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I was just reading about chickens and poultry for unrelated reasons and found this. Apparently since we now have different breeds for meat production vs. egg laying, a new need has arisen. You see, roosters aren't very useful for egg laying, so after the chicks have been hatched the males need to be disposed of quickly to avoid having to house and feed them. Enter the world of chick culling:Wikipedia posted:Several methods have been used to cull chicks: So you'd think throwing the chicks all into a big grinder would be on its way out, what with all those more humane options on the table right? Wrong: Wikipedia posted:The American Veterinary Medical Association recommends cervical dislocation and asphyxiation by carbon dioxide as the best options, but has recently amended their guidelines to include maceration.
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2013 23:42 |
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# ¿ May 15, 2024 06:16 |
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DNova posted:I really don't understand why anyone uses CO2 to euthanize animals. If you want to know why, take a big breath of CO2 sometime and tell me how it feels. Hint: it hurts a lot. CO2 reacts with water to form carbonic acid. It's the reason carbonated soda/water tastes kind of sharp and offsets the sweetness. So imagine that prickly/burny feeling that you get on your tongue but instead filling your lungs. Not so good! It's also the only reason you feel "desperate for breath" when you hold your breath - your body can't actually detect low oxygen, just high CO2. If you use an inert gas, the animal doesn't even know anything is going on until they fall unconscious. Use CO2 and they feel like they're drowning or being strangled.
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2013 00:03 |
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Phobophilia posted: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. I had an actual no-poo poo medical doctor from my town's local health department office (who looked and sounded like Cedric the Entertainer) tell my health class in highschool that it was either A) People having "booty sex" with monkeys, emphasizing "booty sex" by saying it in a silly voice or B) a secret soviet engineered virus made to destroy America, which they tested first on Africa because "It's full of black people, and the Russians looked at Africa and thought 'hey black people make great test subjects because they're not real people'". He maintained that theory B was the most likely explanation through his entire speech, even when questioned by some of the AP bio students about how loving crazy that theory is. Weirdest drat day of class ever
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# ¿ Feb 17, 2013 00:29 |
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Religious Man posted:Your lovely days at work are as bad as having to eat your co-workers to survive? Obviously you have never worked a customer service job.
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# ¿ Feb 20, 2013 02:47 |
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Look a sunflower posted:To contribute, I've always enjoyed letting myself be creeped out by the postulations offered to resolve the Fermi Paradox, which contrasts the mathematical likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrial life with the apparent lack of evidence available. I think it nags at me because one of these things, or another similar explanation, has to be true - there simply is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe, or there is not - and both possibilities are mind boggling. I'm very skeptical when it comes to paranormal phenomena on earth, but sometimes I feel like I would give anything to just know what or who else is out there, whether they know about us, etc. I think the most likely explanation is that there are other thinkers out there but that the scale of the universe is just too massive to ever facilitate a meeting, at least between us and anyone else. The spookiest answers to the Fermi Paradox involve some form of "cosmic censoring", where either something that happens regularly in nature (like a supernova exploding nearby) or something that is expected to happen to all sentient races (like the discovery of nuclear technology) causes any intelligent life to be either completely wiped out or very seriously hampered before they even have a chance to colonize planets. The idea is that there's an enormous brick wall intrinsic to the nature of the universe that lies between the whole "intelligent life" stage and the "actually colonizing space en masse" stage. We could have already gotten past this brick wall, or it could still be in front of us, waiting to kick our rear end back to the stone age in a literal sense.
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# ¿ Feb 23, 2013 21:04 |
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Tagra posted:Are there accurate records of temperatures dating all the way back to 1350AD and earlier? Or is that just an estimate based on science and stuff? Generally temperature measurement in a modern sense only dates back accurately to the 1800's or so when modern measurement tools and proper shielding boxes and standardization of measurements came into play (though we have somewhat good measured temperature records for England going back to 1659), but we can estimate to an okay degree of accuracy average temperatures going back very far by using various techniques such as snow layers, measurements of tree rings, coral growth patterns etc. Here is a wikipedia table listing various methods of determining temperature without actual records (It's not scary or unnerving, sorry.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_historic_and_prehistoric_climate_indicators
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# ¿ Feb 26, 2013 05:40 |
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Intergalactik posted:If it makes you feel any better, I'm fairly certain that is a recreation of the crash, so even if you're seeing a person fall out it is just CGI. I am basing this off Youtube comments though, so I can't be sure. You know Youtube pretty universally claims all things are fake right?
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2013 19:06 |
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FrozenVent posted:Isn't 1/20 5%, not 0.05%? Wouldn't 0.05% be 1/400? You're right, 1/20th is 5% (though the original number was 0.5%, not 0.05%, so it should actually be 1/200)
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# ¿ Feb 27, 2013 23:38 |
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White Dog Eggs posted:I cant remember where I read this, but apparently Humans have genes that offer resistance to disease that you can only catch by eating human brains, so we are all decended from cannibals. Yay! The wiki article on Kuru mentioned that some of the people who lived in the areas affected by the disease had possibly developed a resistant protein form as a response to it in a remarkably short amount of time as far as natural selection goes. Perhaps that's what you meant? (even if not I still think it's neat )
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# ¿ Mar 2, 2013 03:53 |
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Post Your Favorite (or Request) > Post your favorite semantic wank argument tangentially related to a scary or unnerving wikipedia page Content, though someone in the thread briefly mentioned it already earlier they didn't really get into it: Strangelets Basically, it's a weird form of matter hypothesized to exist that, if it behaves like we predict it would, would effectively turn any other matter into it. quote:This "ice-nine"-like disaster scenario is as follows: one strangelet hits a nucleus, catalyzing its immediate conversion to strange matter. This liberates energy, producing a larger, more stable strangelet, which in turn hits another nucleus, catalyzing its conversion to strange matter. In the end, all the nuclei of all the atoms of Earth are converted, and Earth is reduced to a hot, large lump of strange matter. One second you're sitting at home watching TV, the next you and the entire planet are melting into a puddle of a heretofore unseen form of matter. THANKS UNIVERSE! The universe has other fun friends that can change you into horrible other states too, like a false vacuum. The idea behind this one is that the current stable state of the universe itself is a trough in the vacuum energy, not the actual "true" zero point of the universe. Basically, if we can get out of this trough, all the cosmological constants suddenly and irreversibly change to new values - energy behaves differently, the space between the atoms in your body changes, gravity changes, electromagnetism, everything, at the speed of light, radiating out from the initial point where the trough was overcome. Again, one second you're sitting at home just fine, the next the very laws of the universe have been turned on their head. quote:If a more stable vacuum state were able to arise, then existing particles and forces would no longer arise as they presently do. Different particles or forces would arise from (and be shaped by) whatever new quantum states arose. The world we know depends upon these particles and forces, so if this happened, everything around us, from subatomic particles to galaxies, and all fundamental forces, would be reconstituted into new fundamental particles and forces and structures. The universe would lose all of its present structures and become inhabited by new ones (depending upon the exact states involved) based upon the same quantum fields. Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 20:26 on Apr 14, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 14, 2013 20:21 |
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I cite this whenever I want to taunt my friend who is studying to get his degree in psychology (it's also scary as all gently caress and highlights the serious disconnect between theoretical and applied psychology - "you're in a mental hospital OF COURSE you're crazy!")
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 01:27 |
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Here's one that has scared the gently caress out of me ever since I read about it, though it's something that planes do on a regular basis. What do you do when you're piloting a 747 on a tight schedule and nature happens to have strong winds blowing across your runway? A Crosswind Landing, or literally landing sideways and then quickly turning the plane to go straight again. When executed correctly (IE the wind is perfectly constant, measured properly, and the pilot is experienced and knows the particulars of the aircraft) it works fine. If, on the other hand, the wind is gusty, the pilot is overzealous, or any of a number of other things go wrong, your enormous jumbo jet turns into a child's toy in the wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfB4xyM7tMw
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 02:19 |
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Yeah crosswind landings go perfectly fine 99.999999% of the time. One of the requirements for GA pilots is to specifically practice crosswind. I realize it's a fully mastered technique that all pilots probably have drilled into their heads so much they can do it in their sleep and there's probably even autopilot programs that can do it perfectly in a hurricane now, it's just the idea of "land sideways then quickly turn while hoping you don't get hit by a gust of wind and knocked off course" freaks me out, no matter how routine and safe it is these days. I guess I did hype it a bit too much in my post though
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 03:18 |
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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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JoltSpree posted:Gamma-ray bursts are pretty terrifying. In short, they're waves of intense radiation that are given off by things like neutron stars or black holes. They're really tough to predict. They're extremely rare, but if one happened to pass through our solar system, it would cause a mass extinction event. The best part? Some scientists believe it already happened. More terrifying space facts: Magnetars! They're some of, if not the, most powerful sources of magnetic fields in the universe. When the fields shift, they shoot out powerful gamma rays and x-rays as millions of joules of energy is released all at once. Wikipedia posted:The magnetic field of a magnetar would be lethal even at a distance of 1000 km due to the strong magnetic field distorting the electron clouds of the subject's constituent atoms, rendering the chemistry of life impossible. At a distance halfway to the moon, a magnetar could strip information from the magnetic stripes of all credit cards on Earth. As of 2010, they are the most magnetic objects ever detected in the universe. So magnetic that 1000km away, your atoms would literally be unable to function properly due to the electrons getting hosed up by the field. And to boot, the object is only ~20 miles across, yet is heavier than the sun
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# ¿ May 14, 2013 17:20 |
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Mr. Flunchy posted:This is probably a really dumb question, but what would actually happen if your atoms stopped functioning properly? Would you melt into a sludge? Break out in tumours? Collapse into a fine heap of dust? Explode? I'm guessing all the chemical bonds in your body would break apart, so you'd turn into some kind of vapor of atoms.
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# ¿ May 14, 2013 17:35 |
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JagGator posted:Why is this unnerving? You, me, and everything you've ever seen or touched are basically 99.975% empty space. Obviously you have never seen Buckaroo Banzai or know of the oscillation overthruster EDIT: Also re: nerve agent blobs, mustard gas and lewisite are not nerve agents, they're vesicants (give you blisters and otherwise melt your face off). So if they're condensing into blobs (which I don't think chemistry says should be possible without some kind of gelling agent which makes no sense for a gas-based chemical weapon) and washing up on the shore they're at least only going to give you severe and horrible chemical burns, not destroy your nervous system. Of course that's probably just not happening at all but whatever, it makes a great spooky story. Also this is one of my favorite creepy WWII posters: Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 07:27 on May 16, 2013 |
# ¿ May 16, 2013 06:39 |
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Winstons posted:I'm sure some of you have seen this one before, but again I don't think it's been posted yet, and I always found it pretty fascinating - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_B-52_crash#cite_note-Big4-1 Ahahaha that guy's loving insane: Wikipedia posted:The minimum aircraft altitude permitted for that area was 500 feet (150 m) AGL. During the mission, Holland's aircraft was filmed crossing one ridgeline about 30 feet (10 m) above the ground. Fearing for their safety, the photography crew ceased filming and took cover as Holland's aircraft again passed low over the ground, this time estimated as clearing the ridgeline by only three feet (1 m). The co-pilot on Holland's aircraft testified that he grabbed the controls to prevent Holland from flying the aircraft into the ridge while the aircraft's other two aircrew members repeatedly screamed at Holland, "Climb! Climb!" Holland responded by laughing and calling one of the crew members "a pussy".
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# ¿ May 16, 2013 16:31 |
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The bigger problem is diseases - Pretty much every recent case of an uncontacted tribe being contacted has resulted in like 50 to 90% of the tribe dying of pretty basic diseases that everyone else has immunity to. These are things we, for the most part, can't really treat all that well because it's just assumed that everyone has immunity to them. The wiki page doesn't really get into it that much, but it's really the biggest barrier and kind of negates the "what if we bring them our enlightened modern medicine/food!" argument when they basically get obliterated by the common cold within a year every goddamn time:Wikipedia posted:Nukaak Maku were contacted in 2003 and 65% of the tribal members died of disease.
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# ¿ May 18, 2013 16:58 |
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sweeperbravo posted:No, I understood what you meant, not what the guy who responded to you meant. well that wiki page sure did have some loving horrifying pictures on it. EDIT: NWS/NMS the quote Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 23:43 on May 19, 2013 |
# ¿ May 19, 2013 22:30 |
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DNova posted:Where the gently caress do you people work where surfing forums.somethingawful.com is kosher but looking at a wikipedia article about a birth defect is not? NWS isn't quite called for but NMS definitely is, for smiling dead baby without a skull. Also my work is fine with SA and other sites like it as long as the threads we look at are work safe and we don't sit on them 24/7 and never get any work done, though I realize this is pretty unusual as far as companies go.
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# ¿ May 19, 2013 23:52 |
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Cordyceps Headache posted:I can't remember is Prosopagnosia(also known as "face blindness") has been posted yet, but it's always freaked me out. I was reminded of it by Arrested Development today. Completely serious here: I have a moderate case of faceblindness (there's a test they give you, 85+ is normal, I scored a 60). It's pretty much just really annoying - all my friends either think I'm crazy (everyone I see is CLEARLY a celebrity! come on guys don't you see it?!) or think I'm a jerk for not recognizing them also I get a lot of "SO WE ALL LOOK THE SAME TO YOU HUH?" I basically compensate by being very good at remembering people based on their hairstyle/color, clothes they're wearing and mannerisms (how they walk, hold themselves etc). I sometimes still have trouble finding my own mom in a crowd though Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 06:14 on May 29, 2013 |
# ¿ May 29, 2013 06:11 |
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The wiki page mentions the "Cambridge Face Memory Test" as a test for faceblindness so it might have been that, though the article they cited also mentions other tests so I'm not sure which one I got. My psychologist showed me a bunch of faces, and I had to pair up similar ones, or say if I had seen a particular one in a series before, etc. Like I said I'm not TOTALLY lost when it comes to face recognition, but beyond very general things (IE fat face, thin face, stuff like that) I can't really remember finer details or tell faces apart based on them.
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# ¿ May 30, 2013 06:15 |
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Msdoomngloom posted:I don't remember anything that happened ( also about 1 week after) I was actually at the gym and face planted. People said it looked like I was having a seizure.....then I turned blue. There was a defibrillator there which they used. Sorry about all the questions but I've never gotten to talk to someone who almost died like this before - Is there just a huge gap in your memory between "at the gym" and "woke up in the hospital a week later"? Did you dream at all? Do you have a feeling of "missing time," IE a feeling that you existed during that week and just can't remember it, or does it feel more like you teleported right from the gym to waking up in the hospital and that week never happened?
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# ¿ Jun 13, 2013 17:45 |
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Msdoomngloom posted:I don't remember being at the gym nor any of the first week I was in the hospital. I honestly have zero recollection of this. I've been told what happened. It doesn't feel like missing time at all. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity and sorry for bugging you about it. I'm glad you're alright
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# ¿ Jun 14, 2013 06:24 |
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Math uses incomprehensible things all the time. Just try to imagine infinity, yet it's an integral (heh) part of pretty much everything you can do with calculus.
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# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 05:11 |
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Blimpkin posted:Someone mentioned this in another thread, and I just had to go look for myself. It's about the Moscow Apt Bombings of 1999. A time when I was blissfully unaware about most foreign news beyond sports, (I was 11). Wow, that's drat creepy. Normally when I hear people yelling FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG etc I just dismiss it as the usual conspiracy theory nuts, but in this case there's just so much wrong with the story and so much evasiveness by the people involved it's really hard to dismiss
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# ¿ Jul 15, 2013 19:03 |
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NuminaXLT posted:I've been trying to find this article for ages, thanks for posting this! I read it once when it was posted in some other thread and every time I try to find it again to show someone I never could find it. Wikipedia says the english version was deleted. Perhaps it will reappear in a few days mysteriously
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# ¿ Jul 23, 2013 23:31 |
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pkticker posted:I have had a toenail ripped out (accidentally), and I can attest that it is not at all pleasant. Oh wow, back in highschool we learned specific limits to freedom of religion as an example of the whole "your freedom ends where your fist hits my face" concept, and one of them was the "no venomous snakes" laws. I could never figure out why the hell that would even ever come up at the time and never really figured it out until reading that page.
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# ¿ Jul 25, 2013 13:29 |
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Glasgow Kiss posted:Oh poo poo, the thing I thought about while getting blazed has a name? That's awesome! I do love me some thought experiments. It's not really "perfect" immortality - for instance if the only way for you to not die would be in violation of the laws of thermodynamics, no universes could possibly be created in which you live and therefore you die everywhere and completely. It's not like the new universe forms with the specific intent of keeping you alive perpetually, it's just that there's so drat many universes all "created" by all the different ways all the universe's quantum states have and will collapse that if there is a way for you to survive something (especially if that "something" is directly determined by quantum probability, but probably even if it isn't just because of the sheer number of universes being "made" at any one moment), that one way will happen in at least one of them. Therefore, from your point of view, while several trillion+ copies of yourself just died and stopped experiencing things, the "you" that KEPT experiencing things just survived by incredibly improbable odds and continues your timeline uninterrupted. Of course you'd probably wind up horribly maimed but hey whatever. You'd never be brain-dead because the entire reason it's called immortality is because the world line in which you "continue to experience" can theoretically be stretched impossibly far due to these stupidly small chances that you'll survive everything that happens to you. Therefore, to you and only you, you are immortal.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2013 01:31 |
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MadMattH posted:The number of "you"'s in this case would be infinite, but also the "you"'s that didn't exist in the first place would also be infinite, right along with the "you"'s that were immortal would also be infinite. All possible "you"'s would be immortal, dead, living and non existing at the same time. Yeah, and it's viewing this from the perspective of yourself, right now, a subjective view, that makes it seem like immortality - your subjective experience will, if this is a correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, continue existing in a straight and uninterrupted line until you run up against something that would have a 100% chance of killing you. utada posted:Soviet Space Program Stuff The best part was that they tried to pretend that they didn't even have a moon rocket program after we got to the moon first - they claimed it was all ~tactical misdirection~ to fool those dumb Americans into wasting a bunch of money. Even now we don't have many good videos of the N1 exploding because they destroyed the parts of the film that contained 'failures'. Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 07:45 on Aug 3, 2013 |
# ¿ Aug 3, 2013 07:42 |
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MadMattH posted:We were all in my mom's car on the way back from an academic meet and we were discussing that nights upcoming basketball game. Now, as I have said before it was a small town and there wasn't much to do so high school basketball was a pretty usual hangout for even the non-athletic. My friends and I used to go hang out on the stage with the band guys. Anyway, you usually went even if you weren't interested in basketball. My mother offered him a ride to the game and his reply to her was, and I can remember this more than anything else the kid ever said to me, "No, I think the only way basketball would be interesting is if you gave the players hatchets." I'm not saying this to downplay your experience or anything but to highlight something sort of unnerving: I wouldn't be able to tell that sentence apart from everything else your normal modern "edgy" emo/goth teen says on any given day. Kinda creeping me out that the difference between "saying stupid poo poo to get attention and seem hardcore" and "about to loving murder someone" is that unclear, to me at least.
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2013 08:45 |
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THE_Chris posted:Unfortunately someone has put together a Wikipedia page that does go through this stuff. A list of lists of school shootings
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# ¿ Aug 13, 2013 23:29 |
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Frostwerks posted:Take issue my rear end. How the hell am I suppose to know what you people are going on about half the time. They're too busy touching their wood to care about us yanks understanding them
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# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 02:29 |
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Fascinator posted:^ I put my address up on Craigslist for a yard sale a few years ago. Basic stuff--I have furniture, books, and knickknacks at this address from 8AM to 1PM, please come! Craigslist is full of fascinating, horrible cheapskates, the kind of people who will spend a lot of time and effort to get something for "free". Do you think there's enough material to warrant a "Craigslist horror stories" thread or a "stupid poo poo related to Craigslist in general" thread? The latter could also include dumb postings I guess. I'm sure there's been something like that in the past but I haven't seen one in a while and this isn't really the place for it. Probably some great stories though.
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# ¿ Aug 19, 2013 23:25 |
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Thanks, apparently I'm an idiot who can't use the search feature properly or look at the forum itself before posting!
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# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 02:18 |
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Cordyceps Headache posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayou_Corne_sinkhole That article led to this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Beloye_%28Nizhny_Novgorod_Oblast%29 It's pretty short, but creeping me out nonetheless: Wikipedia posted:Beloye (Russian: Белое) is a small freshwater lake in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia. It lies approximately 300 meters from the village of Bolotnikovo. In May, 2005, the lake disappeared overnight for unknown reasons. It's probably underground instabilities, but the idea that something as big as as a lake (even a small one) could be there one day and just disappear overnight is pretty
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# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 18:43 |
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You know when your computer crashes and the screen gets all corrupted and whatever sound it was playing at the time starts repeating every half second? I think that's basically what's going on in the brain during a seizure.
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# ¿ Aug 25, 2013 15:40 |
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p-hop posted:I forget if it was mentioned before, and it certainly isn't a wikipedia article... but check out Welcome to Night Vale if you like scary/paranormal things and enjoy podcasts or talk radio. It's like NPR mixed with The X-Files. GBS thread here. I mentioned that I had moderate prosopagnosia previously in this thread, and now that you brought them up together I do sort of get why they'd be related. Sometimes I kind of subconsciously doubt that I've identified the person I'm approaching correctly and maybe this is just some stranger I started talking to and not my best friend or whatever and I get a little tinge of anxiety. The doubt goes away once they respond like my best friend responds, but I could easily see how someone could sorta start to think that they're talking to a weird impostor if their person-recognition brain circuitry is messed up in the right way
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# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 17:09 |
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# ¿ May 15, 2024 06:16 |
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Tiberius Thyben posted:Say. What about transmissible/infectious cancer? Isn't "transmissible/infectious cancer" sorta what HPV is in humans? Admittedly it only leads to cancer in a minority of cases but still. EDIT VV Yeah sorry I should have included wikipedia stuff VV Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 03:20 on Aug 31, 2013 |
# ¿ Aug 31, 2013 03:00 |