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POOL IS CLOSED posted:
Too much money, not enough sense.
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May 11, 2017 21:59
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Pick posted:Dogecoin gets dark
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May 11, 2017 23:07
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Pick posted:Dogecoin gets dark Its cool how memes filter through the whole internet culture til they emerge in the physical world as something a nazi or rapist thinks is funny
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May 11, 2017 23:13
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theflyingorc posted:You missed a lot. For instance, this is from a real NASCAR race: Everything else about this is horrible and makes me wonder why cryptocurrencies are so popular*, but this is legitimately so stupid that I can't help but laugh at it. *I've read far too much of the buttcoin thread, and I still don't understand why they're popular among people who aren't criminals. You'd think after the first dozen scams people would wise up but it keeps happening. It's like that sweet bro and hella jeff comic where one of them falls down stairs, just replace stairs with bitcoins.
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May 12, 2017 00:51
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Don Gato posted:Everything else about this is horrible and makes me wonder why cryptocurrencies are so popular*, but this is legitimately so stupid that I can't help but laugh at it. Is the buttcoin thread still around? Some of those mining rigs would fit perfectly in here or the OSHA thread.
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May 12, 2017 01:29
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Don Gato posted:Everything else about this is horrible and makes me wonder why cryptocurrencies are so popular*, but this is legitimately so stupid that I can't help but laugh at it. The scams are a feature, not a bug. Everyone thinks they're too smart to be scammed, so it'll just be them taking advantage of other people's losses.
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May 12, 2017 02:11
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Don Gato posted:Everything else about this is horrible and makes me wonder why cryptocurrencies are so popular*, but this is legitimately so stupid that I can't help but laugh at it. Same, plus the doge meme used to make me giggle a little bit, and it was subversive to the "serious" sponsors of NASCAR.
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May 12, 2017 03:07
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Does anyone have any particular favourite books with unnerving topics? I'm downloading the atomic accidents one from the last page but I'm about to send my computer into the shop and could use some reading material for the downtime. Basically any topic that's fit for this thread is fair game- thanks guys!
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May 12, 2017 07:41
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subpar anachronism posted:Does anyone have any particular favourite books with unnerving topics? I'm downloading the atomic accidents one from the last page but I'm about to send my computer into the shop and could use some reading material for the downtime. Basically any topic that's fit for this thread is fair game- thanks guys! "Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex" a really good sociological study of cannibalism across time and cultures. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll inadvertently learn terms like "Exophagic"!
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May 12, 2017 09:57
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subpar anachronism posted:Does anyone have any particular favourite books with unnerving topics? I'm downloading the atomic accidents one from the last page but I'm about to send my computer into the shop and could use some reading material for the downtime. Basically any topic that's fit for this thread is fair game- thanks guys! In the times of madness and People who eat darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry. The first one is about the end of the Suharto regime and the absolute balls out madness that happened over that and the second one is about Lucie Blackman who went to Japan to work as a hostess but then disappeared.
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May 12, 2017 10:15
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The Truth About Chernobyl by Grigori Medvedev. He was one of the investigators into the causes of the accident and after he defected he wrote a book on the causes. Really drives home exactly how bad it was, and how preventable, and how hosed up the Soviet bureaucracy was.
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May 12, 2017 13:09
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purple death ray posted:Dogecoin sponsored a NASCAR driver, what the heck does it look like??? Anybody can buy ad space on a Cup car if they have enough money. It was mentioned in the NASCAR thread in TVIV or SAS that Danica Patrick's main sponsors pay Stewart-Haas $16million a year to have their logo on her car for a third of the season, and she's just middlin'. The Reddit Dogecoin joke was actually pretty cheap: driver nobody's heard of qualified in a plain white car, the team was begging for sponsorship. See also the one sponsored by Trump's campaign last year. More on-topic: NASCAR wrecks can get pretty gnarly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnBRgC_btW0&t=62s The driver walked away with a broken wrist. They put pop-up spoilers on the cars to prevent that, and they mostly work, as demonstrated last Sunday at the same track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0VJUzNGtzk ~25 years ago when Rusty did his aerobatics, the 24 car would've been in the stands and the 47 doing what Rusty did, but the flaps stopped 'em. Those look bad, but they're actually good -- bleeding off the kinetic energy slowly. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. See the '01 Daytona 500, in which the color commentator was elated because his lil' brother won, but then his best friend died. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXGKys62TXw After that (and two other deaths in the same circumstances in the same year), a lot of previously-optional safety gear was made mandatory, and NASCAR hasn't had a driver die on the track since. But an awful lot of the rookies in that race have retired or written their resignation letter (including Dale Jr., quitting at the end of this season) at age 45 (Dale Sr. was 52) -- Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart, to name a few of the better-known ones in addition to The Only Dale Now. Not because they're worried about dying (it's nigh-impossible in the modern Cup car), but because they're worried about too many concussions -- no matter how good the car is, your brain still sloshes around in your skull when you take a hard hit, just like a boxer or football player. Dale Jr. sat out half of last season because of a concussion. 37-year-old Carl Edwards left the sport on an open-ended sabbatical at the end of last season (in which he won a few races, and was a finalist for the championship) to raise his kids, because he didn't want to be like old Muhammed Ali at 40. Can't blame 'em for getting out while they still have brains.
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May 12, 2017 15:33
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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subpar anachronism posted:Does anyone have any particular favourite books with unnerving topics? I'm downloading the atomic accidents one from the last page but I'm about to send my computer into the shop and could use some reading material for the downtime. Basically any topic that's fit for this thread is fair game- thanks guys! [Command and Control is a book that kept me up nights. It's about the nuclear arsenal from Manhattan Project onward, and the horrible no good very bad safety and security controls on the weapons. Also the hosed up people and policies of the cold war era.
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May 12, 2017 16:08
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Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer - About the Battle off Samar in the Pacific at the end of WWII, where through some serious stupidity by Bull Halsey, he let what remained of the main battle line of the Japanese Navy approach a group of unarmored escort carriers undetected and so a group of U.S. destroyers and destroyer escorts conducted a suicide charge and, for two and a half hours, fought a group of Japanese battleships, heavy cruisers, and destroyers to a standstill, allowing four of the six carriers to escape destruction. At the opening of the battle on for the Americans, one of the destroyer commanders Ernest E. Evans of Johnston begins taking fire and in response orders flank speed and a turn directly towards the Japanese without being ordered to do so. He dodges shellfire by navigating his ship into the shell splashes from the previous salvoes. His ship survived that run, and made another, on which they were joined by Samuel B. Roberts], whose Captain, Robert W. Copeland said over the intercom "A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can." The part that made it really unnerving to me was that the middle is filled with pictures of the battle and of some of the sailors, and one of the sailors Paul H. Carr, could be my grandfather's identical twin. Literally, I got out my grandpa's WWII Navy picture (he was in the Pacific at the time) and put them side by side, just to make sure that they literally weren't identical and that I didn't mistakenly actually have Paul H. Carr's picture somehow.
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May 12, 2017 18:08
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Delivery McGee posted:Can't blame 'em for getting out while they still have brains. ...or before they want to go out like Dick Trickle
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May 12, 2017 18:14
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Azathoth posted:Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors by James D. Hornfischer Neptune's Inferno by the same author is also good, its about the naval battles off of Guadalcanal. The creepiest part is that it is filled with survivors accounts and follows individuals on their doomed ships, both US side and IJN side. Did you know that fires can get hot enough to ignite paint rooms away from the actual fire? The crew of the USS Astoria found that out the hard way. Being on the receiving end of a ship's broadside is like something out of a horror movie.
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May 12, 2017 23:01
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Don Gato posted:Being on the receiving end of a ship's broadside is like something out of a horror movie. In Losing the War (it's excellent but i think its been posted here before) the discussion of Midway freaked me out for the same reason. At the end of the spear so to speak it's giant machines doing the actual fighting, ripping each other apart. Most of the people involved are running around inside them, never seeing the enemy, performing a function like a cog or a gut bacterium, knowing they may suddenly face horrific death at any time-- and even that death, even the total destruction of your body and life, is just incidental to the structural damage being done to your machine by another machine. poo poo dude
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May 12, 2017 23:35
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Don Gato posted:Neptune's Inferno by the same author is also good, its about the naval battles off of Guadalcanal. The creepiest part is that it is filled with survivors accounts and follows individuals on their doomed ships, both US side and IJN side. I remember watching a documentary about the Falklands War and a survivor of the HMS Sheffield being hit by an Exocet recounts himself trying to get out of the inferno and reaching up to climb a ladder and watching in horror as his skin just sort of fluttered around his hands in the breeze, because the skin had basically been burned loose. Wish I could remember the documentary it was, I'm sure I'm misremembering a lot, but that particular moment stays.
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May 12, 2017 23:44
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Keru posted:I remember watching a documentary about the Falklands War and a survivor of the HMS Sheffield being hit by an Exocet recounts himself trying to get out of the inferno and reaching up to climb a ladder and watching in horror as his skin just sort of fluttered around his hands in the breeze, because the skin had basically been burned loose. I remember a colleague of mine, same conflict, a cousin was a master diver, deep in the ship and as the Exocet hit through the ship his mate in the same cell was oblitorated as the missile went through, though he escaped... can't imagine
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May 13, 2017 00:03
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Don Gato posted:Neptune's Inferno by the same author is also good, its about the naval battles off of Guadalcanal. The creepiest part is that it is filled with survivors accounts and follows individuals on their doomed ships, both US side and IJN side. I was going to mention Neptune's Inferno because it's an amazing collection of first-hand accounts. Instead, I'll mention his third book, Ship of Ghosts. It follows the crew of the USS Houston from the salad days in the 30s as FDR's favorite ship for cruises, through the struggle at impossible odds against the Japanese onrush in the SW Pacific, to the crew's time as POWs working on the same hellish railroad featured in Bridge Over the River Kwai. If I could tell Amazon to just send me a copy of anything an author publishes, he'd be on my short list.
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May 13, 2017 04:30
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Jan Bondeson's Buried Alive is a pretty amazing book. It focuses on the fact that there haven't been hard rules for doctors on when otherwise healthy-looking people were dead for most of medical history, and so people have gone to great measures to make sure they weren't buried alive. There's a lot of history of the waiting mortuaries, where the fresh corpses were laid out on slabs with bells tied to them in case they twitched, and the safety coffin fads, and more. In Germany, people would tour the waiting mortuaries because the dead were kept until there was visible decay, and in the meantime they were just covered with plants and flowers up to the neck, which were considered very beautiful. Degenerate Star has a new favorite as of 05:10 on May 13, 2017 |
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May 13, 2017 05:05
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Antioch posted:[Command and Control is a book that kept me up nights. You beat me to it! This is a great book, using the framing device of nuclear missile maintenance going horribly wrong in a silo in Arkansas (while Clinton was governor!) to discuss (awful) nuclear policy and (lack of) safety from The Manhattan Project onwards. It's basically a loving miracle that one state or another wasn't blown to hell during the Cold War by America's own devices.
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May 13, 2017 11:45
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A couple on Hurricane Katrina: One Dead in Attic by Times-Picayune reporter Chris Rose https://www.amazon.com/1-Dead-Attic-After-Katrina/dp/1416552987/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494691955&sr=1-1&keywords=one+dead+in+attic I haven't read this one in a while so I can't remember much other than it was good.  Five Days at Memorial https://www.amazon.com/Five-Days-Me...ays+at+memorial This poo poo...recounting being trapped in a hospital with dozens of patients with lessening supplies and failing emergency power,and the decision made by some doctors to overdose some patients with morphine to hasten their deaths because they probably weren't going to make it. Also talks about how woefully unprepared our medical system is for a large scale disaster.
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May 13, 2017 17:21
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On that note, The Great Deluge is long but worth reading. Warning: do not read if you do not want to become homicidally angry at how utterly, utterly cocked up everything was from City Hall all the way up to the White House and how many people involved deserve to die in prison. Honorable mention for Ray Nagin barricading himself in his office and weeping, convinced that everyone in the Convention Center was laying siege to the building to lynch him.
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May 13, 2017 21:41
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Another good one is The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina. https://www.amazon.com/Storm-During-Hurricane-Katrina-Scientist/dp/0143112139 Also Brownie's book, where he tries to paint himself in a good light and utterly fails. https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Indifference-Perfect-Political-Hurricane/dp/1589794850 And finally, Rising Tide, about the great Mississippi flood of 1927. Like Katrina but 80 years earlier. https://www.amazon.com/Rising-Tide-Mississippi-Changed-America/dp/0684840022
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May 13, 2017 21:53
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From a review of a book about a woman seeking a career in law, with views opposed to the death penalty, being forced to research a death row case for a retrial and becoming convinced that the defendant deserves their conviction:
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May 13, 2017 22:47
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Degenerate Star posted:Jan Bondeson's Buried Alive is a pretty amazing book. It focuses on the fact that there haven't been hard rules for doctors on when otherwise healthy-looking people were dead for most of medical history, and so people have gone to great measures to make sure they weren't buried alive. There's a lot of history of the waiting mortuaries, where the fresh corpses were laid out on slabs with bells tied to them in case they twitched, and the safety coffin fads, and more. Bondeson has a new book out about the murder of Eliza Grimwood, a prototype Ripper murder some 50 years earlier. It may be of interest to some in the thread.
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May 13, 2017 22:55
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Another good one is The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina. The 1900 Galveston Hurricane by Erik Larson who wrote Devil in the White City Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
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May 14, 2017 01:56
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HisMajestyBOB posted:Also Brownie's book, where he tries to paint himself in a good light and utterly fails. Something I found interesting in The Great Deluge was that it painted a more sympathetic view of Brownie; basically a bureacrat who understood the gravity of the situation but was given no real power and had to clear everything through DHS (who didn't understand or care about whatever he was asking about) with an oblivious President and Vice President who didn't seem to know just how badly they hobbled FEMA by rolling it into DHS. As for how accurate that characterization is, I don't know; but given that they savage all other federal, state, and local officials, it is weird.
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May 14, 2017 04:23
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Interesting article on the BBC today about a mystery body found in Norway 46 years ago. I mean, it's no organ harvesting or blood draining tale but still... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-39369429
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May 14, 2017 08:41
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monkeytennis posted:Interesting article on the BBC today about a mystery body found in Norway 46 years ago. I mean, it's no organ harvesting or blood draining tale but still... This one has for some reason always made me very sad. For whatever reason that lady traveled alone to an unknown place to kill her self 
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May 14, 2017 12:56
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There was a case like that in the UK recently. This guy that had been living in retirement in Pakistan suddenly flew back to London, then the next day took a train north to Manchester, walked out of the city and killed himself. Nobody seems to be able to figure out why he chose to return and end it like that. There was a documentary on about him a few months ago and his family members (who he was estranged from; they had no idea he'd been living in Pakistan) talked about he had no clear connection to the moors, as far as they knew he'd never visited them in any of the time they'd known him. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39255114
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May 14, 2017 14:41
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If we're talking about sad deaths then Joyce Vincent is always the one I think of. She died and no one noticed for years....and she was surrounded by Xmas presents she had just bought and wrapped. Heres an article on it too: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/09/joyce-vincent-death-mystery-documentary
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May 14, 2017 14:52
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The isdal woman and the Taman shud case are the only two mysterious deaths that I'm 100% certain is some crazy cold war spy poo poo.
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May 14, 2017 15:28
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Solice Kirsk posted:If we're talking about sad deaths then Joyce Vincent is always the one I think of. She died and no one noticed for years....and she was surrounded by Xmas presents she had just bought and wrapped. as someone with social anxiety I really relate to Joyce. They talk a lot about how outgoing she was so if she suffered from some sort of anxiety or phobia it might have been extra shameful for her to admit to herself and others. You learn to compensate but at one point you just get exhausted and withdraw completely. I was really lucky that I found a job were they didn't care about work experience and the boss was really understanding and impressed that I was honest about my mental health problems from the get go. I also gained an incredible, supportive boyfriend and friends for life at that job. I'd probably be dead or a total hermit if I hadn't been that lucky. http://www.doenetwork.org/cases/245ufva.html The annandale Jane Doe is another weird one.
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May 14, 2017 16:19
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Cayleigh Elise has a video of the Jamison family mystery. Nothing new but fair summary. (Less sad plinky piano music over panned google-images photo.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6QJoagFKA Kind of bugs me that her first theory is a satanic cult killing....
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May 14, 2017 16:39
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Solice Kirsk posted:If we're talking about sad deaths then Joyce Vincent is always the one I think of. She died and no one noticed for years....and she was surrounded by Xmas presents she had just bought and wrapped. It's a sad story, but it made for a good album.
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May 14, 2017 17:13
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This all reminds me of the "Cipher in Room 214". The original article can't be found on the Seattle-Post Intelliigencer, which would make me thing it's an urban legend. But there's an actual article on the Seattle PI about the author of the article, Carol Smith, winning an award (they even have a dead link in the online article). I did find a "reprint" on some rando website, but since they're an idiot and formatting makes it all but unreadable you're going to want to cut and paste it into a text editor or something. http://www.doenetwork.org/media/news124.html I can't remember where I first heard about it, but it definitely unnerved me. And made me more than a little sad. quote:If there was anything out of the ordinary about the woman's arrival at the Hotel Vintage Park in downtown Seattle that autumn day, it was only the weather -- a near-record 80 degrees. That much is recorded. quote:What we do know is this: She made no phone calls. Ordered nothing from room service. Instead, in some unknown sequence, she put out the "Do Not Disturb" sign, applied pink Est?e Lauder lipstick and combed her short auburn hair. She wrote a note on hotel stationery, opened her Bible to the 23rd Psalm and mixed some cyanide into a glass of Metamucil. quote:What they didn't realize was this: Everything they thought they knew about Mary Anderson was a lie. Her name -- an alias, likely made up on the spot based on a later signature analysis. The New York address she'd given the hotel -- non-existent. The phone contact she left -- a wrong number.
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May 14, 2017 17:51
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Sarcopenia posted:This one has for some reason always made me very sad. For whatever reason that lady traveled alone to an unknown place to kill her self https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/de-kom-til-norge-og-dode-1.13428134
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May 14, 2017 22:11
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Gaius Marius posted:The isdal woman and the Taman shud case are the only two mysterious deaths that I'm 100% certain is some crazy cold war spy poo poo. flosofl posted:This all reminds me of the "Cipher in Room 214". The original article can't be found on the Seattle-Post Intelliigencer, which would make me thing it's an urban legend. But there's an actual article on the Seattle PI about the author of the article, Carol Smith, winning an award (they even have a dead link in the online article). I did find a "reprint" on some rando website, but since they're an idiot and formatting makes it all but unreadable you're going to want to cut and paste it into a text editor or something. This one reminded me a lot of Lyle Stevik. I think that what really makes me sad about both of these is that they're both likely people just didn't have anyone to report them missing and so all it took for them to die anonymously is for them to put their affairs in order and go somewhere out of state to commit suicide under a fake name. What's unnerving to me is that people like this are probably more common than any of us realize. If someone had full and unfettered access to various IRS, SSA, credit agency, etc. databases, I wonder just how many people there are who live normal lives then one day just drop off the face of the earth, without being declared dead, that is.
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May 15, 2017 02:54
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