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Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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:
Maceration, using a large high-speed grinder into which the chicks are fed.
Gases or gas mixtures, often carbon dioxide is used to induce unconsciousness and then death.
Cervical dislocation, manually induced dislocation of the spinal column from the skull.
Electrocution, a new method that has been touted as being cheap, reliable, and humane by its developers

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.

:gonk:

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Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

A better hypothesis for what happened was someone accidentally cut themselves while butchering a carcass and got blood into the wound.

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 :wtc:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

:rimshot:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

I also get a pang of jealousy when I consider that there might be a solar system out there that's just teeming with life and everyone gets to visit all sorts of other planets and it's totally normal and they have friends there and everything :mad:

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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?

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

FrozenVent posted:

Isn't 1/20 5%, not 0.05%? Wouldn't 0.05% be 1/400?

(I am not good at math)

You're right, 1/20th is 5% (though the original number was 0.5%, not 0.05%, so it should actually be 1/200)

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :))

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010


I cite this whenever I want to taunt my friend who is studying to get his degree in psychology :allears:

(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!")

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :shobon:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :psyduck:

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.


And here's what would happen if one did hit us.


When I first learned about them, I was kept up for a while thinking about it, knowing that the planet is dying, knowing that eventually you will die too of radiation sickness, and not being able to do a thing about it. And we still don't really know what causes them.

And then there's asteroids. The meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk was 17-20m in length and caused a great deal of damage. Currently, NASA has nearly a thousand asteroids that are considered Potentially Hazardous Asteroids that are at least one kilometer in length. Some of them will get closer to the Earth than our moon. Some already have.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_asteroids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroid_close_approaches_to_Earth

It's incredible to think that at any moment, life as we know it could just cease to exist. I love learning about space, but it can get pretty terrifying.

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 :stare:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :colbert:

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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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

Essentially, a very dangerous pilot attempts a 360 degree banked turn in a B52 bomber at an airshow practice, with not very good consequences.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReSm7r45_ds

Although the wikipedia article is very interesting in itself, for extra insight, have a read of this, an official case study into the background and buildup to the accident - http://www.uscg.mil/safety/docs/CRM/Darker_Shades_of_Blue.pdf

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".

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

sweeperbravo posted:

No, I understood what you meant, not what the guy who responded to you meant.

For content, and since we're talking about brains, how about babies who never develop one?:nws::nms:
The second image on the page is disturbing and heartbreaking; stillbirths in general are really depressing but having a baby that doesn't look even really "human" adds an extra couple layers on top of that. Imagine being partway through your pregnancy, you're excited to have your baby, and then you see that third image as your ultrasound :(
Some babies survive birth and live for a few days, weeks, months- some for a few years. But prognosis is very limited and relatively grim compared to a lot of other genetic defects kids get born with.

:stare: 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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Basically, the part of the brain that does face recognition is damaged, so the effected individual is unable to recognize or remember faces. I find it weird to think about how much post-processing is going on in our brains on the images we see. Everything we experience is filtered through a bunch of evolutionary developed processors. Always makes me wonder about how much I can trust my perceptions.

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 :ohdear:

Shame Boy has a new favorite as of 06:14 on May 29, 2013

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.
At the hospital I was in a medically induced coma and was given therapeutic hypothermia.

Turns out I had a congenital heart defect whose symptom Is... cardiac arrest.
It would have sucked if my last minutes of life were spent at the gym.

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?

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :shobon:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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).

Having boned up on this, though, it's amazing how much it unnerves me. There are so many little details and things that happened or happened since that just creep me out.

Like:

A failed bombing being called a "training exercise," praising the citizens and local authorities for their pursuit of the bombers.

Putin, then head of the FSB, basically rising to power overnight to great support while basically commanding a bombing campaign against people who might not have had much to do with these particular bombings.

This: :stare:


This is Hexogen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzwET1YnC68&t=21s

And one general/politician/authority figure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko) who opposed this supposed government action being mysteriously killed via radioactive assassination.

Frankly, the entire article is riveting and well worth reading if you have not read on this topic before.

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 :tinfoil:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame the article dosent exist in the english version, I swear I did'nt have to run it through a translator (and was longer) when I saw it the first time.

Wikipedia says the english version was deleted. Perhaps it will reappear in a few days mysteriously :tinfoil:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

pkticker posted:

I have had a toenail ripped out (accidentally), and I can attest that it is not at all pleasant.

Content: I grew up in North Alabama, and while I never attended a Snake handling church, I know they existed not far from where I lived. I find the whole concept ridiculous and ridiculously dangerous.

When I went to college, one of my professors found out where I grew up. He asked me what I knew about snake handling churches. I told him that I was a United Methodist, and we only handled snakes once a month, after Holy Communion. :haw:

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

Glasgow Kiss posted:

Oh poo poo, the thing I thought about while getting blazed has a name? That's awesome!

I wonder, if this was to be absolute fact, how would it handle cases of otherwise unpreventable deaths? Like falling into lava or suffocating in space?

Would a set of unlikely occurrences form in the new universe you now dwell in, in order to allow you to survive? Or would the definition of living be drastically different, as you eventually turn into paralyzed, brain dead abomination?

I love quantum mechanics, at least the layman variation of it. I'm sure the actual Physicists can scream at me for how wrong I am.

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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."

This was maybe a month before the shootings. At the time it didn't seem to mean much, but all of us mentioned it later when everything went down.

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

THE_Chris posted:

Unfortunately someone has put together a Wikipedia page that does go through this stuff. :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings

A list of lists of school shootings :stare:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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 :heysexy:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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!

NEVER AGAIN.

Nothing overtly creepy happened, but it was such a huge hassle. From the moment I posted the ad til literally two weeks later, I was bombarded with emails and visits, asking to either hold stuff before the yard sale or asking if I had any leftover yard sale items they could have. This continued AFTER I took the ad down! One woman came to my house a week after the sale saying she'd seen my ad and that her daughter was going through some hard times so could she please have anything from the yard sale that didn't sell and oh by the way can I look inside your house to see if you have anything else you want to give away? She asked for my couch.

From now on I will advertise any future yard sales by putting up flimsy posterboard signs around the block the night before, as God intended.

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010


Thanks, apparently I'm an idiot who can't use the search feature properly or look at the forum itself before posting! :downs:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

Cordyceps Headache posted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayou_Corne_sinkhole

Sinkholes are unnerving in general, but this one is particularly so, because you can watch a video of it swallowing a stand of trees. It looks so surreal, the trees just start sinking into the marsh like something out of a cartoon. :stare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcOPz_7KVQU

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 :stare:

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

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.

Sorry if it was already mentioned, but Capgras delusion is an interesting way that the human brain can misfire. From the wiki page: "a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor."

Just imagine - you are absolutely convinced that a close friend or family member has been replaced with an identical fake. No one believes you. You are still coherent and mentally stable otherwise. There's no reason for them to be "replaced" by an impostor, so why? Who took the real one away? That's something straight out of a nightmare.

Possibly related to prosopagnosia, where you are unable to recognize others based on their facial features. You'll still recognize and be able to identify your friends by voice, manners, style of dress, etc. But if you were just given a portrait of someone you knew, they might appear to be a stranger you've never seen in your life.

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 :tinfoil:

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Shame Boy
Mar 2, 2010

Tiberius Thyben posted:

Say. What about transmissible/infectious cancer?


Admittedly it only affects Tasmanian Devils (though there are some examples of similar diseases in other species).

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 :ughh: VV

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