legacy. Pick has a new favorite as of 19:10 on Dec 30, 2012 |
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Dec 30, 2012 19:08
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The whole story on those that died in Everest and heir bodies still being there is creepy. I can't fid the link but there are some incredible pictures of corpses, each from different times of hiking style, just littering the path the climbers take. You're very likely to see them if you go hiking, and they're likely to be there for a while considering that its tough as hell to recover bodies. You have to hope hat a strong wind or an avalanche brings your body down.
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Dec 30, 2012 20:36
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pants cat posted:I am a surviving Rh baby! Polyclonal antibodies, the key component of the injection, are in and of themselves a little unnerving in how they're manufactured, but are also pretty fascinating. My brother (and most likely myself) have the proper blood/plasma types to make the antibodies needed for the RhoD injection. It involves receiving injections of another person's plasma (of a different B cell type) over a course of months, then donating your plasma to be used for the manufacture of the RhoD. He ended up finding out when he worked at a plasma clinic, and as far as I know is still regularly selling his plasma (at a higher price than regular plasma). Since I'm female, I have to be sterilized if I want to go through the process. I'm not sure why, but it might result in spontaneous abortion of any conceived fetuses, presumably? On a totally unrelated note, the deaths of Empress Wang and Consort Xiao have always creeped me out. quote:...when Empress Wu heard [her husband, the Emperor, being sympathetic to the former Empress Wang and Consort Xiao] , she was enraged, and she sent people to cane Empress Wang and Consort Xiao 100 times each and cut off their hands and feet. She then had them put into large wine jars, saying, "Let these two witches be drunk to their bones!" When Empress Wang was informed the orders, she bowed and stated, "May His Imperial Majesty live forever, and may Zhaoyi [(昭儀, Empress Wu's title as a concubine, implicitly refusing to acknowledge her as empress)] be favored forever. Dying is within my responsibility." However, Consort Xiao cursed Empress Wu, "Wu is a treacherous monster! May it be that I be reincarnated as a cat and she be reincarnated as a mouse, so that I can, for ever and ever, grab her throat." Empress Wang and Consort Xiao suffered for several days inside the wine jars before dying, and Empress Wu had their bodies taken out of the jars and beheaded. I just can't imagine what sitting in jars of wine with open wounds would have been like. Other than supremely awful, of course
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Dec 30, 2012 22:00
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Ringo Star Get posted:The whole story on those that died in Everest and heir bodies still being there is creepy. I can't fid the link but there are some incredible pictures of corpses, each from different times of hiking style, just littering the path the climbers take. You're very likely to see them if you go hiking, and they're likely to be there for a while considering that its tough as hell to recover bodies. You have to hope hat a strong wind or an avalanche brings your body down. You're possibly thinking of this link, which was posted in GBS a while back. Obviously a little for dead people: http://godheadv.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/abandoned-on-everest.html It's really like another planet up there; if you run into trouble, you're really hosed.Also a video on the discovery of Mallory's body on Everest, which still looked fresh nearly 80 years after his death (again, potentially ) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFr1KdY6aiw. I had to link it in case anybody has video embeds turned on, since the preview was literally just a picture of his body. It's a bit of a grey area whether or not he reached the summit before Hillary but he obviously didn't survive.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory
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Dec 30, 2012 22:47
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Sagebrush posted:Probably because no one ever finds the corpses that were actually hidden well. Thousands of people just "disappear" every year in the USA alone, and at least some of them were probably murdered and disposed of by as-yet-unknown serial killers. Fun to think about, huh? Related to this the "Highway of Tears" article is really depressing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Tears_murders
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Dec 30, 2012 22:52
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In getting an anthropology degree I learned a lot of terrifying stuff about other hominids and primates that thankfully died out. Homo antecessor was a relative of ours. Little is known about them because specimens are rare, but they inhabited areas of Europe between 250,000 to 600,000 years ago. They developed into adults faster than Homo sapiens, had language and reason, and were cannibals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_antecessor Check out this wax sculpture of an antecessor woman:  http://i.imgur.com/einnl.jpg Then there's gigantopithecus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantopithecus Gigantopithecus is the largest primate to have ever lived, and it coexisted with our ancestors as recently as 100,000 years ago. It was essentially a monstrous orangutan, which are already unsettling.  I can go on and on. The pleistocene epoch especially (it's currently the holocene, the pleistocene ended about 12,000 years ago) is full of crazy, horrifying lifeforms and circumstances.
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Dec 30, 2012 23:40
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Ringo Star Get posted:The whole story on those that died in Everest and heir bodies still being there is creepy. I can't fid the link but there are some incredible pictures of corpses, each from different times of hiking style, just littering the path the climbers take. You're very likely to see them if you go hiking, and they're likely to be there for a while considering that its tough as hell to recover bodies. You have to hope hat a strong wind or an avalanche brings your body down. There was a person years ago who was going up there and rolling the bodies off of the path and down the cliff. He said that their spirits were telling him to help give them dignity and to stop their bodies from being used as checkpoints. I don't remember how many he did this to, but I know that he would do a little ceremony and then roll the body down the cliff face. * edit * The story is a little bit more sad than weird: quote:In late May 1998 Woodall together with his climbing partner Cathy O'Dowd were again on Everest when they encountered their friend Francys Arsentiev during her last hours in life. They called off their own attempt to reach the summit and tried to help her for more than one hour but because of her condition, the location, and the cold weather they were finally forced to abandon her and to start descending. MichiganCubbie has a new favorite as of 23:51 on Dec 30, 2012 |
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Dec 30, 2012 23:48
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Sorry to contribute to a Mt Everest derail, but the more you learn about what Mt Everest means for a climber, the angrier it makes you. It's a relatively "easy" mountain, in terms of technical difficulty, so every jackoff who has more money than sense can get on it. The danger is simply how conditions change as you get that high - and that's the infuriating part. Even if you do everything right, are in great shape, have enough oxygen and warm clothing, by sheer random chance, you can get hit with cerebral or pulmonary edema. And you'll likely die if you're not at one of the lower camps. It's well-known that above the "death zone" (27k+ feet), you really can't get help down. So if anything life-threatening happens to you, you will not be helped. There's more than one story of several people walking right by wounded, or incapacited people, having no way to assist them. That poo poo is well-known, and then people are OK with putting themselves in that position, and saying, "ope darn, can't help them at that height". Man, gently caress that mountain. To contribute a bit, here's the entry about the 1996 disaster. And if you get hooked on this morbid poo poo, like I did, get your hands on Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, who was there to experience it. VVV - Ditto with this guy. I'm more interested in the giant alien birds and mammals than I ever was with Dinosaurs. Captain Lavender has a new favorite as of 00:17 on Dec 31, 2012 |
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Dec 31, 2012 00:00
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Christoph posted:I can go on and on. The pleistocene epoch especially (it's currently the holocene, the pleistocene ended about 12,000 years ago) is full of crazy, horrifying lifeforms and circumstances. Do go on, really interesting stuff. I'd be fascinated to learn about other scary life forms that once roamed the planet like that massive ape or other freaky proto people.
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Dec 31, 2012 00:15
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cucurbit posted:
If it's any solace, this probably didn't actually happen. A very similar execution was attributed to Dowager Empress Lü, who lived some 800 years before Wu Zetian. By the Tang Dynasty, Lü had become a byword for female cruelty and a common rhetorical argument against female political power, and a lot of things that had originally been done or attributed to Lü were attributed wholesale to Wu Zetian. Wu Zetian wasn't a nice lady or anything, but she was one of the most subtle and brilliant political minds of her day, with identification with historical heroes/religious figures being a specialty, and it's pretty doubtful she'd have done anything to blatantly invite a comparison to the well-known atrocities of Empress Lü.
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Dec 31, 2012 01:56
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Here's a partial list of just the big dead animals from the Americas in the pleistocene: Dire wolves, which were actually more like giant coyotes, were five feet long weighing 110 to 175 pounds (30 to 90 pounds more than modern wolves) died out 10,000 or so years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf Giant beavers, up to 8 feet long and weighing 220 pounds died out 12,000 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_beaver  The American lion, a cat 25% bigger than modern lions (weighing up to 770 pounds). It's unknown if it was more along the lines of a lion, tiger, or cougar. For some reason I find the cougar angle to be the most frightening. It died out about 11,000 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Lion  My personal favorite is the giant ground sloth, some weighing almost 9,000 lbs and and 20 feet long (as big as an elephant). Their demise is believed to be the direct result of active hunting by humans (unlike in other cases where indirect human effects on the environment or the end of the ice age are typically believed to be the causes of extinction). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_ground_sloth  They had really big hands. http://i.imgur.com/Q598v.jpg Then there were giant armadillos... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doedicurus  and so on. For hominids, there is Australopithecus robustus (aka Paranthropus robustus) which kind of freaks me out. They had huge jaws and molars, the development of which required them growing a sharp mohawk-like head bone just to attach their over-sized chewing muscles to. It's like they were about a million years from the finish line and then started to turn back into mindless grazers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopithecus_robustus  More famously, there is the "hobbit" species Homo floriensis. They were 3-foot-tall hominids that died out as recently as 12,000 years ago (compared to the neanderthals, who disappeared over 30,000 years ago). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floriensis
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Dec 31, 2012 02:12
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