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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. Surprisingly, this is true in the world generally [PDF], even when war is taken into account. It's always seemed strange to me too, but I guess that people who commit suicide aren't deterred by the possibility of getting caught. Also, it's harder to kill someone who is trying to avoid being killed.
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Apr 13, 2015 15:46
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What's a good podcast about strange events/phenomena and unsolved mysteries? I tried an episode of Thinking Sideways and hated the format. I'd much rather listen to one in the TAL/Reply All reporting style than Thinking Sideways' "3 idiots joke about murder while reading a wikipedia entry".
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Apr 13, 2015 17:35
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Futility Closet does some unsolved mysteries and events, although their usual fare is "a collection of entertaining curiosities in history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and mathematics, designed to help you waste time as enjoyably as possible" so most of the episodes aren't too mysterious. I like that Greg Ross doesn't try to solve the mysteries or anything, just presents the facts and concludes with "If anyone can make any sense of this, please write in and let me know."
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Apr 14, 2015 01:20
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Brocktoon posted:"3 idiots joke about murder while reading a wikipedia entry". Ah, the Caustic Soda style.
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Apr 14, 2015 01:29
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Brocktoon posted:What's a good podcast about strange events/phenomena and unsolved mysteries? I tried an episode of Thinking Sideways and hated the format. I'd much rather listen to one in the TAL/Reply All reporting style than Thinking Sideways' "3 idiots joke about murder while reading a wikipedia entry".
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Apr 14, 2015 01:33
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Wild T posted:THOR was an awesome idea in theory. Some ideas were scaled sized of projectiles from full-sized ones (your telephone poles) for hardened bunkers down to small-diameter or cluster rods for raining hypervelocity molten metal down on troop formations or other large area targets. Rods from God sound like the least efficient way to blow something up ever. It costs $4000-10000 to a kilo of mass into low earth orbit, and all that energy comes from rocket fuel. All that effort just to drop an inert payload, when you could drop one stuffed with explosives instead.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:20
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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. They ran a computer simulation and it turned out the only winning move was not to play
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Apr 14, 2015 05:40
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Everybody dies but the one who kills the most is still the winner. 
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Apr 14, 2015 07:41
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Stick Insect posted:Everybody dies but the one who kills the most is still the winner. From the people who made Darwinia. It's a simple game, but it can get very tense.
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Apr 14, 2015 10:21
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There's an LP of it on the archive, if anyone wants to watch a series of nuclear wars play out.
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Apr 14, 2015 12:57
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Meet Clive Wearing He has one of the worst cases of amnesia ever recorded after a Herpes complex virus attacked his brain in 1985. quote:Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness. Because of damage to the hippocampus, an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory, he is completely unable to form lasting new memories – his memory only lasts between 7 and 30 seconds.[2] He spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds, 'restarting' his consciousness once the time span of his short term memory elapses (about 30 seconds). He remembers little of his life before 1985; he knows, for example, that he has children from an earlier marriage, but cannot remember their names. His love for his second wife Deborah, whom he married the year prior to his illness, is undiminished. He greets her joyously every time they meet, either believing he has not seen her in years or that they have never met before, even though she may have just left the room to fetch a glass of water. When he goes out dining with his wife, he can remember the name of the food (e.g. chicken); however he cannot link it with taste, as he forgets what food he is eating by the time it has reached his mouth. For more information here is a New Yorker piece about him And a clip from a BBC documentary on him called Man Without a Memory. There's also an ITV documentary that can be found called The Man With a 7 Second Memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y
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Apr 14, 2015 13:38
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Deborah is married to a Labrador retriever, basically. Jesus. 
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Apr 14, 2015 14:04
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BarbarousBertha posted:Deborah is married to a Labrador retriever, basically. Jesus. He seems happy enough... I guess. What a bizarre, terrifying condition.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:10
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"Do you know where they are?" "No idea, I don't know where I am." That's just terrifying, but at least he has absolutely no idea himself.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:37
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KozmoNaut posted:"Do you know where they are?" Waking up every morning must be particularly frightening.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:53
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Syd Midnight posted: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. Sure, go for it
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Apr 14, 2015 14:56
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Omnishambles posted:Waking up every morning must be particularly frightening. And I thought 50 First Dates was creepy enough as it was.
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Apr 14, 2015 14:59
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KozmoNaut posted:"Do you know where they are?" I loved the amazingly lucid section where he's describing never having any long term thoughts. The upper crust english accent really seals in the uneasiness of listening to him
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Apr 14, 2015 15:18
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Honestly the best part is how happy he is to see his wife or w/e every time she shows up
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Apr 14, 2015 15:30
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Mr. Flunchy posted:He seems happy enough... I guess. There's another video from the early 1990s that paints a slightly more grim picture. Clive Wearing's Diary posted:I DO LIVE!!! Because every moment he is waking up for the first time, he feels compelled to record this astonishing moment in writing to reflect on it later. When he sees that someone has already written in the diary, and in his own handwriting too, he crosses it out and dismisses it as a clear fraud. That way, this new entry will really record his thoughts and not whatever nonsense was written above it. QuoProQuid has a new favorite as of 17:20 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 17:15
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QuoProQuid posted:There's another video from the early 1990s that paints a slightly more grim picture. It reads like a journal from a survival horror game.
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Apr 14, 2015 17:59
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bean_shadow posted:He has one of the worst cases of amnesia ever recorded after a Herpes complex virus attacked his brain in 1985. This happened to a friend of mine. She was initially diagnosed with meningitis near the end of 2013, but turned out to actually be Herpes in the brain, and had to get some of her brain removed. I think she pretty much lost like a solid 6 months, and had a spotty memory for a pretty long time. Said she got As in her classes, but did so by rote memorization of as much text as she could for exams and doing assignments day of, or she wouldn't remember to. Basically strengthening her 'at the moment' memory, in her words. She's doing a lot better now, but still has issues with direction/not getting lost. She hasn't had an easy time at all, but it's terrifying to think that she could have ended up like Clive Wearing.
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Apr 14, 2015 18:56
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He knows she's his wife, but he feels like it's the first time he met her? That doesn't really compute.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:19
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Kurtofan posted:He knows she's his wife, but he feels like it's the first time he met her? That doesn't really compute. That's because there's nothing wrong with your brain.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:20
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All of this from herpes, that's really hosed up. Make sure you clean those glasses, people. Kurtofan has a new favorite as of 19:31 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 19:28
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Kurtofan posted:He knows she's his wife, but he feels like it's the first time he met her? That doesn't really compute. If it's the same as they guy in the Oliver Sacks book it's because his relation to specific people was committed to long term memory just fine, but all individual memories of them interacting were damaged in the individual onset.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:29
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bamhand posted:That's because there's nothing wrong with your brain. I wouldn't go that far.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:29
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Kurtofan posted:He knows she's his wife, but he feels like it's the first time he met her? That doesn't really compute. It's more that he thinks that he hasn't seen her in years instead a few seconds.
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Apr 14, 2015 22:23
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Omnishambles posted:Waking up every morning must be particularly frightening. Relatedly, I wonder how he sleeps, and how he dreams.
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Apr 14, 2015 22:35
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Interesting thing is that he was a pianist and while he does not remember what he's playing, he's still able to play because of his procedural memory. Pretty crazy stuff. Another case to do with amnesia is the story of HM (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison) who was severely lobotomized to cure his seizures, leading him to have anterograde and retrograde amnesia, but without affecting his procedural and short term memory. What I find especially awful about it is that we owe him a huge amount for what we know about how memory is mediated in the brain but it's just incredibly hosed up nonetheless that he had to go through what he did.
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Apr 15, 2015 00:08
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SC Bracer posted:Interesting thing is that he was a pianist and while he does not remember what he's playing, he's still able to play because of his procedural memory. Pretty crazy stuff. He had to have court-appointed guardians for most of his life. He was basically institutionalized forever because of it.
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Apr 15, 2015 02:17
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Syd Midnight posted: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. Yes please
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Apr 15, 2015 03:09
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20 years ago, someone derailed an Amtrak train in the middle of the desert. That's basically it. Culprits left a manifesto but were never heard from again. e: Wikipedia link and text of the letters they left. RNG has a new favorite as of 09:05 on Apr 15, 2015 |
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Apr 15, 2015 09:02
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Death of Edgar Allan Poe was as unnerving as his stories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe
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Apr 15, 2015 09:11
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SC Bracer posted:Interesting thing is that he was a pianist and while he does not remember what he's playing, he's still able to play because of his procedural memory. Pretty crazy stuff. From the relevant articles list at the bottom of that, meet S.M., the woman that cannot experience fear: quote:S.M., also sometimes referred to as SM-046, is a female patient first described in 1994[1] who has had exclusive and complete bilateral amygdala destruction since late childhood as a consequence of an extremely rare genetic condition known as Urbach–Wiethe disease. S.M. is notable in that, because of this damage, she has little to no capacity to experience fear or anxiety in her everyday life, a characteristic which has resulted in her being dubbed by the media as the "woman with no fear".[2] S.M. has been studied extensively in scientific research, and has helped researchers to elucidate the function of the amygdala.[3] I am not sure how you can experience more empathy if you are biologically incapable of experiencing their fear and anxiety (and so relating to them), but regardless being unable to experience the full spectrum of emotion sounds incredibly sad.
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Apr 15, 2015 11:24
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It's important to know that you can have sympathy without empathy, the two get lumped together a lot. You can genuinely sympathize and offer somebody comfort and a nice cup of tea and a blanket, while not really understanding what they're going through emotionally, as opposed to emphasizing, where you're almost mirroring the same emotions as the person you're comforting, "stop it, you're making me cry too now" I guess though if it's only fear-like emotions she can't feel, she can kind of make up for it in those situations by taking shared experiences and social knowledge to cover the gap, maybe even use the gap itself as an emotional link. "Oh you were robbed, I was robbed too, people say being robbed is very traumatic and I've seen the ways they react that I don't, so I can sympathize with what you must be going through, even while I can't feel those emotions myself"
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Apr 15, 2015 13:27
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YF-23 posted:From the relevant articles list at the bottom of that, meet S.M., the woman that cannot experience fear: S.M. got interviewed on the Invisibilia podcast, if you want to hear her talk. She has a weird voice, too, kind of scratchy and whispery, but she sounds so drat earnest and wide-eyed about everything. http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/377515477/fearless?showDate=2015-01-16
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Apr 15, 2015 14:11
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YF-23 posted:I am not sure how you can experience more empathy if you are biologically incapable of experiencing their fear and anxiety (and so relating to them), but regardless being unable to experience the full spectrum of emotion sounds incredibly sad. It makes more sense to be sad over people suffering from depression. They can't experience emotions normally either but they have it much worse than this woman. Hell, maybe I'd take her condition and I'm not even depressed.
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Apr 15, 2015 14:54
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Doctor Malaver posted:It makes more sense to be sad over people suffering from depression. They can't experience emotions normally either but they have it much worse than this woman. Hell, maybe I'd take her condition and I'm not even depressed. An irrational, pant-making GBS threads fear of spiders is exactly what every person needs to lead a full and fulfilled life. As Aristotle said "the path to eudaimonia is paved with that time you piddled in your trousers".
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Apr 15, 2015 17:02
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Doctor Malaver posted:Death of Edgar Allan Poe was as unnerving as his stories. T The last bar he drank in is still in operation, though obviously it's changed hands a few times. It's a bit of a tourist trap, and they use the connection as a selling point. Relatedly, this isn't scary or unnerving, just sort of cool: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe_Toaster
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Apr 15, 2015 17:10
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