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BioMe posted:But what is really kills me is that there are now reformist Scientologists who agree as a church the religion is corrupt and horrible, but the "core teachings of Scientology" are still important and deserve a better church around them. "Well we don't like the forced labour or the torture but the creation myth where a space warlord flew people through space on Douglas DC-8s to earth where they were blown up by nukes in volcanos is the hill we're willing to die on" Edit: I was just reading the Xenu article as a refresher on Wikipedia and gosh, they just obfuscate everything with technical-sounding jargon don't they. "Incident II" "R6 implant" "Operating Thetan level III" "Advanced Technology" and so on. I guess the fact that it sounds vaguely scientific is why people don't just immediately laugh it off; though I suppose it helps that the average Scientologist who makes it that far is already at least a little unhinged to begin with. BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 11:11 on May 31, 2014 |
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May 31, 2014 11:01
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Separating Hubbard from his freaky UFO cult, he really wasn't a very original sci-fi writer. The appearance of every drat thing in his stories looks like some mundane thing from present day (circa 1940-1960). I mean god forbid you actually describe how something looks without saying "oh Markabians look like IRS auditors" or "Xenu's personnel transports look exactly like a contemporary passenger jetliner but with rockets" etc..
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May 31, 2014 23:19
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The most shameful part is that it took until he was captured for someone to decide to street justice him. As far as I'm concerned his men are just as terrible as he was for not mutinying against him and executing him, even if they thought he was a butcher.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:41
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The fact that people feel sympathy for Dahmer is the scary or unnerving part of the whole thing. Why does anyone even write fictional stories about monsters when we have real monsters wearing human skin living among us? Obviously not him specifically since he's dead now, but who knows what any random person you walk by on the street has in a barrel in their home?
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Jul 30, 2014 15:11
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BioMe posted:Most people like that do in fact cope without committing several murders, yes. Tons of people have a high percentage of those issues and the only reason we even know about Dahmer by name is because he is in fact a very very exceptional and not at all typical example of a human. Plus a similar guy here in Canada was Russell Williams, a decorated officer in the Canadian Forces (or Royal Canadian Army or whatever the gently caress Harper renamed it to) who achieved the rank of Colonel and ran a large military base here in Ontario. On many occasions he drove off of his base, broke into women's houses, took pictures of himself wearing their underwear, and several who were unlucky enough to be present were raped, tortured, and murdered. Then he'd just drive back to his base like nothing happened. Or what about Anders Breivik, according to whom the worst thing that ever happened to him is that his prison is only giving him a Playstation 2 and not the Playstation 3 he demands. Point is that being abused or having a hard life or whatever doesn't have any real correlation with turning people into monstrous serial killers; tons of people manage to cope with poo poo situations without brutalizing other people.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:31
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All mass-produced nuclear weapons in history have been plutonium-based because they're smaller than uranium-based weapons. Unlike uranium weapons where the explosion is caused by mashing two pieces of uranium together to form a supercritical mass, plutonium weapons are built with subcritical spheres of plutonium surrounded by explosive material. When detonated, the explosion compresses the plutonium in just the right way so it becomes supercritical and rapidly releases energy. The good news is that the detonation of the explosive material has to be perfect or there won't be a fission reaction. If the explosive is detonated by a fire or another explosion or anything like that there won't be a nuclear explosion. Edit: On top of that the explosive is almost certainly something that can only be detonated by electricity anyway BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 15:09 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 15:06
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HonorableTB posted:The age of the Peaceful Atom: Cold fusion isn't a thing. It refers specifically to a hoax paper by previously-respected electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann that managed to get published in a respected journal. Pons and Fleischmann thought that palladium, a metal which absorbs hydrogen, could be forced to absorb so much hydrogen that fusion occurs within it. They couldn't get it to work in the laboratory but thought they had something revolutionary on their hands nonetheless so they falsified the results and published the paper anyway in the hopes that someone else could make it work while they got to keep all the credit. No one could make it work, though, and they were disgraced after the deception was uncovered. What's scary and/or unnerving about this affair is that cold fusion caught on with pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists as an example of oil companies/the government/big pharma/the pope/the new world order suppressing non-fossil fuel energy research. Adherents now call it "low energy nuclear reactions" in order to sidestep the stigma behind cold fusion (it's still an identical process though) and sometimes it catches on with a reputable scientist who doesn't know better; if I recall correctly, there's a guy at NASA who thinks he can make it work.
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Sep 22, 2014 15:58
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That's actually a good case study on why torture doesn't work. In the end though the entry of the Soviet Union to the war against Japan had more to do with their surrender than anything else; the US blowing away entire cities in a single day was just business as usual whether it came from one bomb or thousands.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:24
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nucleicmaxid posted:That is an argument against the bombs. However, there is evidence both that it both is and isn't legitimate. If we're going to have this argument, then we should make our own thread thought, it's one of those topics that can get tempers going and would massively derail this thread if it got started in earnest. The only argument I would make against the bombs is that it was actually the strategic bombing of Japanese cities by any type of bomb that contributed to the end of the war. I think people give way too much credit to the Manhattan Project. Without nuclear bombs the US would have kept up the firebombing campaign to similar results. (Also, the Soviet Union entering the war was the tipping point because even with cities burning the leadership thought they could hold out until they brought their vast reserves of weapons and manpower to the home islands. With the Soviets fighting them on the mainland those hopes were dashed)
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Sep 22, 2014 21:34
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Solice Kirsk posted:Is there a way to convert solar energy into a synthetic solid or liquid fuel? That sounds absolutely fascinating. Nothing used in the (for example) space shuttle and its launch system used anything derived from petroleum products or that couldn't be prepared in a chemical plant with just simple stuff and electricity as an input. At that point it doesn't matter where the electricity is coming from so it could be solar or wind or nuclear or coal or whatever. The shuttle's main engine just used liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen which can be made through electrolysis of water. The hydrazine monopropellant for the thrusters can be produced by mixing bleach or hydrogen peroxide and ammonia together. The solid rocket stuff is ammonium perchlorate (made by ammonia and perchloric acid) is mixed with aluminum (most common metal on Earth by composition) and a binder. You're not going to get into space by mixing household cleaners together in a bucket but chemical plants really aren't that far off from that in concept.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:10
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Pharnakes posted:I don't think it was seriously trying to say we are going to cook ourselves any time soon, it was more making the point that what we are looking forward to as sustainable is only being measured in very human timescale, assuming we want to survive as a species indefinitely we are eventually going to have to start thinking in millions of years, not hundreds. If we continue to grow our energy demands and keep doing it for thousands and thousands of years, then presumably eventually that will all add up to something significant. I'm sure the direct heat released from human activities is negligible so far, but we've only been doing it for a couple of hundred years. I think you have a seriously tortured understanding of global warming if you think anthropogenic heat is going to be a contributing factor to it. We're talking about a scale where minor changes in snow albedo from carbon pollution are causing the sun to melt the Arctic ice but a CANDU power plant putting 2 gigawatts of heat into the surrounding environment only raises the lakewater by a couple of degrees for a half-kilometer radius. Our generating capacity is not going to increase infinitely either, it will foreseeably only multiply by several times before reaching a maximum due to several possibilities - we kill ourselves off and it drops like a rock, it stays there because Earth has reached a carrying capacity and everyone has reached an industrialized quality of life, or we take conservation seriously and it drops to a newer maximum. It's not like 30,000 years in the future Earth will host a population of 7 trillion consuming a million times more energy, releasing enough heat into the environment to melt the crust or something. BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 13:24 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 13:19
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LawfulWaffle posted:Well, I happen to have a bit of experience with the Nipponese legal system, and it's quite a bit different from the judicial practices held here in the states. Most of my experience comes from my short term as an assistant to a defense attorney, and their responsibilities go far above and beyond what our counterparts are tasked with. Do you have a citation on any of that? You've pretty much exactly described a Phoenix Wright game but those games started coming out long before 2012.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:17
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Silver2195 posted:Pretty sure that's  I think it would have worked a bit better if the year was the release year for the first game. I knew the Japanese system was hosed (police allowed to use coercive methods to get a confession, guilt being the default state upon a trial starting, and such) but Phoenix Wright is just a bit worse.
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Dec 19, 2014 17:52
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(although Phoenix Wright is less exaggerated than one might think; the Japanese criminal justice system is pretty stacked against the accused).
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Random Stranger posted:Also on the subject of the Japanese legal system, they have an over 99% conviction rate. That is a conviction rate more typically encountered in kangaroo courts where dictators want someone to vanish. Yeah the way I've heard it is that they never go to court without a confession... and the police are allowed to hold you and heavily lean on you until you confess. And once you're in court the assumed state is guilt and you have to prove someone else actually did it to be considered innocent.
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Dec 23, 2014 23:41
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WickedHate posted:Fine, the nuclear football stays as it is, but using it activates a device in the aide's heart that kills him anyway. I'd volunteer for that; I wouldn't want to survive to see what would be left of the world when the nukes were done being tossed around.
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Jan 3, 2015 06:31
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:And for true Given the seismic data from their previous tests it's possible that they faked the tests with loads of conventional explosives buried underground and only killed a mass of slave labourers in the progress.
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Jan 4, 2015 03:02
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level, imagine the North Korean nuclear program.
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I'm studying nuclear engineering (4th year undergraduate) and I've found these projects to scare off future explorers to be really silly and irresponsible. They're all predicated on the idea that you'll be trying to communicate with primitive hunter-gatherers, with concepts like "no honor here" and other things like you're talking to a Klingon. I think there are two problems with that. First, almost anything you can try will just make people curious or wonder what treasure you're trying to hide. Second, why the hell are you putting your waste somewhere that primitive tribesman can find it?! Even if they don't find it or your warnings work, it will be close enough to the surface that you're risking contaminating the water table in the event of a leak. Just stick that poo poo so deep that anyone who finds it will be advanced enough that they'll have radiation detection equipment.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:07
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Atmus posted:It also doesn't get a group of 'scientists' paid. Haha yeah I didn't want to say anything but this project looks like a make-work program for anthropologists.
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Jan 8, 2015 22:20
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atomicthumbs posted:re: containing nuclear waste: I always liked the idea of a grid of enormous black concrete cubes with narrow passages between them that heat up in the sunlight and become impossible to traverse. Nah, the problem is that if you're storing it close enough to the surface that you need a scary warning then you're risking contaminating people/animals/water even if the warning works and people stay away. Many radionuclides in spent fuel waste have half-lives of thousands of years, and the majority of it is heavy metal that lasts forever. Do you think that the containers the waste is in will retain their integrity that long? This whole thing is an irresponsible wankfest by artists and anthropologists when it should be treated as a science and engineering problem. Maybe the social scientists should work towards figuring out how to make sure our society doesn't collapse that far instead of working on their Fallout fantasies? BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 13:49 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 13:44
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Freudian posted:A big sign saying "DONT DIG HERE WE hosed UP AND YOULL DIE" Probably even more useful since more advanced explorers could possibly understand it as something other than a place to poke around in. But seriously, the long-term storage of nuclear waste is a real problem that governments don't want to pay for because the proper solutions (deep underground vaults) that have already been proposed too expensive for the politicians to stomach. That's why they're cheaping out and going with fields of cubes/spikes/gibbeted skulls which won't do a drat thing for long-term safety.
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Jan 9, 2015 14:00
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Jack Gladney posted:It has some hallmarks of fraud, like going the media route before establishing a business to make or sell the stuff and never letting anyone do more than some initial testing, plus being a huckster showman about it. Plus, it really plays into the lone maverick genius myth that Americans love so much, but what could some guy do in his garage that dupont couldn't? It's not like there aren't lots of people trying to make heat shielding. Yeah my instinct upon reading that is that it's more showmanship than science. Who knows though, some people are crazy.
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Jan 10, 2015 21:18
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Kenning posted:We are definitely not running out of aluminum. Aluminum is one of the top 5 most abundant elements in the earth's crust, but we mostly get it from bauxite which could conceivably become short. I don't know if that's the case though. If we're talking about apocalyptic wars over resources in the next few decades aluminum isn't one of the things that comes to my mind.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:42
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Eh the Soviets starved millions of people to death on purpose and killed millions more in gulags (not always on purpose) so I have a hard time getting unnerved about a couple of dogs.
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Jan 25, 2015 19:53
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Is it really civilian medical doctors' faults that government-sanctioned butchers brutalized blacks in the past? I mean, I doubt that Jews in Germany are wary of medical doctors because of Mengele's concentration camp horror show.
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Jan 31, 2015 15:51
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Serious Cephalopod posted:The average medical doctor still believes that black people do not feel pain the same way whites do. quote:Also, the average medical model is a white dude, leaving all other people with inaccurate and dangerous health models. I feel like there's two different and opposing messages there
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Jan 31, 2015 19:21
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Steampunk iPhone posted:This is horrifying. The pictures in the article are NSFW and may ruin your day. literally 15 year old jokes
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Feb 5, 2015 22:26
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Wasabi the J posted:It was littorally disintegrating at the docks where it was built.
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Feb 10, 2015 03:13
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Stick Insect posted:Links are potentially It also happens in countries where women are valued at less than the dollar value of the acid thrown at them which is bad enough to have to deal with.
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Feb 12, 2015 03:24
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I think Everest works okay as flypaper for middle managers.
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Feb 26, 2015 18:44
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Bushmeister posted:The article mentioned photos from 1904-1905 taken by French soldiers and turns out they are entirely GIS'able It's kind of weird to me that smacking someone in the head with a mallet is considered "one of the most brutal methods of execution ever devised" when it's contemporary to a large number of countries outside of Europe using impalement as an official execution method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement The wiki article used to be more detailed in how impalement worked a few years ago so you can dig back through the edit archives if you want. But for the squeamish, let's just say that an execution method where the victim has a spear driven through most of their body and yet still survives long enough for thirst to become more of a complaint than the pain is going to rank far higher than getting knocked out in one blow by a hammer 
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Mar 5, 2015 17:02
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Wild T posted:Sort of like the mentality of Dr. Gatling, who hoped that inventing a mass-producable machine gun would paradoxically save lives since one man could provide the volume of fire of dozens. The Gatling gun worked. His plan didn't. I guess the thought was that there would be fewer men on the battlefield rather than a larger number of men being killed more efficiently as they charge a single guy with a machine gun.
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Mar 6, 2015 16:39
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8 Ball posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_birth Yikes, spooky.
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Mar 20, 2015 04:46
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Nth Doctor posted:Crosspost from the Everest Thread. Not Wikipedia, but unnerving as gently caress. "This is my hole! It was made for me!"
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Mar 20, 2015 23:50
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Remember that he locked the other pilot out of the cockpit before flying the plane into the ground, if it was an aneurysm or something the passengers would have survived. Someone killing themselves is terrible and sad, but I can't pity them when they take down others with them; that's where it becomes murder.
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Mar 27, 2015 18:47
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The only reason Japan was still fighting is that they thought they could bring their forces on the mainland to bear if they held out long enough; their hopes of doing that were dashed by the Soviets entering against them. They were already having cities burned down so the nukes were just business as usual. To them it made no difference if it was thousands of incendiary bombs or one nuclear bomb doing the deed. The idea of the US losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in an invasion was predicated on the idea that Japanese civilians were going to arm themselves with makeshift spears and charge the beaches. If the Japanese were really that fanatical then no number of destroyed cities would have made them surrender. I don't think that the nuclear bombs were necessary, but it was likely that without them another couple of cities would have been burned down by conventional bombs before their surrender anyway. What I don't know is if they were going to surrender without any amount of aerial bombardment.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:52
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Going back to the wikipedia article theme of the thread while not deviating very far from the current topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_weapon_project The German nuke program was a complete non-starter that wouldn't have gone anywhere even if it wasn't starved for resources by politicians and didn't have prominent members drafted to die as infantry in Russia. And that's not to mention the other more serious problems like the bias against nuclear science as a "Jewish science" and the fact that the Jewish scientists working in the field were chased out or killed. On the other hand, something you never hear about is that the Japanese program was on the right track and only faltered because of the resource starvation that set in when the Siege of the Japan home islands started. BattleMaster has a new favorite as of 17:31 on Apr 6, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 17:26
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muscles like this? posted:I think the creepiest thing about that were the religious figures who voluntarily did it, leaving just enough room to receive food and water. Isn't that just a slightly more extreme version of what monks and nuns were doing anyway?
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May 8, 2015 23:46
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AnonSpore posted:I like how the wiki page notes "The fruit is edible if the stinging hairs that cover it are removed." Some madman looked at this plant that drives animals to kill themselves and thought "Hmm, I wonder if I can eat this thing." There's a lot of food out there that arose from some ancient person saying to another ancient person "dude I'll give you a nickel if you eat that"
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May 13, 2015 02:54
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KozmoNaut posted:I just can't over how goddamn AMERICAN everything put out by Scientology is. Have you ever read anything by or seen any quotes from L. Ron Hubbard? He can't describe anything without directly comparing it to something from real life so it makes sense that his religion is super-derivative too.
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Jun 12, 2015 21:12
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Lazlo Nibble posted:The Yanango accident ( I read that report and it looks like he tried to steal it. The source can only be removed from the camera with a key, or if you disassemble the lock with a screwdriver which is what seems to have happened (Not good design but not exactly likely for it to be laying around). Dude pocketed it, took it home, and when guys from work with radiation detectors showed up at his house he realized what they were there for and took it out to them.
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Aug 14, 2015 17:34
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