Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
stickyfngrdboy
Oct 21, 2010
In Britain sometime in the late nineties, they brought in a law which means we can only buy paracetamol in packs of sixteen. Before that they came in tubs of hundreds or whatever.

Suicides by overdose reduced, because even though you could still buy a shitload of paracetamol, you'd have to go to several shops to have enough to suicide with, and suicide is usually an impulsive act, which is why shooting yourself in the face is the best way to go about it.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Eau de MacGowan
May 12, 2009

BRASIL HEXA
2026 tá logo aí

stickyfngrdboy posted:

In Britain sometime in the late nineties, they brought in a law which means we can only buy paracetamol in packs of sixteen. Before that they came in tubs of hundreds or whatever.

Suicides by overdose reduced, because even though you could still buy a shitload of paracetamol, you'd have to go to several shops to have enough to suicide with, and suicide is usually an impulsive act, which is why shooting yourself in the face is the best way to go about it.

life will find a way :ironicat:

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Ozz81 posted:

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.

Well to be fair in Australia it's 6 times more likely for you to kill yourself with a gun on purpose than it is for you to kill someone else with a gun on purpose. It's just that as gun-related deaths go up in a country it's usually because the country has some sort of mass civil violence causing murder to be the largest cause of gun death. In the US though gun-related deaths are really high but homocide is a relatively small component of it, implying that the problem may very well be less that Americans are suicidal and more that suicidal Americans have access to means of killing themselves.

RaceBannon
Apr 3, 2010

Zesty Mordant posted:

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.

I live in the US and I check my boots for spiders. I've found a black widow in them once and found one in my children's bathroom once as well. I was quite freaked out until I learnt that they weren't nearly as dangerous as reported.

From my understanding; there really are only two spider species to worry about in Australia. The redback and the funnelweb. But no one in Australia has died of a spider bite of any kind since 1979. Redbacks don't even necessarily require anti-venom.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Whats a good alternative to Sword and Scale? I've finally given up on it because the dude is a moralizing twat idiot who ruins his show despite being really good at gathering and presenting primary sources

Chrtrptnt
Aug 18, 2008

Frog Act posted:

Whats a good alternative to Sword and Scale? I've finally given up on it because the dude is a moralizing twat idiot who ruins his show despite being really good at gathering and presenting primary sources

Yeah, I've been looking for a replacement ever since one episode he went on a tangent about a lawyer being sleazy for doing the exact same thing any lawyer would do. Legal representation, even by murderers, is something that is guaranteed by pretty much every government but the host was trying to make this lawyer seem evil just for representing a killer. Haven't come across anything related to true crime in such a way especially for lesser known crimes and topics.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Chrtrptnt posted:

Yeah, I've been looking for a replacement ever since one episode he went on a tangent about a lawyer being sleazy for doing the exact same thing any lawyer would do. Legal representation, even by murderers, is something that is guaranteed by pretty much every government but the host was trying to make this lawyer seem evil just for representing a killer. Haven't come across anything related to true crime in such a way especially for lesser known crimes and topics.

Yeah, the last straw for me was the episode where he kept pausing to emphasize how insane it was that someone hadn't gotten the death penalty, interspersed with clips of her family being thankful she wasn't dead as though they were some kind of evil motherfuckers for not wanting their daughter killed. blech. The daughter in question was a complete piece of poo poo who deserved to be punished for the rest of her life (microwaved a baby) but the host just seems to have a really knee jerk, bloodlusty worldview.

Frog Act has a new favorite as of 01:00 on Apr 11, 2015

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell

AnonSpore posted:

Don't dingos eat people, especially babies?

Nope, and there are very few dingoes around anyway. A dingo is basically just a wild dog, and most wild dogs want nothing to do with humans in general - we rightly scare the poo poo out of them. There's been a handful of attacks, but you're much more likely to be attacked by a domestic dog here, or even by a Wolf over in America. The only people in danger from dingoes are very small children or injured people who can't defend themselves, living in areas where the dingoes have lost fear of man.

They make excellent pets, by the way.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



That sounds similar to American wolves besides the whole good bets thing.

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell

PresidentBeard posted:

That sounds similar to American wolves besides the whole good bets thing.

They're pretty much just dogs that adapted over ~4000 years to fill the same niche as Wolves, so yeah, there's a lot of similarity there. They're more doglike overall, though, and much easier to tame as a result than full-blooded wolves or coyotes are, from what I hear. The only issue with them as pets is they're used to having a ton of space and they're very, very smart dogs - so they tend to slip their enclosures and go walkabout, which scares people. That and trying to tame older ones is a recipe for disaster if they've had any negative history with humans.

Nuclear War
Nov 7, 2012

You're a pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty girl

PresidentBeard posted:

In the US though gun-related deaths are really high but homocide is a relatively small component of it,

*something about only 10% or so of the population being gay, so OBVIOUSLY*

thatbastardken
Apr 23, 2010

A contract signed by a minor is not binding!

Loomer posted:

They make excellent pets, by the way.

Uhhhhhhhh......

Crossbred dingoes can make excellent working dogs - see the Australian Cattle Dog and the Kelpie. They don't generally make great pets, especially not fresh wild or 'pure' dingoes, because they haven't spent tens of thousands of years being bred for domestic purposes. Also it's (depending on jurisdiction) illegal to keep them as pets without a license.

Zipperelli.
Apr 3, 2011



Nap Ghost

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.

Quoting for posterity.

From the FBI Crime Statistics 2013 stats (most recent)

quote:

There were an estimated 14,196 murders last year.
Firearms were used in 69 percent of the nation’s murders, 40 percent of robberies, and 21.6 percent of aggravated assaults (weapons data is not collected on rape incidents).

And from the CDC on suicide-by-firearm CDC Statistics

quote:

Firearm suicides
Number of deaths: 21,175

Literally twice as likely to kill yourself than someone else if you use a gun.

Wild T
Dec 15, 2008

The point I'm trying to make is that the only way to come out on top is to kick the Air Force in the nuts, beart it savagely with a weight and take a dump on it's face.
Funny thing about aircraft crashes. I am a human lightning rod for aircraft crashes, though never involving myself (at least, so far). I've been in the Air Force for four assignments. There has been at least one crash while at each one, including one assignment where there weren't even any freaking planes.

My first assignment was to a pilot training base where a trainee on his first solo flight managed to get into a situation he couldn't recover from and ejected. He was found on the porch of a nearby farm drinking a Dr. Pepper, fortunately unhurt but had killed a perfectly good airplane and an innocent field.

I move to Dover after a couple of years. While there a Reserve crew managed to land a C-5 Galaxy short of the runway, breaking the fuselage into three pieces and fortunately all surviving. I was in the gym maybe a mile away when this massive pile of metal slammed into the ground at high speed and never heard it. Then again, it probably would have sounded like Crossfit.

From there I move to Alaska and have the joy of working on the casualty assistance team when a hotshot pilot* flies a C-17 in a way not endorsed by the manufacturer or the laws of physics and gets four guys killed the day before an air show. The videos are available online, fortunately cutting off just before impact. It's... Very bad but so is packaging up DVDs of Elmo talking about why Daddy isn't coming home to send to peoples' kids, so that guy is still an rear end in a top hat in my book. Shortly afterwards an F-22 pilot noses into a frozen swamp in the middle of the winter, which everyone suspected was due to the aircraft's sneaky habit of deciding the pilot was getting too much oxygen.

Then I move to Germany and get sent to a base with no aircraft. Score! I spend two years without jinxing anything above ground level, then get sent to Kyrgyzstan for six months. Barely after I get there, we all get locked down and are wondering what the hell is going on, are we bombing someone else now? Nope, a KC-135 went down in the mountains and we all get to spend our time looking for important pieces and fighting with Kyrgyz over anything they thought was important enough to try to get money for.

Even when I left Germany, the German Wings crash happens within a week of my flight out. I swear to god at this point I'm convinced that I'm unknowingly the patron saint of aircraft mishaps and need to be isolated away from anything with wings that isn't a butterfly or a maxi pad.

* Who, oddly enough, I had known at my first assignment and had a reputation as a hardass know-it-all instructor pilot.

Loomer
Dec 19, 2007

A Very Special Hell

thatbastardken posted:

Uhhhhhhhh......

Crossbred dingoes can make excellent working dogs - see the Australian Cattle Dog and the Kelpie. They don't generally make great pets, especially not fresh wild or 'pure' dingoes, because they haven't spent tens of thousands of years being bred for domestic purposes. Also it's (depending on jurisdiction) illegal to keep them as pets without a license.

Purebred dingoes, raised from a young age, are a fine dog breed for pets so long as you don't mind a very intelligent dog. They actually did spend thousands of years being bred for domestic purposes - they've just reverted over the last few to a wild state. They were originally domesticated dogs from either India or south-east Asia, brought in with waves of migration only a few thousand years back. In my part of NSW, they can be kept without significant restriction and without a license because they are considered legally no different to any other dog. You can own them with licenses in the ACT, WA, and western NSW.

If you take a full-grown dingo and try to make it a pet, yes, that's usually a bad idea. If it's had any negative exposure to humans before, it moves into terrible territory. If you take a young pup and properly socialize it, you've got a good pet. It's the same with wild dogs: Adults cannot (or at least, usually cannot) be made into safe pets. Their pups still can be. It's also the same with some of the 'vicious' breeds of regular dog: proper socialization and care makes them safe, loving, and reasonable pets.

(also the kelpie is not a dingo crossbreed. Only the ACD is confirmed to be of dingo stock)

thatbastardken
Apr 23, 2010

A contract signed by a minor is not binding!
They don't make great pets for the same reasons that border collies make bad pets - they are smart, high energy and goal focused. Good traits in a working dog. Bad in a family pet because they get bored and gently caress poo poo up. Even if you get them as a pup and raise them right they still aren't domestic dogs, and have a statistically higher rate of attacks on people and animals, although a portion of that could be reporting issues.

Loomer posted:


It's also the same with some of the 'vicious' breeds of regular dog: proper socialization and care makes them safe, loving, and reasonable pets.


sometimes. doesn't always take. genetics plays a role in dog aggression.

Probably we should talk about this in Pet Thunderdome if you want to keep going though.

C.M. Kruger
Oct 28, 2013

Wild T posted:

I move to Dover after a couple of years. While there a Reserve crew managed to land a C-5 Galaxy short of the runway, breaking the fuselage into three pieces and fortunately all surviving. I was in the gym maybe a mile away when this massive pile of metal slammed into the ground at high speed and never heard it. Then again, it probably would have sounded like Crossfit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkg_Y1ZmbWc
"Guys, I'm concerned."

8 Ball
Nov 27, 2010

My hands are all messed up so you better post, brother.

Wild T posted:

Funny thing about aircraft crashes. I am a human lightning rod for aircraft crashes, though never involving myself (at least, so far). I've been in the Air Force for four assignments. There has been at least one crash while at each one, including one assignment where there weren't even any freaking planes.

In the interests of personal safety, where are you based now?

Nettle Soup
Jan 30, 2010

Oh, and Jones was there too.

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

And aphasia - imagine not being able to understand words and being unable to stop speaking gibberish (seems like a few GBS posters I know).

Welcome to the wonderful world of a-typical-migraines. They're basically strokes.

Does anyone know which air crash investigation it was in where a plane was shot by an anti-aircraft gun and they basically had to relearn how to fly it, while in the air?

A Pinball Wizard
Mar 23, 2005

I know every trick, no freak's gonna beat my hands

College Slice

It's, uh, it's not normal for air force guys to be dicking around in the cockpit like that, right? :stare:

Wild T posted:

Funny thing about aircraft crashes. I am a human lightning rod for aircraft crashes, though never involving myself (at least, so far).

I would think being in the air force, and thus very frequently around planes, would make you more likely to be around aircraft crashes. Not to mention there's a whole heap of magical thinking in this post (Germanwings happened a week after I left Germany! COINCIDENCE?!)

Not trying to sound like a jerk, I just hope you don't actually think there's any kind of cause and effect here.

Wild T
Dec 15, 2008

The point I'm trying to make is that the only way to come out on top is to kick the Air Force in the nuts, beart it savagely with a weight and take a dump on it's face.
An obvious coincidence of living around planes and planes crashing occasionally isn't as funny as the idea of being a bad luck charm.

Buh
May 17, 2008
The biggest factor is simply that most of the dangerous animals live in nondescript bushland while people live in ordinary cities and barely see wildlife at all.

About the only thing that genuinely is everywhere is venomous spiders, but they don't actively try to bite people; none of them kill especially fast; and we have effective anti venoms for every one of them. There hasn't been a fatality in over 30 years and there's only ever gonna be one if some poor gently caress gets bitten in the middle of the Nullabor or something.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Frog Act posted:

Whats a good alternative to Sword and Scale? I've finally given up on it because the dude is a moralizing twat idiot who ruins his show despite being really good at gathering and presenting primary sources

None really, unfortunately. Everybody else is trying to be the chucklehut.

Hobson
Oct 19, 2009

This is not the way I wish to be remembered.

Frog Act posted:

Whats a good alternative to Sword and Scale? I've finally given up on it because the dude is a moralizing twat idiot who ruins his show despite being really good at gathering and presenting primary sources

The thing that turned me off from Sword and Scale is when he called his friend using the chatlog voice and joked (for far too long) about eating his friends kids that night.

True Murder is interesting. He interviews authors who have written books about that weeks murderer. But, there are a lot of awkward pauses.

Your Gay Uncle
Feb 16, 2012

by Fluffdaddy

Frog Act posted:

Whats a good alternative to Sword and Scale? I've finally given up on it because the dude is a moralizing twat idiot who ruins his show despite being really good at gathering and presenting primary sources

phone posting so not sure if I can link it but Mind Of a Murderer is pretty good. A little short, but no real moralizing and no bizzarre tangents about the hordes of paranoid schitzophrenics waiting to eat your childrens eyeballs hiding around every corner.

Chillbro Baggins
Oct 8, 2004
Bad Angus! Bad!

Literally Kermit posted:

Back to Ghost Flights!

Not at all spooky, but in the same vein: the Cornfield Bomber. In 1970, an F-106 fighter jet on a training flight over Montana got into an unrecoverable flat spin. Pilot Gary Foust chopped the throttle to idle and ejected. Then it went from pants-making GBS threads terror to hilarity: Foust and his seat unassing the airplane caused its center of gravity to shift enough that it recovered from the spin and resumed straight and level flight. Foust, swinging under silk, watched as his empty aircraft gently glided to a belly landing in a nearby farmer's field.



The farmer went out to see what was going on, and found the plane, lubricated by the blanket of snow on the ground, still slowly moving forward under the power of its idling engine. He called the Air Force, who told him "just leave it alone, it'll run out of fuel soon enough."

The Air Force came and took the wings off, took it back to the base on a railroad flatcar, fixed the minor damage it had sustained in the "crash" (one officer on the recovery crew said that if it had a seat in it, he could have flown it out), and returned it to service for another 18 years until the type was retired. It's now on display at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. Foust, having drifted into the mountains, was quicly rescued by locals with snowmobiles and presumably also returned to service.

QuoProQuid
Jan 12, 2012

Tr*ckin' and F*ckin' all the way to tha
T O P

The Effects of Nuclear War is a Congressional Report produced in 1979 at the request of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Tasked at a period of particularly bad relations with the Soviet Union, Congress was interested in finding out whether the United States could survive a nuclear attack if worst came to worst. The immediate effects of a single "relatively small warhead" on Detroit were explained as such:

quote:

Out to a distance of 0.6 miles [1 km] from the center there will be nothing recognizable remaining, with the exception of some massive concrete bridge abutments and building foundations. At 0.6 miles some heavily damaged highway bridge sections will remain, but little else until 1.3 miles [2. I km], where a few very strongly constructed buildings with poured reinforced concrete walls will survive, but with the interiors totally destroyed by blast entering the window openings. A distance of 1.7 miles [2.7 km] (1 2-psiring) is the closest range where any significant structure wilI remain standing.

Of the 70,000 people in this area during non-working hours, there will be virtually no survivors. (See table 4.) Fatalities during working hours in this business district would undoubtedly be much higher. The estimated day-time population of the “downtown” area is something over 200,000 in contrast to the census data of about 15,000. If the attack occurred during this time, the fatalities would be increased by 130,000 and injuries by 45,000 over the estimates in table 4.

quote:

In the band between the 1.7- and the 2.7-mile (5 psi) circles... individual residences in this region will be totally destroyed... In this same ring, which contains a nighttime population of about 250,000, about half will be fatalities, with most of the remainder being injured.

quote:

n this ring only 5 percent of the population of about 400,000 will be killed, but nearly half will be injured (table 4). This is the region of the most severe fire hazard, since fire ignition and spread is more likely in partly damaged buildings than in completely flattened areas. Perhaps 5 percent of the buildings would be initially ignited, with fire spread to adjoining buildings highly likely if their separation is less than 50 feet [15 m]. Fires will continue to spread for 24 hours at least, ultimately destroying about half the building.

As table 5 shows, there would be between 4,000 and 95,000 additional deaths from thermal radiation in this band

Fortunately, the US Federal Government is extremely prepared to deal with such a catastrophe.

quote:

Even as transportation for the injured out of the area becomes available in subsequent days, the total medical facilities of the United States will be severely overburdened, since in 1977 there were only 1,407,000 hospital beds in the whole United States. Burn victims will number in the tens of thousands; yet in 1977 there were only 85 specialized burn centers, with probably 1,000 to 2,000 beds, in the entire United States.

quote:

[While interstate highways are surprisingly immune to blast effects and could be used by emergency vehicles], the majority of urban streets will be cluttered with varying quantities of debris, starting with tree limbs and other minor obstacles at 1 psi, and increasing in density up to the 12-psi ring, where all buildings, trees, and cars will be smashed and quite uniformly redistributed over the area. It could take weeks or months to remove the debris and restore road transportation in the area.

If you want something more fictional, you can read this account of how nuclear war might have unfolded in 1988. Here's how it begins:

quote:

12:05 PM CDT: Nuclear weapons are detonated aboard several Soviet satellites in low Earth orbit over the U.S. and other areas, generating electromagnetic pulses (EMP). This devastates electronics in these areas. Most unhardened computers and related equipment are rendered useless, destroying communication, information, and power supply networks on a nationwide scale. Transportation vehicles using electronics are inoperable. Many satellites are disabled. While few human casualties have occurred so far, much of the civilian elements of a continent-spanning society are devastated. For most American civilians this is the only warning of the coming attack they will receive: no effective civil defense program exists.

U.S. strategic bombers begin leaving their bases. This includes 25 B-52s and 5 B-1Bs in Texas, with four of these B-52s leaving Bergstrom AFB near Austin. These 30 bombers are carrying 400 nuclear bombs and missiles.

12:10 PM CDT: NATO missiles in Europe (U.S., British, and French weapons) are launched against Warsaw Pact targets. This includes U.S. Pershing II and Gryphon missiles, most of which were not yet retired under the INF treaty.

Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads begin reaching targets in Texas and other parts of the U.S. Over the next 15 minutes 55 SLBM warheads succeed in reaching targets in Texas out of 74 launched (the rest were on missiles that malfunctioned early in flight). In Travis County, a 1.5-megaton (1 mt equals the explosive energy of 1,000,000 tons of TNT) warhead detonates 2.5 km (1.5 miles) over Bergstrom AFB. Over the next few minutes ten warheads, each between 200 kilotons and 500 kilotons (1,000 kt equals 1 mt) detonate over Bergstrom and in a pattern extending 100 km (60 miles) to the north, west, and east--this in an attempt to destroy the four escaping bombers.

Each explosion produces a fireball which radiates intense light (flash) for about 10 seconds: all exposed combustible material ignites up to ranges of 3 to 9 km (2 to 5.5 miles); second degree burns to exposed skin and fires are produced up to 6.5 to 18.5 km (4 to 11.5 miles) away. The atmospheric shock wave (blast) from each explosion causes partial or complete destruction of all buildings within 1.5 to 4.5 km (1 to 3 miles) and causes moderate damage and 50% injuries or deaths at 5.5 to 15 km (3.5 to 9.5 miles) in the 10 to 40 seconds following detonation. (These figures represent the variation among 200-kt to 1.5-mt warheads exploded in the air or on the ground.) Severe damage and fires result in much of Austin.

nonathlon
Jul 9, 2004
And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

QuoProQuid posted:

If you want something more fictional, you can read this account of how nuclear war might have unfolded in 1988. Here's how it begins:

Note that this is an essay stating that the effects of nuclear war have been overstated and it won't be as bad as you'd think, honest ...

Zopotantor
Feb 24, 2013

...und ist er drin dann lassen wir ihn niemals wieder raus...

QuoProQuid posted:

If you want something more fictional, you can read this account of how nuclear war might have unfolded in 1988.

Not reading that. I was only 3 years out of (German) army service in 1988. (My unit was one that would have provided communication in place of the EMP-damaged equipment, some distance away from the front, so I might have survived the first week or so.)

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."

Please could someone make an effort post on all the scary poo poo that people have done due to sleepwalking/somnambulism? I think the list includes fatal accidents, rape and murder.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

outlier posted:

Note that this is an essay stating that the effects of nuclear war have been overstated and it won't be as bad as you'd think, honest ...

The effects of nuclear war are and probably were overstated, but isn't that better than being too cavalier about just chucking nukes around? I mean if it came down to it USA/USSR would've been airbursting them over massed troops, dropping little ones here and there like artillery, retaliation strikes over randomly chosen cities, etc. The kind of poo poo the so-called superpowers do in ticky tack proxy wars is appalling enough without adding nuclear weapons to the mix.

QuoProQuid
Jan 12, 2012

Tr*ckin' and F*ckin' all the way to tha
T O P

outlier posted:

Note that this is an essay stating that the effects of nuclear war have been overstated and it won't be as bad as you'd think, honest ...

It still concludes that over half the US population would die, with a third of the survivors afflicted with disease and mass starvation due to the destruction of the Great Plains.

While the effects have been overstated, the reality really isn't much better.

Mr. Gibbycrumbles
Aug 30, 2004

Do you think your paladin sword can defeat me?

En garde, I'll let you try my Wu-Tang style
There's not a single global nuclear war scenario that doesn't result in a horrific end-of-times hellscape for everyone in the civilised world.

The only people that might still be able to cling onto a sense of normalcy are maybe some self-sufficient and remote southern hemisphere communities, but all bets are off if nuclear winter fucks over their ability to produce food I guess.

The question that fascinates me is: will humanity learn from this? Or will the civilisation that arises from the ashes just blow themselves up again in the same way, Ad infinitum?

Mr. Gibbycrumbles has a new favorite as of 15:47 on Apr 12, 2015

Necrothatcher
Mar 26, 2005




Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:

The question that fascinates me is: will humanity learn from this? Or will the civilisation that arises from the ashes just blow themselves up again in the same way, Ad infinitum?

I believe the Planet of the Apes series covers this in some detail.

Alhazred
Feb 16, 2011




Mr. Flunchy posted:

I believe the Planet of the Apes series covers this in some detail.

So does A Canticle For Leibowitz.

nonathlon
Jul 9, 2004
And yet, somehow, now it's my fault ...

Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:

There's not a single global nuclear war scenario that doesn't result in a horrific end-of-times hellscape for everyone in the civilised world.

There's a famous study for nuclear war from Reagan's time (with a completely forgettable acronym that escapes me, part of SIOP), that worked on the premise that even if both countries were blasted to pieces, as long as the US "recovered" faster than the USSR, that could be counted as a victory. "Recovery" could take place on the scale of decades to centuries.

If you're working from premises like that, no good or rational plan will result.

Blue On Blue
Nov 14, 2012

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

Please could someone make an effort post on all the scary poo poo that people have done due to sleepwalking/somnambulism? I think the list includes fatal accidents, rape and murder.

Here's one to start off, I used this case for a paper back in college.

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

Kenneth Parks; who to put it bluntly, used sleeping as an excuse to murder, and got away with it.







Interesting to note that the judgement focused specifically on the 'impairment of the mind' --- s. 16(2) of the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1970, c. C-34, "the impairment of the mind" must be caused by illness, a disorder or an abnormal condition.



Is somnambulism not an abnormal condition? What metric did they use to determine abnormal versus normal?

Either way it was all the defense needed for a total acquittal.

Zamboni Rodeo
Jul 19, 2007

NEVER play "Lady of Spain" AGAIN!




Josef K. Sourdust posted:

Please could someone make an effort post on all the scary poo poo that people have done due to sleepwalking/somnambulism? I think the list includes fatal accidents, rape and murder.
Here's a very recent one from where I live.

The defense for Joseph Anthony Mitchell successfully argued that he was in a somnambulistic state when he killed his son and attempted to kill his two other children in September of 2010.

Here's an archive of articles covering the case from a local TV station.

quote:

"I didn't believe one word out of that man's mouth," one juror, who asked to remain anonymous, told ABC.

Why was he declared guilty when the evidence pointed to his guilt? According to one juror, their "hands were tied." They were not given the option of finding him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter -- they were told it was first-degree murder or nothing.

And why was it a choice of first-degree murder or nothing?

ABAJournal.com posted:

The defense had requested that jurors be given an option for an involuntary manslaughter verdict, District Attorney Roger Echols told ABC11. Echols said he objected because jurors were being instructed that the defendant was not guilty of any offense if he is unconscious.

Zamboni Rodeo has a new favorite as of 19:27 on Apr 12, 2015

Syd Midnight
Sep 23, 2005

C.M. Kruger posted:

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.

I've got Mullane's book "Riding Rockets" and one part, in which he describes in detail what the Challenger disaster would have been like for the people onboard, chilled me so much I never forgot it. I'm not sure if it's on-topic enough, the Wikipedia article probably isn't unnerving enough for reposting, but if anyone is interested I've been looking for an excuse to type out or copy/paste just that bit.

It's an interesting book, although he was admittedly a humongous macho rear end in a top hat. But he was about as close to the victims, and as close to being one himself, as anyone could be, and knew as much about the accident details and evidence as anyone could. There's something cathartic about his "how it must have gone down" story, as the post-explosion fate of the crew was shrouded in so much mystery. It's a kind of closure where your brain can go "ok now I know what probably happened" but goddamn is it depressing.

IIRC he seemed pretty adamant that the "pole slide" escape mechanism was just a token gesture that would have been impossible to use in any situation where it was needed.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

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 for those posts. I didn't realise that somnambulism has been used as an excuse for murder. I assumed that these were authentic cases. Can anyone provide bona fide examples of serious crimes actually committed while sleeping? I read that examples of accidental and deliberate self-injury that sounded genuine and thought that injuring others was also genuine. On reflection, I can see the advantage of pleading not guilty due to sleep-acting. After all, if it's murder in a private house with only perp and victim, who's there to contradict the claim? :(

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply