Aesop Poprock posted:

Err weird question but... on a scale of one to ten how offended would you be if I put my dick in your pocket and later claimed that was you saying you wanted to marry me

quote:

the assumptions made in determining the revised wind loading were inadequate, in that they assumed all windows were closed. However, if the glass in a window had broken, or somebody had gone out leaving a window open, a wall panel could suffer pressure on one side and suction on the other, to an extent that the panels on the upper levels of the building might still be sucked out
that construction defects (failure to build as designed), had left unfilled gaps between floors and walls throughout, hidden only by skirting boards and ceiling paper, which left the building without fire separation (or acoustic separation) between flats. Tall blocks of flats in the UK are permitted relatively narrow staircases because the requirement for full fire separation between floors means that it is actually safer for people above the fire to stay in their flats rather than walk down the stairs. Without fire separation, all people above would need to escape, which would not be possible in the existing narrow staircases.
that further construction defects had led to the whole weight supported by each wall panel being supported off the panel beneath by two steel rods, instead of being spread evenly along the panel, leading to extremely high stresses that the concrete was not designed to withstand
that the strengthening brackets which had been fitted during the rebuilding were in many cases not properly attached, since they were fastened to hollow-core slabs, and in many cases they had been bolted only to the thin concrete surrounding the cores, which was inadequate to take the stress.[4]

Khazar-khum posted:

Anyways, here's a clusterfuck: Ronan Point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point

quote:

At approximately 5:45 am on 16 May 1968, resident Ivy Hodge went into her kitchen in flat 90, a corner flat on the 18th floor of the building, and lit a match to light the stove for a cup of tea. The match sparked a gas explosion that blew out the load-bearing flank walls, removing the structural supports to the four flats above. It is believed that the weakness was in the joints connecting the vertical walls to the floor slabs. The flank walls fell away, leaving the floors above unsupported and causing the progressive collapse of the south-east corner of the building.

The building had just opened, and three of the four flats immediately above Hodge's were unoccupied. Four of the 260 residents were killed immediately and seventeen were injured, including a young mother who was stranded on a narrow ledge when the rest of her living room disappeared. Hodge survived, despite being blown across the room by the explosion—as did her gas stove, which she took to her new address.

outlier posted:

American hippopotamus

outlier posted:

I may have encountered the following story in this thread, but it is such an incredible, unbelievable story, it bears repeating for those who haven't encountered it:

American hippopotamus, the unlikely story of two killers, several wars, grand impersonation, a decades-long rivalry and friendship, spies and the plan to populate America with hippos.

Aesop Poprock posted:

Oh thanks I just remembered that mother who wrote into a newspaper or something about how healthy it is that she masturbates her retarded adult son

edit: I guess it was a dad http://www.rdm.co.za/lifestyle/2015/07/02/why-i-m-masturbating-my-disabled-son

quote:

These include The Netherlands, which has a grant scheme through which people with disabilities can receive public money to pay for sexual services up to 12 times a year. In Taiwan, an NGO called Hand Angel trains volunteers to masturbate the disabled.

quote:

In 1953, a young man named Henry Gustav Molaison, of Hartford, Connecticut, lost his memory and helped to invent neuroscience. Henry Molaison's amnesia was the result of a highly risky "psychosurgical" procedure, an operation designed to cure the debilitating epilepsy he had suffered since childhood. In an attempt to remove the part of the brain that was causing Henry's fits, two holes were drilled in the front of his skull and a portion of his brain, the front half of the hippocampus on both sides, and most of the almond-shaped amygdala, was sucked out. The procedure, hopeful at best, went badly wrong and Henry, then aged 27, was left with no ability to store or retrieve new experiences. He lived the subsequent 55 years of his life, until his death in 2008, in the permanent present moment.

Henry Molaison's tragedy was, however, perhaps also the single most significant advance in understanding the function of memory made in the past century. Until his operation, it had been believed that memory was a property of the whole brain. The accident of his surgery proved a large part of its capacity to be localised in this one area. The "cleanness" of Henry's amnesia made his brain the perfect subject for study of cognitive function in many other ways, too. After his operation, living first with his parents and later with carers, he became known to science as "HM" to protect his identity. It was through these initials that a young postgraduate researcher called Suzanne Corkin, now professor of behavioural neuroscience and head of the Corkin Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, got to know him.

Their relationship seemed a little bit like fate. When Corkin came across Henry's case in medical journals from the late 1950s, she discovered that their lives had already overlapped in curious ways. She had grown up a couple of miles from him, in Connecticut, and as a child had lived over the road from the surgeon who had operated on Henry's brain; the surgeon's daughter had been her childhood friend. In 1962, as part of her research, Corkin interviewed Henry. Over the next 46 years they spent many days in each other's company, though for Henry, of course, it was always the first time. Corkin has now written a compelling memoir of that bond between scientist and subject, Permanent Present Tense, a relationship which Henry once described neatly: "It's a funny thing – you just live and learn. I'm living and you're learning."

quote:

The striking thing about Henry's memory loss was how specific it was. He forgot all of his experiences after the operation within 30 seconds, but he retained a good deal of the texture of life he knew up until the age of 27. His personality remained intact, he still had above average IQ and language skills, though for more than 50 years he was able to acquire only the tiniest fragments of self-knowledge.

Speaking to Corkin by phone at her lab in Boston, I ask if she has missed Henry since his death. She laughs a little. "I feel that in a way he is not gone," she says. "Partly because I have been writing this book but also because when he died he donated his brain to MIT. So we continue to study him. He has gone but is still very present for us every day."

quote:

One of the fascinating, unsettling impulses in reading Henry's life is that sense of identity being a bundle of all of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Henry loved to relate the few clear memories of his childhood, over and over, though he lacked a context for them and the face he surprised himself with in the mirror each morning did not quite connect with them. Corkin heard those stories many times over the years; every time she left the room for a minute and returned to Henry he introduced himself as if they had never met before, and told the stories again. Some were the family lore of how his father had moved north from Louisiana; others involved going roller skating as a child in the park, taking banjo lessons, driving with his parents along the Mohawk Trail.

quote:

Henry was not capable of learning new information, though his knowledge of past events, the Wall Street Crash, Pearl Harbor and so on, was clear. Only a very few tiny details of TV programmes he watched repetitively ever stuck. He could, however, learn and retain new motor skills, which led to important understanding of the difference between conscious memory and unconscious. The latter category would include learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, or even play the piano – things that the brain encodes and transmits to the muscles through conditioning, memories which we come to think of as intuitive.

quote:

As we talk, I wonder if Henry was able to feel things like guilt or regret, emotions with a temporal component. She suggests not, though "he knew that he'd had a brain operation. He knew not many people had had the operation before him. He never used the word 'experiment', but I think he had the sense of himself as that word. Of the original operation, he once said: 'I think they possibly did not make the right movement at the right time.'"

She did not remind Henry of this too often, however, in the same way that it was too painful, after his parents passed away, to have to let him know, as if for the first time, that they were dead. The amnesia was both a prison and a liberation in this sense. His operation had given Henry by default the kind of concentration on the present to which Buddhist meditation might aspire. "He was never sad or depressed," Corkin says, "though I don't think any of us would want to change places with Henry. He had a tragic life and he made the best of it. He showed the world you could be saddled with a tremendous handicap and still make an enormous contribution to life. I found his resilience inspirational."

quote:

I wonder, what are the images of him that come first to the top of her own mind in that curious process of remembering?

She offers three, all pointedly emotional. In the first, during an interview, Henry had gone to the bathroom with a nurse and when he returned she gave him her usual question: have we spoken before, Henry? On this occasion, for whatever reason, he said: "Yes, we were speaking just now." Her second memory is of the last time she saw him, when he was demented and uncomprehending; she stood by him and said who she was, and she had a sense that he turned toward her with a trace of a smile.

The final memory is the oddest of all. "It is when we put his brain on a plane to San Diego," she says. "It was strapped into a seat of its own. I watched the plane take off on its trip across the country and I had this swelling of emotion, remembering Henry and his plane ride. It was the perfect goodbye."

xoFcitcrA posted:

Also this demonstrates how small the explosion was that collapsed the corner of the building. That was a brand-new highrise which was just waiting for an excuse to collapse.

Aesop Poprock posted:

So is Locked-in Syndrome real?

Khazar-khum posted:

I have to comment on this.

I have seizures. Afterwards, I usually can't speak. This effect lasts for anywhere from a few minutes to hours. When I do start to speak, I am slow, unsteady, halting as I search for words. The more I speak, the more my ability to do so returns. Within a short time of resuming speech, I am back to normal. I can write, though my handwriting is worse than normal and it takes longer than usual to scrawl out a message.

Scared the hell out of me the first couple of times it happened.

Regrettable posted:

This is seriously the worst part for me. I can deal with the exhaustion and general lack of motor skills but not being able to communicate with people around me is incredibly frustrating.

Charles Fort posted:

That, early in July, 1836, some boys were searching for rabbits’ burrows in the rocky formation, near Edinburgh, known as Arthur’s Seat. In the side of a cliff, they came upon some thin sheets of slate, which they pulled out.

Little cave.

Seventeen tiny coffins.

Three or four inches long.

In the coffins were miniature wooden figures. They were dressed differently in both style and material. There were two tiers of eight coffins each, and a third one begun, with one coffin.

The extraordinary datum, which has especially made mystery here:

That the coffins had been deposited singly, in the little cave, and at intervals of many years. In the first tier, the coffins were quite decayed, and the wrappings had moldered away. In the second tier, the effects of age had not advanced so far. And the top coffin was quite recent looking.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

In 1836, three Scots boys were goofing around. They found a cave full of tiny coffins containing dolls.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/edinburghs-mysterious-miniature-coffins-22371426/?no-ist


Since 1836 people have been wondering what the heck was going on. One of the most enticing theories is that the original seventeen coffins (many were destroyed at the time or have vanished since) correspond to the seventeen victims of Burke and Hare, none of whom got proper burial on account of being dissected.

TheFallenEvincar posted:

TheFallenEvincar posted:

Captain Monkey posted:

What? This is just garbled text.

outlier posted:

I may have encountered the following story in this thread, but it is such an incredible, unbelievable story, it bears repeating for those who haven't encountered it:

American hippopotamus, the unlikely story of two killers, several wars, grand impersonation, a decades-long rivalry and friendship, spies and the plan to populate America with hippos.

Travis343 posted:

PYF internet gaslighting techniques

packetmantis posted:

What the hell is wrong with you?

Sarcopenia posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Hazzard

Ironically named, non-doctor woman starves wealthy patients to death. Poetic justic ensues.

Sarcopenia posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Hazzard

Ironically named, non-doctor woman starves wealthy patients to death. Poetic justic ensues.

The talking apple posted:

The MS Estonia, was a cruise ferry which sank in the Baltic Sea on September 28, 1994 and claimed 852 lives.

In December 1994, a diving company, Rockwater A/S, was tasked to investigate why she sank and filmed over 68 hours of footage from divers exploring the multiple decks of the ship.

Some of what Rockwater filmed is available on Youtube.

for some possible glances of floating bodies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyQ8WYOg28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suPcxqNOo10

The talking apple posted:

The MS Estonia, was a cruise ferry which sank in the Baltic Sea on September 28, 1994 and claimed 852 lives.

In December 1994, a diving company, Rockwater A/S, was tasked to investigate why she sank and filmed over 68 hours of footage from divers exploring the multiple decks of the ship.

Some of what Rockwater filmed is available on Youtube.

for some possible glances of floating bodies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyQ8WYOg28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suPcxqNOo10

Gibfender posted:

Really good long form article on this disaster:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/

Gibfender posted:

Really good long form article on this disaster:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/

Professor of Cats posted:

Wow. Holy hell.

Gibfender posted:

Really good long form article on this disaster:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/

quote:

Survival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history, Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control.

Professor of Cats posted:

Wow. Holy hell.

Gibfender posted:

Really good long form article on this disaster:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/

quote:

...Indeed, some of the first people to follow Rolf Sörman and his three female companions outside onto the nearly empty promenade were brazen thieves—a band of young Estonian men who took advantage of the confusion to tear a gold chain off Sörman's neck and to strip cash and jewelry from the women. With startling speed they robbed others on the deck and then disappeared inside, apparently to work through the crowds that were just beginning to surge up the staircases. They were confident, as criminals tend to be, and they must not even have considered that the ship might then trap them, though the best evidence is that it did.

Gibfender posted:

Really good long form article on this disaster:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/