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Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

Thanks to all of those effort posts on ghost flights and plane crashes. And aphasia - imagine not being able to understand words and being unable to stop speaking gibberish (seems like a few GBS posters I know).

Effort posters, you have made the world a more unnerving place for us and we thank you for it. I think.

E: Actually, hypoxia is a pretty unscary way to go if you don't know it's happening.

Josef K. Sourdust has a new favorite as of 12:08 on Apr 9, 2015

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The Mighty Moltres
Dec 21, 2012

Come! We must fly!


Josef K. Sourdust posted:

Thanks to all of those effort posts on ghost flights and plane crashes. And aphasia - imagine not being able to understand words and being unable to stop speaking gibberish (seems like a few GBS posters I know).

Effort posters, you have made the world a more unnerving place for us and we thank you for it. I think.

E: Actually, hypoxia is a pretty unscary way to go if you don't know it's happening.

If for but to not honey great of fever nine forty two!
Iron folk you but then dog dock George.

Seriously though, aphasia is messed up.

CONTENT:

The recording sessions of "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band

quote:

Van Vliet wanted the whole band to "live" the Trout Mask Replica album. The group rehearsed Van Vliet's difficult compositions for eight months, living communally in their small rented house in the Woodland Hills suburb of Los Angeles.

quote:

At various times one or another of the group members was "put in the barrel", with Van Vliet berating him continually, sometimes for days, until the musician collapsed in tears or in total submission.[61]

quote:

Drummer John French described the situation as "cultlike"[63] and a visiting friend said "the environment in that house was positively Mansonesque".[4]

quote:

Band members were restricted from leaving the house and practiced for 14 or more hours a day.


quote:

Since its release, Trout Mask Replica has been acknowledged not only as Captain Beefheart's masterpiece, but as one of the greatest albums of all time.

Wiggy Marie
Jan 16, 2006

Meep!
Forgive me if this has been mentioned already, but there is an excellent short documentary featuring an interview with the pilot of flight 232 called One Hell of a Tale. Here is part 1 of 6:

http://youtu.be/OPu0chBQeUk

Wiggy Marie has a new favorite as of 12:55 on Apr 9, 2015

Ague Proof
Jun 5, 2014

they told me
I was everything

The case of Ramil Safarov is deeply bizarre.

quote:

Ramil Sahib oglu Safarov (Azerbaijani: Ramil Sahib oğlu Səfərov; born August 25, 1977) is an officer of the Azerbaijani Army who was convicted of the 2004 murder of Armenian Army Lieutenant Gurgen Margaryan. During a NATO-sponsored training seminar in Budapest, Safarov broke into Margaryan's dormitory room at night and axed him to death while Margaryan was asleep.

Notice the present tense.

quote:

In January 2004, the 26-year-old Ramil Safarov, along with another officer from Azerbaijan, went to Budapest (Hungary), to participate in the three-month English language courses, organized by NATO's Partnership for Peace program for military personnel from different countries. Two Armenian officers, a 25-year old Gurgen Margaryan and Hayk Makuchyan, also participated in this program.

quote:

Safarov attacked Margaryan as he was sleeping with the axe and delivered 16 blows to his body, which almost severed Margaryan’s head. The noises woke up Kuti, who was shocked seeing the Azerbaijani officer standing by Gurgen’s bed with a long ax in his hands. As Kuti later testified, “By that time I understood that something terrible had happened for there was blood all around. I started to shout at the Azerbaijani urging him to stop it. He said that he had no problems with me and would not touch me, stabbed Gurgen a couple of more times and left

After the other Armenian locked the door-

quote:

Safarov went to look for Hayk in the room of the Serbian and the Ukrainian roommates, showing them the blood-stained axe and stating that he thirsted for nobody's blood but Armenian

The killer's words:

Ramil Safarov posted:

If not here and now, then I would do the same thing any other time and in any other place. If there were more Armenians here I would like to kill all of them. It is a pity this was the first occasion and I hadn't managed to get better prepared for this action... My calling is to kill all the Armenians

quote:

On April 13, 2006, a Hungarian court sentenced Safarov to life imprisonment without right of appeal for 30 years.

quote:

After serving eight years of the life sentence, Safarov was extradited under the framework guidelines of the 1983 Strasbourg Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons and transferred to Azerbaijan on August 31, 2012.[3] Although the Hungarian government stated that it had received assurances from the Azerbaijan government that the remainder of the sentence would be enforced, President Ilham Aliyev issued a pardon immediately upon Safarov's arrival in Baku and ordered that he be "freed from the term of his punishment."[33]

Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiyev promoted Safarov to the rank of major and the Defense Ministry of Azerbaijan provided him with an apartment and over eight years of back pay

Hero-worship of a literal axe murderer:

Presidential Administration of Azerbaijan Novruz Mammadov posted:

Yes, he is in Azerbaijan. This is a great news for all of us. It is very touching to see this son of the homeland, which was thrown in jail after he defended his country's honor and dignity of the people.

Man kills one Armenian and tries to kill another on racial grounds, shows no remorse or signs of insanity and is later extradited and hailed as a hero for axing a man to death.

Kurtofan
Feb 16, 2011

hon hon hon
The 40 Azeri who voted for Armenia during the Eurovision were detained. Azerbaijan really doesn't like Armenia and Armenians, and I think the feeling is mutual.

All because of some territory dispute.

Kurtofan has a new favorite as of 13:19 on Apr 9, 2015

Wasabi the J
Jan 23, 2008

MOM WAS RIGHT

The Endbringer posted:

If for but to not honey great of fever nine forty two!
Iron folk you but then dog dock George.

Seriously though, aphasia is messed up.

CONTENT:

The recording sessions of "Trout Mask Replica" by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band









http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PenaCaptainBeefheart.ogg

This poo poo sounds like what insanity must feel like :stare:

quote:

In the end, after the album's recording, Beefheart ejected French from the band by throwing him down a set of stairs, telling him to "Take a walk, man" after not responding in a desired manner to a request to "play a strawberry" on the drums.

WHAT THE gently caress DO YOU MEAN PLAY A STRAWBERRY ON THE DRUMS????

Another article pretty clearly shows he was loving nuts.

quote:

He expressed bewilderment that anybody should listen to his music. "I don't know how people can stand it. Who would want to be beat, slapped, have their wig pulled off, if they have one for sure. I can't stand falsies. When I was three or four I found one of my grandmother's falsies, and it had NO NIPPLE. It was a hip shape, and that old foam – like a soya-bean steering wheel". His voice rose in a deafening bellow – "Blow your top! BLOW YOUR TOP!", causing everybody in the room to cast anxious looks in our direction.

Wasabi the J has a new favorite as of 13:38 on Apr 9, 2015

Parasol Prophet
Aug 31, 2012

We Are Best Friends Now.

KozmoNaut posted:

Flying is very safe, but in the few cases where it goes bad, it goes very bad.

I think that's the issue. You're more likely to get in a car crash, but you're also more likely to survive one of those. You're also in control as the driver-- you can at least try to brake, swerve, duck, dive out of the car before it goes off the cliff, get out once you're in the water, whatever. You can avoid speeding, pull over if the weather gets unexpectedly bad or you start hearing a weird noise from the engine, give a wide berth to semis/people transporting ominous, poorly-secured ladders on top of their cars. At least in a car I can try to save myself, and there's a chance of it working.

Whereas if the plane's stabilizer blows out at 30,000 feet, most often there's precisely gently caress-all you can do to affect your chances; just hope the pilots can pull off a crash landing and you got one of the lucky seats that stays attached to the most-intact part of the fuselage. That's what unnerves me.

Double Plus Good
Nov 4, 2009

I work with patients with this in the hospital and rehab outpatient. It's pretty unnerving to see it unfold, especially Wernike's. Broca's (expressive) aphasia isn't so bad because it's nonfluent, so you'll just have a patient struggling to generate the word "cup" for 5 minutes. Sometimes you can give them a cue like "you drink from a..." And their brain will produce "cup." But asking them to name things spontaneously is nearly impossible. I was doing confrontational naming with a guy who had anomic aphasia, and he had these windows of clarity but could, for the most part, only produce his name, "telephone," and "clock." I asked him, "What is this?" and patted his bed, and his response was "Telephone. No. Telephone. I KNOW that's a telephone. No, tele..." Then he stopped and sat there shaking his head. "It's bad. That's all there is. I know it's bad." Having the awareness of the deficit is rough. But spontaneous recovery kicked in and he did much better after that.

But there are a lot of treatment protocols. And being able to understand language puts them in a better position to use other tools, like AAC devices and communication board, to be able to communicate with people.

Now, Wernike's will freak a patient's family out significantly more. It's hard for them to grasp, that their speech is there but it's entirely meaningless, they're fluent but it's all a word salad empty jumble. And not understanding speech limits the therapy options to very very few. You rely on a lot of pictures and gestures, but sometimes even that is impaired.

china bot
Sep 7, 2014

you listen HERE pal
SAY GOODBYE TO TELEPHONE SEX
Plaster Town Cop
I didn't see this anywhere in the thread, but it's worth reposting either way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin

A drilling rig experiences one of the more noteworthy instances of explosive decompression -

wikipedia posted:

Coward, Lucas and Bergersen were exposed to the effects of explosive decompression and died in the positions indicated by the diagram. Subsequent investigation by forensic pathologists determined Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient, violently exploded due to the rapid and massive expansion of internal gases. All of his thoracic and abdominal organs, and even his spine, were ejected, as were all of his limbs. Simultaneously, his remains were expelled through the narrow trunk opening left by the jammed chamber door, less than 60 centimetres (24 in) in diameter. Fragments of his body were found scattered about the rig. One part was even found lying on the rig's derrick, 10 metres (30 ft) directly above the chambers. The deaths of all four divers were most likely instantaneous.

Less unique but equally horrifying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_Alpha

A repair and a missing permit lead to a catastrophe -

wikipedia posted:

9:52 p.m. The permit for the overhaul was found, but not the other permit stating that the pump must not be started under any circumstances due to the missing safety valve. The valve was in a different location from the pump and therefore the permits were stored in different boxes, as they were sorted by location. None of those present were aware that a vital part of the machine had been removed. The manager assumed from the existing documents that it would be safe to start Pump A. The missing valve was not noticed by anyone, particularly as the metal disc replacing the safety valve was several metres above ground level and obscured by machinery.

wikipedia posted:

12:45 a.m. The entire platform had [slipped into the sea]. Module (A) was all that remained of Piper Alpha.

china bot has a new favorite as of 16:55 on Apr 9, 2015

showbiz_liz
Jun 2, 2008

Double Plus Good posted:

Now, Wernike's will freak a patient's family out significantly more. It's hard for them to grasp, that their speech is there but it's entirely meaningless, they're fluent but it's all a word salad empty jumble. And not understanding speech limits the therapy options to very very few. You rely on a lot of pictures and gestures, but sometimes even that is impaired.

Can these people communicate by drawing? Like, if they're thirsty, could they draw a glass of water? Or is that ability similarly impaired?

pienipple
Mar 20, 2009

That's wrong!
It's entirely case by case. I have a very mild aphasia where I lose words and it's frustrating and embarrasing. I have to either talk around the word that's hosed up at the moment or try to jar it loose by describing it.

Good soup!
Nov 2, 2010

I know there's been a lot about plane crashes on the past few pages, and I have to admit my own morbid curiosity for reading about them, but there is one YouTube channel which provides interesting reconstructions of several high profile incidents but it appears he took some of them down perhaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1277wt-7Us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV3QVw0A9Y0

The loving view inside the cockpit at 11:44 in Part 2 :gonk:

Double Plus Good
Nov 4, 2009

showbiz_liz posted:

Can these people communicate by drawing? Like, if they're thirsty, could they draw a glass of water? Or is that ability similarly impaired?

It depends. Drawing, writing, and reading are all assessed separately from language. Like, you'll have a patient who can't tell you his address but can read a complex passage and nod yes or no to answer context questions, or a patient who can verbally spell any word but can't write it down. And then sometimes there will be neglect, which is also a fascinating subject: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect which is crazy to see manifest. A patient may eat only the left side of their tray, or think that their left arm has been amputated.

There are various drawing based therapy programs, and you usually just try a bunch until something sticks.

benito
Sep 28, 2004

And I don't blab
any drab gab--
I chatter hep patter

Double Plus Good posted:

It depends. Drawing, writing, and reading are all assessed separately from language.

And reading in different scripts can impact different parts of the brain, meaning that you can be dyslexic in one script but not in another:

quote:

For years the latter viewpoint had the upper hand. But last September a team of researchers led by Li Hai Tan published a paper in Nature saying: Not so fast. Li and friends performed brain scans of Chinese readers, both normal and dyslexic, who were taking reading tests. They found that normal Chinese readers show increased activity in the brain's left middle frontal gyrus, thought to specialize in remembering visual patterns (e.g., the thousands of Chinese characters), whereas Chinese dyslexics show less activity there. In contrast, readers of English show high activity in a different cranial district called the left temporoparietal regions, whereas English dyslexics show less.

The shrewd will now think: Jeez, sounds like you could be dyslexic in one language but not the other. Exactly. Commenting on Li's work in the Guardian, British neuroscientists Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang point to the case of Alan, who has English parents but was raised in Japan. Alan is severely dyslexic in English but has no problems reading Japanese. Naturally, say Butterworth and Tang. They think dyslexia is the same for everyone, and affects "phonemic analysis"--the ability to convert letters into sounds, which the reader then assembles into syllables, words, sentences, etc. Alan's problem presumably is that he's lousy at phonemic analysis but OK at the skills needed to decode Japanese. (Japanese, so we're clear, uses various scripts in addition to Chinese pictograms but still basically matches one symbol to one syllable.) Butterworth and Tang suggest that the dyslexia = sucks-at-phonemic-analysis theory also explains why there are fewer Chinese dyslexics: phonemic analysis is an extra step for which Chinese readers have less need.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2591/is-it-possible-to-be-dyslexic-in-chinese

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/news040830-5.html

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

Ms Boods
Mar 19, 2009

Did you ever wonder where the Romans got bread from? It wasn't from Waitrose!
I"m reading all of these airplane stories in an airport lounge, waiting for my flight to be called (8 hour, trans-Atlantic).

Keep them coming! (I have a hugely morbid fascination with reading about plane crashes :smith:)

Crow Jane
Oct 18, 2012

nothin' wrong with a lady drinkin' alone in her room

Ms Boods posted:

I"m reading all of these airplane stories in an airport lounge, waiting for my flight to be called (8 hour, trans-Atlantic).

Keep them coming! (I have a hugely morbid fascination with reading about plane crashes :smith:)
I always, always get Andrew Bird's "Fiery Crash" stuck in my head at airports and on flights. It's a lovely song, but perhaps not the best lyrics to think about in that situation.

LargeHadron
May 19, 2009

They say, "you mean it's just sounds?" thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are.

Ms Boods posted:

(I have a hugely morbid fascination with reading about plane crashes :smith:)

You and me both. There's a series on Netflix called Air Disaster that I've been hooked on recently. Some cool re-enactments and analyses.

13Pandora13
Nov 5, 2008

I've got tiiits that swingle dangle dingle




LargeHadron posted:

You and me both. There's a series on Netflix called Air Disaster that I've been hooked on recently. Some cool re-enactments and analyses.

I really, really loving wish Nexflix or Prime would get Mayday/ACI. It's so good, and you can get the majority on YouTube, but the quality really varies.

3
Aug 26, 2006

The Magic Number


College Slice
I was just reminded of a documentary from a couple of years back where a group of researchers jammed a Boeing 727 full of sensors and crash dummies so they could fly it remotely into the Sonoran desert and get some real experimental data on what goes on at the point of impact. Interestingly, this kind of test has only been done twice, the first time in 1984 by NASA and this:

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

The footage captured from inside the plane on impact is actually really neat, but the experimental results as summed up by the program are kind of pedestrian: "if the plane goes in nose-first, the passengers up front are probably going to die!"

chird
Sep 26, 2004

The last flight I took was delayed. The other waiting passengers and I were treated to 3 hours of air disaster reenactments on the LCD screens in Manila airport terminal 3 before it was time to get onboard.

Was just some kind of discovery channel marathon but I read my onboard safety card carefully that night.

Rochallor
Apr 23, 2010

ふっっっっっっっっっっっっck
The Wikipedia page for John C. Lilly seems kind of sanitized. It does give away the game in the very introduction, but, I don't think it really backs up the extraordinary second sentence.

quote:

John Cunningham Lilly (January 6, 1915 – September 30, 2001) was an American physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer and inventor.

He was a researcher of the nature of consciousness using mainly isolation tanks,[1] dolphin communication, and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination.

To be fair, it does mention that he believed that he was receiving messages from aliens.

quote:

In 1974 Lilly's research using various psychoactive drugs led him to believe in the existence of a certain hierarchical group of cosmic entities, the lowest of which he later dubbed Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO) in an autobiography published jointly with his wife Antonietta (often referred to as Toni). To elaborate, "There exists a Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (CCCC) with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control (GCC). Within GCC is the Solar System Control Unit (SSCU), within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (ECCO).

However, it doesn't really go into depth on his experiments with dolphins, which feels like burying the lead because one of those experiments was teaching dolphins to talk, and it ended with a researcher giving a dolphin handjobs.

quote:

Lovatt reasoned that if she could live with a dolphin around the clock, nurturing its interest in making human-like sounds, like a mother teaching a child to speak, they'd have more success...The radical nature of Lovatt's idea appealed to Lilly and he went for it. She began completely waterproofing the upper floors of the lab, so that she could actually flood the indoor rooms and an outdoor balcony with a couple of feet of water. This would allow a dolphin to live comfortably in the building with her for three months....

Lovatt selected the young male dolphin called Peter for her live-in experiment...Lovatt would attempt to live in isolation with him six days a week...

But there was something getting in the way of the lessons. "Dolphins get sexual urges," says the vet Andy Williamson, who looked after the animals' health at Dolphin House. "I'm sure Peter had plenty of thoughts along those lines."

"Peter liked to be with me," explains Lovatt. "He would rub himself on my knee, or my foot, or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls," she says. But transporting Peter downstairs proved so disruptive to the lessons that, faced with his frequent arousals, it just seemed easier for Lovatt to relieve his urges herself manually.


"I allowed that," she says. "I wasn't uncomfortable with it, as long as it wasn't rough. It would just become part of what was going on, like an itch – just get rid of it, scratch it and move on. And that's how it seemed to work out. It wasn't private. People could observe it."

For Lovatt it was a precious thing, which was always carried out with great respect. "Peter was right there and he knew that I was right there," she continues. "It wasn't sexual on my part. Sensuous perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. Not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that's really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter. That was part of Peter."

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Return_To_Launch_Site_.28RTLS.29
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6fSUaZlsWw

quote:

Return To Launch Site (RTLS) was the first abort mode available, and could be selected just after SRB jettison. The shuttle would have continued downrange to burn excess propellant, as well as pitch up to maintain vertical speed in aborts with an SSME failure. After burning sufficient propellant, the vehicle would have pitched all the way around and begun thrusting back towards the launch site. This maneuver was called the Powered Pitcharound (PPA), and was timed to ensure less than 2% propellant remained in the external tank by the time the shuttle's trajectory would bring it back to the Kennedy Space Center.



quote:

Just before main engine cutoff, the orbiter would be commanded to pitch nose-down to ensure proper orientation for external tank jettison, since aerodynamic forces would otherwise cause the tank to recontact the orbiter. The SSMEs would cutoff, and the tank would be jettisoned as the orbiter used its RCS to increase separation. Once the orbiter cleared the tank, it would make a normal gliding landing about 25 minutes after lift-off.

Should a second SSME have failed at any point but during PPA, the shuttle would not have been able to make it back to the runway at KSC, but the crew would be able to bail out. A failure of a second engine during the PPA maneuver would have led to loss of control and subsequent loss of crew and vehicle (LOCV).

(Bailout was added after the Challenger disaster, and consisted of blowing off the crew hatch so that a large pole would then be extended for the astronauts to slide down, to keep them from hitting the wing.)


quote:

Astronaut Mike Mullane referred to the RTLS abort as an "unnatural act of physics," and many pilot astronauts hoped that they would not have to perform such an abort due to its difficulty.

quote:

To provide an incremental non-orbital test, NASA considered making the first mission an RTLS abort. However, STS-1 commander John Young declined, saying, "let's not practice Russian roulette."

Okan170
Nov 14, 2007

Torpedoes away!

To be entirely fair, by the end of the program, they had enough data to say for certain it would have been successful. Additionally, worries about hypersonic retropropulsion turned out to have been somewhat overblown (thanks SpaceX). Still, the act of flipping a Space Shuttle around and killing posigrade velocity in the upper atmosphere is some seriously touchy stuff. If anything, it shows how drat unsafe the shuttle was, especially prior to Challenger. Sometimes when people complain about NASA being too "safety oriented" they forget that "not safety oriented" meant strapping 7 astronauts into a giant spaceplane with literally no provision for anything besides a happy runway landing, no parachutes and no pressure suit because it was too drat expensive to design the thing with the capability of safe escape.

Melaneus
Aug 24, 2007

Here to make your dreams and nightmares come true.

3 posted:

I was just reminded of a documentary from a couple of years back where a group of researchers jammed a Boeing 727 full of sensors and crash dummies so they could fly it remotely into the Sonoran desert and get some real experimental data on what goes on at the point of impact. Interestingly, this kind of test has only been done twice, the first time in 1984 by NASA and this:

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

The footage captured from inside the plane on impact is actually really neat, but the experimental results as summed up by the program are kind of pedestrian: "if the plane goes in nose-first, the passengers up front are probably going to die!"

I'm amazed that despite the entire cockpit area getting ripped off, an engine kept humming right along and may have done its thing for eight hours if they didn't drown it (or something caught fire).

Pondex
Jul 8, 2014

Rochallor posted:

The Wikipedia page for John C. Lilly seems kind of sanitized. It does give away the game in the very introduction, but, I don't think it really backs up the extraordinary second sentence.


To be fair, it does mention that he believed that he was receiving messages from aliens.


However, it doesn't really go into depth on his experiments with dolphins, which feels like burying the lead because one of those experiments was teaching dolphins to talk, and it ended with a researcher giving a dolphin handjobs.

The podcast "The Dollop" has a pretty funny episode devoted to this guys "research". Nr. 8: The dolphin.

His research was also a big inspiration for the movie Altered States.

Tiberius Thyben
Feb 7, 2013

Gone Phishing


Crow Jane posted:

I always, always get Andrew Bird's "Fiery Crash" stuck in my head at airports and on flights. It's a lovely song, but perhaps not the best lyrics to think about in that situation.

I prefer "One More Red Nightmare", by King Crimson.

Ms Boods
Mar 19, 2009

Did you ever wonder where the Romans got bread from? It wasn't from Waitrose!

Crow Jane posted:

I always, always get Andrew Bird's "Fiery Crash" stuck in my head at airports and on flights. It's a lovely song, but perhaps not the best lyrics to think about in that situation.

Happily uneventful flight (aside from some woman who tried to jump the queue and board with the first class/'do you have small children?' early boarders, and was still arguing with the stewards by the door when the rest of us proles got on). I watched Nightcrawler and had a pretty decent bacon sandwich towards morning.

I had the EastEnders theme stuck in my head because for once it was a brilliantly sunny morning and the plane flew low up the Thames on its way into Heathrow; that's always been my favorite thing about trans-Atlantic flights :buddy:

I've watched some of those documentaries/re-enactments on YouTube; they're like crack. I also tend to read black box transcripts for crashes. What in the heck is wrong with me?

RaceBannon
Apr 3, 2010

VidaGrey posted:

How do people stay alive in Australia?

I was listening to a MonsterTalk podcast a few weeks ago and they had an Australian guest on to talk about poisonous spiders. One of the hosts (an American) said something about Australia being dangerous and the guest said that she never understood that. She said that North America has far more dangerous animals than Australia. One of the other hosts (an Australian who lives in the US) agreed with her.

Not to mention people get shot all the drat time in the US.

Dachshundofdoom
Feb 14, 2013

Pillbug
Do Australians think we're constantly dodging hails of gunfire from all directions when we walk down the street? I won't deny that the US has a lot of shootings but it also has slightly more people and landmass than Australia, so that inflates the numbers a bit. As for the animals thing, most of the dangerous creatures in the US are pretty drat big and isolated to particular regions.

Speaking of terrible things and the US, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. 146 people burned to death or jumped from 10th story windows because the owners locked the doors and fire escapes to prevent unauthorized breaks.

fistful of hammers
Nov 11, 2011

Dachshundofdoom posted:

Speaking of terrible things and the US, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. 146 people burned to death or jumped from 10th story windows because the owners locked the doors and fire escapes to prevent unauthorized breaks.
Not to mention that the majority of the workers were teenage immigrant girls. The few means of escape available were either inaccessible, locked, or broken/non-functional. The only silver lining is that, up until that point, it was the biggest sweatshop disaster, and brought attention to unethical work conditions. Many laws and regulations were put into place after the fire to preserve workers' lives and make work conditions more fair and humane.

GEORGE W BUSHI
Jul 1, 2012

Dachshundofdoom posted:

Do Australians think we're constantly dodging hails of gunfire from all directions when we walk down the street? I won't deny that the US has a lot of shootings but it also has slightly more people and landmass than Australia, so that inflates the numbers a bit. As for the animals thing, most of the dangerous creatures in the US are pretty drat big and isolated to particular regions.

Those numbers are done per 100,000 people and Australia's relative lack of people doesn't really factor into that, Australia's firearm death rate is 0.83 which is more comparable to India's (which has a lot more people than the U.S. and Australia combined) at 0.48 than America's at 10.30 (anyway, if you only count the parts of Australia where people actually live it's probably got a higher population density than the USA).

GEORGE W BUSHI has a new favorite as of 18:59 on Apr 10, 2015

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



You might need reword that, cause I can't tell if you're saying India has a huge number of people but a low firearm death rate, or that it has a huge firearm death rate and got the number wrong.

Edit: Looked it up and India does have a huge population but low gun rated death rate, but an intentional homicide rate that is very similar to that of the United States. Apparently Indians just use other weapons. Though there is something somewhat odd about American gun deaths. Unlike most countries with a high gun-related death rate America's gun-deaths are for the most part not homicides but instead suicides. If you own a gun and live in America you're statistically twice as likely to use it to kill yourself as you are to use it to kill anyone else.

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showbiz_liz
Jun 2, 2008

RaceBannon posted:

I was listening to a MonsterTalk podcast a few weeks ago and they had an Australian guest on to talk about poisonous spiders. One of the hosts (an American) said something about Australia being dangerous and the guest said that she never understood that. She said that North America has far more dangerous animals than Australia. One of the other hosts (an Australian who lives in the US) agreed with her.

I had this exact conversation with an Australian coworker in the US. Apparently, if you grow up around a bunch of poisonous yet tiny creatures, you just get used to it, but the notion of large predators who are capable of eating a person - bears, wolves, mountain lions, etc - is terrifying. None of those in Australia, if you don't count sharks.

AnonSpore
Jan 19, 2012

"I didn't see the part where he develops as a character so I guess he never developed as a character"
Don't dingos eat people, especially babies?

mr. mephistopheles
Dec 2, 2009

showbiz_liz posted:

I had this exact conversation with an Australian coworker in the US. Apparently, if you grow up around a bunch of poisonous yet tiny creatures, you just get used to it, but the notion of large predators who are capable of eating a person - bears, wolves, mountain lions, etc - is terrifying. None of those in Australia, if you don't count sharks.

Or crocodiles.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Well yeah that's why we own guns, keep nature in check. Well that and killing ourselves apparently.

RaceBannon
Apr 3, 2010

showbiz_liz posted:

I had this exact conversation with an Australian coworker in the US. Apparently, if you grow up around a bunch of poisonous yet tiny creatures, you just get used to it, but the notion of large predators who are capable of eating a person - bears, wolves, mountain lions, etc - is terrifying. None of those in Australia, if you don't count sharks.

I think another thing is that all the intensely venomous spiders in both North America and Australia develop mythic status in people's minds but in reality hardly anyone dies from them. One of the most infamous is the black widow or the redback spider. Even if you get bitten by one, its usually not fatal.

Moose, however, are loving dangerous I hear.

Solice Kirsk
Jun 1, 2004

.

Seeing as they account for more predatory killings on human beings than any other animal, I'd say having a few large mammalian predators is a damned blessing.

BOOTY-ADE
Aug 30, 2006

BIG KOOL TELLIN' Y'ALL TO KEEP IT TIGHT

PresidentBeard posted:

You might need reword that, cause I can't tell if you're saying India has a huge number of people but a low firearm death rate, or that it has a huge firearm death rate and got the number wrong.

Edit: Looked it up and India does have a huge population but low gun rated death rate, but an intentional homicide rate that is very similar to that of the United States. Apparently Indians just use other weapons. Though there is something somewhat odd about American gun deaths. Unlike most countries with a high gun-related death rate America's gun-deaths are for the most part not homicides but instead suicides. If you own a gun and live in America you're statistically twice as likely to use it to kill yourself as you are to use it to kill anyone else.

This is the most unnerving part to me and says a hell of a lot about health care and the mental states of people living in the US, when someone is more likely to off themselves than kill someone else.

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doug fuckey
Jun 7, 2007

hella greenbacks
I've heard the argument a few times before, but it still doesn't seem equivalent to me. In the northeast US, a bear, a wolf, or whatever is something most people have probably not seen in the flesh in the wild at least more than once or twice. And even if you have, they probably ran away scared from you at a hundred yards or more. But learning a particular evasive goose-walk and emptying out your boots every morning because something tiny might poison you? Nice try.

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