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Lonely Virgil posted:China's justice system is... interesting. You can literally get away with murder if you pay off the family of your victim. That's Hong Kong, not China. In '99. Sounds to me like less corruption, and more those times where the occasional nutcase slips through the prosecution-defense system. Content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luka_Magnotta Oh hey, I was on the ground floor of this. I even vaguely remember hearing about his stupid attention seeking exploits on these forums a few years back. The unnerving thing was I never expected internet psychos to actually escalate to what they were threatening.
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Dec 15, 2012 02:52
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Stormageddon posted:Well, I find some comfort in that as awful as they are, humanity as a whole have mostly the capability to not be like that. Or all else failing, too lazy to actually get out and torture people. Look on the bright side! Back in the olden days, this kind of brutality was routine and occurred to criminals, anyone who pissed off the authorities, and the citizens of the losing side of a war. Now it's relegated to a tenaciously psychopathic subset of first-worlders.
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Dec 28, 2012 01:36
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If you do get condemned to burial by your King/Emperor, you're probably persona non grata anyway. Say goodbye to your family and estate! In fact, going back would actually jeopardise them.
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Jan 8, 2013 08:27
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Speaking of the sensation of insects crawling over your body... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formication I find it rather interesting that the sensation of tiny little legs touching and tiny little teeth biting your sensory nerves elicits such a rapid response. This sensation was probably evolutionarily selected for so we could brush off poisonous insects fairly quickly, but it seems to sometimes be so ingrained that you can short circuit it and fire off that sensation in your brain with merely imaginary insects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusional_parasitosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons
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Jan 23, 2013 10:50
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quote:On September 2, 1982, Gaskins committed another murder, for which he earned the title of the "Meanest Man in America". While incarcerated in the high security block at the South Carolina Correctional Institution, Gaskins killed a death row inmate named Rudolph Tyner, who earned his sentence for killing an elderly couple named Bill and Myrtle Moon during a bungled armed robbery on the store they owned in the Burgess community. I don't know why I'm giggling. He's a horrible psychopathic poo poo, but the sheer panache it takes to kill another prisoner with an IED is hilarous. The child rape and murder is less fun.
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Feb 3, 2013 01:35
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He seriously played creepy piano music in the background as well?
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Feb 3, 2013 12:00
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You mean that's what the survivors said the kid said.
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Feb 13, 2013 02:15
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The thing about AIDS is that we've probably had contact with it for a long time. It's just that the overall population has never really been exposed to it and co-evolved with each other to reduce virulence, the way that SIV and its reservoir apes can tolerate each other. The reason it's suddenly become a thing recently is because of modern technology suddenly opening up trade routes into the middle of Africa, where suddenly a pathogen that might infect a village or two (and would burn itself out of susceptible hosts) suddenly gets to spread into the wider world where they can't tolerate one another.
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Feb 14, 2013 00:22
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U.T. Raptor posted:as it turns out, eating the flesh of our closest relatives... not such a good idea actually. AIDS isn't orally transmissible. It's a pretty fragile virus outside of fluids, it's not going to be able to stand stomach acid. Sores inside mouth? Maybe. A better hypothesis for what happened was someone accidentally cut themselves while butchering a carcass and got blood into the wound.
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Feb 17, 2013 00:19
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Superpowers Don't Apologize. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
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Feb 23, 2013 05:54
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UUriffic posted:That's one hypothesis, and one that's certainly very plausible. It would make sense that because of the frequency of cannibalism in human history physical adaptation would be fairly quick for a certain portion of the population. If it happened within one or two generations, it likely wasn't a wholesale genetic transformation, but exposure to the protein caused a particular set of previously unused genetic materials to produce the resistant protein form. That there was, at least in this particular population,a dormant set of genetic material which developed over hundreds of generations through cannibalism (a history all humans share), that when exposed to the pathogenic protein activated to produce the resistant protein, is probably the most likely physical explanation. If cultural variance/adaptation can be ruled out (which would be the simplest answer) I'd say the physical explanation is the most likely overall. I really doubt development of Kuru resistance was Lamarckian. The wikipedia article says it takes 5-20 years for symptoms to develop after consuming the prion. It's even kills children. And this is with the resistance allele. God knows how quickly it would develop if a random european person were to partake in it. That's enough time to kill you before breeding age. What's probably happening now is that many people are carriers, and even if they die of unrelated causes, their kuru prion were getting transferred to others in the community. Stop this particular prion from spreading by ending this funeral rite, it dies off.
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Mar 2, 2013 08:54
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Dude, Lamarckian evolution haven't been used to describe the diversity of life nor the genome for centuries*. I called your description of the events Lamarckian because it's so teleological. "If it happened within one or two generations, it likely wasn't a wholesale genetic transformation, but exposure to the protein caused a particular set of previously unused genetic materials to produce the resistant protein form." It's not a case of some individuals already having the resistance gene but producing the wild-type protein, then the resistant protein suddenly kicking into gear the moment they get exposed to the pathogenic prion. Because that's not how natural selection works. The proper way to describe what was happening was that amongst the diversity of people in that area, a certain number had a mutated brain protein. They would have made this variant protein their entire life, prion or no prion. This was a Glycine-to-Valine single amino acid change, both amino acids are neutral and non-polar, it's probably not deleterious. Therefore, there was no selection against it, and hence it persisted within the community for hundreds to thousands of years. As Kuru spread from patient zero (who had the bad luck of spontaneously mutating the pathogenic prion in his head (and which he may not even have died of)), the prion moved through the community at the rate of which people died off. So in other words, slowly at first, but accelerating over time as people died exponentially from the disease. At the same time, the people who made this resistant protein didn't die off, and hence they had a selective advantage. This continued until the proportion of people with the resistant protein made up ~60% of the population. If this had continued for another couple of hundred years, almost everybody would have carried the resistant protein. The real surprising thing is that so many resistants made up such a large proportion of the population so quickly. How could that be? Well, it could just be dumb luck, perhaps the mutant protein made up such a large proportion of the population because the population went through a genetic bottleneck when the Fore's ancestors arrived. Founder effects aren't unknown. Or perhaps the prion resistance gene conferred another benefit against another cause of death in another way. What's not clear is that there was any selection by the pathogenic prion long before the 1900s. Things of note regarding cannibalism. While it has a long history, there's little evidence it is widespread, and hence it is unlikely that it and the diseases it could potentially spread were a major selection factor. If someone was a cannibal, it probably happened once or twice, and there's little chance it could spread these kind of prion diseases into the wider community (not to mention that the choice cuts of the cannibal are muscle tissue, which have low levels of potentially prioned proteins). Finally, regarding your description of smallpox, you are mixing up resistance and immunological memory. Yes, people with the CCR5 mutation are probably resistant to smallpox. However, the ability to produce neutralising antibodies against smallpox virus requires that person to have been innoculated with smallpox itself (or its vaccinating cousins). So what's happening was that the CCR5 mutation was conferring a degree of resistance to the person, increasing the chances that they would survive the initial infection. Afterwards, thanks to adaptive immunity, their anti-smallpox antibodies will provide them with protection for the rest of their lives. This is not an all or nothing thing, lacking this resistance allele did not guarantee you'd die, you'd just have a higher relative risk of failing to fight off the initial infection. And there's no direct evidence that the resistance allele guaranteed protection from the smallpox virus. So what happens now that smallpox is no longer a part of our microbial milleau? Of course people can't make anti-smallpox antibodies if they've never been exposed to it. But the CCR5 mutation persists, because I doubt there is any selection pressure against it. *Yes yes, epigenetics, but that doesn't modify the actual genome itself, just what genes are silenced or not. Ha. Ahaha. Ha. Ha. Can we post this reason absolutely everywhere every single time someone mentions "gotta torture terrorists just in case there is a buried bus full of schoolkids with a bomb". Preferably whenever Scalia is mentioned. Phobophilia has a new favorite as of 12:17 on Mar 3, 2013 |
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Mar 3, 2013 12:04
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Molested by uncle, ran way from home at 15  . Also, holy crap, she tried to regraduate a high school in 2000. At 31. Well, keep trying the same thing until it works out!
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Apr 12, 2013 07:17
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Come on who else has that picture saved on their computer to be specifically posted every single time someone mentions fecal transplants?
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Apr 19, 2013 07:22
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Jesus christ that pretty beetle just latched onto a frog and stripped its skin off and ate it alive.
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Apr 20, 2013 04:48
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See the frog closing its eyes? It's actually slamming its eyeballs against the roof of its mouth to crush its food. It's not good enough.
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Apr 20, 2013 05:33
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1stGear posted:I can't imagine a universe where 60% of ordinary people would torture someone to death simply because they were ordered to but here we are. It's really loving easy to order a bunch of people to go to people's houses and start burning them down and taking their valuables and murdering them. I'm giving examples of good, wholesome anglo-saxon people doing these horrible things because this kind of behaviour is not something exclusively done by Other People, but is terrifyingly universal and something you should always be vigilant against. Society is perfectly capable of sanctioning violence.
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May 4, 2013 03:56
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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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Vladimir Poutine posted:Please not that there is one massive exception to this rule, which happened to kill 5 times the combined death toll of both world wars in the 20th century: smallpox. Yeah, smallpox is definitely zoonotic in origin. There are actually alot of poxviruses out there that preferentially infect other species. It's odd, it crossed over into us relatively recently (which would explain the high death rate), yet at the same time it became totally trophic to us humans. There are no known animal reservoirs of smallpox disease, what's why the smallpox vaccine was so effective at eradicating the virus from the wild. If we never developed the scientific method for anther few thousand years, you would see a steady drop off in the death rate of the smallpox virus in the wild.
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May 19, 2013 11:02
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The world is so terrifyingly complex that we simply do not have any good models to describe so much of biology and physics.Lord Dekks posted:Its interesting when that can happen even when thorough testing has happened, there was a case a few years ago in the UK when some people in a drug trial started suffering multiple organ failure: It's hardly fair to compare lobotomies with TGN1412. The stuff was perfectly fine in animal models, no crazy cytokine storms or anything. And animal models are always going to occur before human tests for some drat good bioethical reason (cf. all the previously posted wiki articles on human testing). Nevertheless, from a post-hoc analysis, the researchers look like they hosed up in several ways. 1) CD28, the molecule they were targeting, is a pro-stimulation molecule. Nevertheless, as knocking out CD28 happens to also cause autoimmune disease because this pro-stimulation molecule is also essential to generate anti-inflammatory cells. Therefore, this poo poo is complicated. And at least in mice, after injecting the substance, they formed anti-inflammatory cells. 2) There are limitations to animal models of drugs and disease. You can do things to mice you can't even dream of doing to a human, and for drat good reason. And it's worked at least some of the time. We know more than ever about how cells and tissues and organs work. But nevertheless, they're not us, and they're going to behave differently to us. Not to mention that humans are going to be alot more genetically diverse than the highly controlled lab animals used for science. That's well and good, we're always at risk of having unexpected outcomes between pre-clinical and clinical trials. 3) They administered suboptimal doses of TGN1412 500 times lower than what would have been used in an animal, and they still got a massive response. One explanation for this incredibly potency in humans is that TGN1412 was originally made to target human CD28, so it'll naturally be less potent than against mouse CD28. But even in monkeys, there was no indication that TGN1412 could cause disease. So, in conclusion, there are just some fundamental issues with the limitations of ethical science. And despite that, the study was up to the standards of the era (2006!). Nevertheless, it has changed the way we do and think about things. Here's a nice journal article summarising what went wrong and how best to improve things. Because the wiki article says some stupid things every now then (dumb conjectures and they cite things like the loving daily mail).
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May 20, 2013 05:24
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And just like ECT, we have no idea how it really works. We think the electric current sends out inhibitory neurotransmitters, but why exactly and what they're targeting is still being researched. And I think there are some implants that use wireless power transmission these days, so you don't have metal in contact with water (the same way my electric toothbrush is wirelessly charged. And it definitely works, I've seen a video of a man turning his DBS off and his hands spazzing out and him struggling to turn the device back on.
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May 22, 2013 23:12
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Luckily it never actually does that and the fear of them smacks of a whole range of culture-bound syndromes such as your dick disappearing into itself.
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May 27, 2013 11:39
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And these were (approximately) the same people who did this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting After reading that article, what strikes me is that the "traditional" american indian lifestyle didn't at all resemble what is typically displayed. Europeans went to war with the blasted post-apocalyptic survivors of a civilization depopulated by waves of smallpox epidemics.
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Jun 28, 2013 14:22
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So sayeth the sexy KGB warlord Putin. It's more important to hand oil contracts to our favourite cronies.
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Jul 1, 2013 09:47
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Tibor posted:I'm pretty sure all urban legends and fairy tales etc have a useful message at their core. That's why they exist. A lot of the typical Western ones resolve around stranger danger, for example. Well, not so much useful truths, but anxieties society holds with itself. So you have someone like Jimmy Savile telling people about stranger danger, but not Jimmy Savile, you see 'im on the telly, you can trust 'im.
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Jul 30, 2013 23:12
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The moral of the story is that's it's only genocide if you don't succeed. The genocided don't get to write history. The afrikaners merely managed to segregate the bantus. The spanish, while perfectly happy to work entire populations to death in the silver mines, were never that concerned about emigration or miscegenation. It's the english settler countries that succeeded in rendering the local aboriginal populations economically and politically irrelevant.
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Aug 5, 2013 15:09
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ibntumart posted:I think you should read up on castas. Also the difference between criollos and peninsulares. Man, that's complex. Yeah, I made a massive oversimplification here, but my point was that there was a shitload more emigration from britain to north america than from the iberians to south america. And thanks for that link, there are so many different backgrounds you could ascribe yourself to in the spanish colonies. I mean, there was still alot of discrimination and poverty and class conflict, but there was no real shame of belonging to any particular group. Contrast this to the anglo colonies, you were either aboriginal or white, no shades of grey. If you were the former, you were untermensch, I remember reading about australian aboriginals calling themselves south-asian indians just to avoid the worse of the discrimination. Hence, if you were the latter, you suppressed any evidence of the former. Of course, there were exceptions, there's the old cliche of claiming you had native descent from some "cherokee princess", but I'm personally convinced that Americans only said that because they considered it socially acceptable for a brave manly settler to conquer the exotic foreign woman, while the opposite was considered terrifying. Phobophilia has a new favorite as of 00:50 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 00:45
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I've read some pretty aggressive antiziganist stuff on these very forums, and honestly I have no idea what the gently caress because I don't know how to even respond.
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Aug 6, 2013 10:56
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I know people who work with the smallpox vaccine virus, and they need to be innoculated with that so to not get sick from their own work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia And you know what's unnerving? Remember how Jenner originally got his vaccine from cowpox? This is not cowpox. At some unknown point in time, England's strain of vaccine was switched to this virus, and no one knows just how it happened.
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Sep 17, 2013 00:08
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