|
Rondette posted:Back to the Lost Cosmonauts, I got pretty spooked a while back now after listening to this- (SFW, just creepy as all heck.) I know some people who worked at Star City back in the 1960's and they claimed that the lost cosmonaut stories just aren't true. According to them it was a small community and no one knew anything about any deaths. Since they immigrated to the US decades ago I think it's safe to say that they weren't worried about being killed for saying otherwise.
|
#
¿
May 18, 2014 23:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 8, 2024 11:38 |
|
|
Wedemeyer posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inokashira_Park_dismemberment_incident Huh. I was unaware that my crazy (well, craziest) uncle was a medical doctor. I really hate these situations where people say that something in a murder could only have been done by a doctor. Draining a body of blood is really easy to do. People who have never had any education past the seventh grade do it all the time when they clean whatever animal they've hunted. I know it's just some stupid wikipedia editor injecting a completely unfounded comment in there, but it's something that I see uncritically repeated often (well, not about draining blood specifically, just that "only a highly trained professional could have done this thing" when average laymen do it or something directly analogous all the time). 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.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 23, 2014 07:46
|
|
|
Screaming Idiot posted:That's an incredibly But like a lot of these  proposals to counter human nature, it doesn't really take into account the practicalities of the situation. The Soviets would have completed their first strike by the time the President got word, got the knife, and then cut the guy's heart out. And any implant small enough to not interfere with the person's life would be hard to find in that spurting arterial blood.Obviously it wasn't a serious proposal, but there's a metric ton of reasons to reject it other than the pat "the president can't kill one guy to his face" excuse given.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2015 05:43
|
|
method and I heartily endorse it. If you're going to murder millions of people with atomic fire from thousand of miles away, then you should be non gender-specifically man enough to murder one with a knife.
|
Brainbread posted:Good thing the people manning and heading your Nuclear Weapons are competent, trained, and definitely do not cheat on their tests or prop open silo doors with crowbars. And yet I somehow still feel better about how the US handles its nuclear arsenal than how Russia does... Now I'm kind of curious about the horrifying things in the Chinese nuclear program. We know they have to happen just by human nature, but they must have had some spectacular problems given how China keeps finding new and better ways to shoot themselves in the foot.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2015 22:43
|
|
|
Hijo Del Helmsley posted:And for true That one I don't have to imagine. There's a US diplomat who went to one of those six-party nuclear disarmament talks in North Korea and he tells a story about how in one meeting a North Korean representative sets a briefcase on the table, pops it open, and inside are two glass jars with some silver metal in it. Yes, they were carrying around plutonium in glass jars and a briefcase and brought it into negotiations. At least the health effects for the people in the room were relatively minor. Pu-239 has a half-life of over twenty thousand years so unless you build your house on it there's not a lot of threat from the radiation. OTOH, it is toxic beyond belief and I would wash my hands until they were raw after shaking hands with someone who touched the jar just because I wouldn't trust them to have the outside clean.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 03:32
|
|
level, imagine the North Korean nuclear program.
|
Last Chance posted:M-M-Martin Random? Only if in his actual identity he wrote a memoir and gave an interview on NPR about it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 03:59
|
|
|
Jack Gladney posted:He also says that the behaviors we think of as typical of serial killers really only become components of recorded killings in the nineteenth century, partially because people need a lot of leisure time to first develop the fantasies that drive the killing and then especially to stalk and kill. So modern capitalism is basically a prerequisite for serial killers. But the agrarian lifestyles that preceded the industrial revolution had massive amounts of down time. Like whole months where the people would only work a couple of hours a day (this is offset by working twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week, for a few months straight during the busy seasons). It doesn't really add up.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 02:51
|
|
|
Angry Salami posted:I don't know, you've got Gilles de Rais and Elizabeth Bathory as pre-modern serial killers For what it's worth Bathroy probably wasn't a serial killer. The claims with historical weight behind don't really paint her in that light. nucleicmaxid posted:It's equally likely that poor records, poor policing, and the general lack of communication at the time have covered up evidence of historical ones. That's my thinking. Twelfth century's Farmer Joe might have killed a dozen people but they caught him for one and hung him the next day without the people executing him aware that the victims of the recent "wolf" attacks were all his. Unless you have someone who can actually assemble the facts and find the patterns that define serial killers then they're going to be effectively invisible, indistinguishable from any other common killer.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 08:40
|
|
|
The Endbringer posted:Not quite unnerving, but considering the fact that these threads inevitably spawn cult discussion, (as this one did many, many pages ago,) I figured you guys would be interested in a very old cult: The "user of hashish" is a backward folk etymology. The two are not actually connected. The Same Wikipedia Article posted:Many scholars have argued, and demonstrated convincingly, that the attribution of the epithet "hashish eaters" or "hashish takers" is a misnomer derived from enemies of the Isma'ilis and was never used by Muslim chroniclers or sources. It was therefore used in a pejorative sense of "enemies" or "disreputable people". This sense of the term survived into modern times with the common Egyptian usage of the term Hashasheen in the 1930s to mean simply "noisy or riotous". It is unlikely that the austere Hassan-i Sabbah indulged personally in drug taking ... there is no mention of that drug hashish in connection with the Persian Assassins – especially in the library of Alamut ("the secret archives").
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
HaB posted:This was a great read and a pro-click. For most protestants, like the vast majority of Texans, it doesn't matter. The only requirement for the positive side of afterlife in those religions is thinking that it's real and Jesus will hold the door for you. Okay, that's not how they put it, but it's what it boils down to. Or to put it another way, if Hitler was really moved by watching Heaven is for Real then he's chilling on a cloud with a harp, assuming that the protestants are correct. Of course, this belief creates a lot of really confusing and ugly theological questions, but there's a reason why with a couple thousand years of organized Christianity they're still arguing about basic aspects of this. For Catholics, murder including self-murder is on the short list of sins that sends you straight down if you die without getting it absolved a priest. What else is on God's no-no list? Sadly, Wikipedia does not have a separate List of Mortal Sins page and just jams it into the regular page; there's some real fun ones on there like not paying your employees enough. In this post I've actually managed to condemn myself to hell twice, so let me just say that Jesus Christ was a cocksucker just to go for the extra point. I'm trying to come up with a complicated scenario where she could have performed penance for the action before getting shot and it's just not really viable since she'd have to be genuinely contrite and thus not want to get shot afterward. Also, she's managed to commit multiple mortal sins herself in this action so per Catholicism she's hanging out with the rock stars and divorcees. Random Stranger has a new favorite as of 16:45 on Jan 23, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2015 16:42
|
|
|
RNG posted:Content! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_circus_fire I knew about the fire, but I did like this line in the article: quote:(the 168 figure is usually based on official tallies that included a collection of body parts that were listed as a "victim") On the theme of major fires that have fallen out of popular consciousness, there's always the General Slocum disaster. Otherwise known as, "Why you don't fill life preservers with iron as a way to fool the inspectors."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2015 02:32
|
|
|
Nckdictator posted:Ah yes, the infamous Genghis Khan movie starring John Wayne. I just posted about this in CD the other day. Most of The Conqueror's reputation as a deadly movie is a result of people going, "Aha! They got cancer! It must have been from working on the film!" even though the cases occurred over decades and the number of people who worked on the film and got cancer wasn't significantly greater than the cancer rate in the general population. The Conqueror's Wikipedia Entry posted:However, the odds of developing cancer for men in the U.S. population are 43 percent and the odds of dying of cancer are 23 percent (38 percent and 19 percent, respectively, for women).[15] This places the cancer mortality rate for the 220 primary cast and crew very near the expected average. Edit: I thought of a related Wikipedia article that people might not know much about : Cancer clusters. They're pretty tricky because while they might indicate a problem, at the same time they'd occur pretty regularly just due to statistical probability. quote:A cluster is more likely to be "genuine" if the case consists of one type of cancer, a rare type of cancer, or a type of cancer that is not usually found in a certain age group. Between 5% to 15% of suspected cancer clusters are statistically significant. So out of all the times people go, "Hey, there's a lot of people around here getting cancer..." it turns out to actually be a problem only about ten percent of the time. Random Stranger has a new favorite as of 03:29 on Feb 13, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2015 03:10
|
|
|
Nckdictator posted:I wasn't aware of any of that! Thank you. FWIW, I wouldn't completely dismiss the possibility that some of the people who worked on The Conqueror got cancer as a result of some kind of exposure while working on it. The cancer rate on the film was a bit higher than normal. Just that it's reputation as a killer movie is overblown. One aspect to this is that all roughly 200 people involved were all exposed to the same risk the same way. So that means that you'd expect the same types of cancer to develop at roughly the same rate (yes, you could expect some pretty wide error bars there; I'm using a broad brush for the sake of explanation), and yet the most commonly cited "victims" developed a huge variety of cancers over a fairly wide period of time. John Wayne, for example, developed lung cancer a few years later but he also was a heavy smoker. He later died of stomach cancer but twenty years after making The Conqueror.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2015 06:44
|
|
|
Literally Kermit posted:I know, imagine how hard it must be to trigger a breakdown in a mentally unstable teenager? Well I know step one is to murder their father and step two is to marry their mother...
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2015 06:17
|
|
|
Literally Kermit posted:This is extremely awesome as far as derails go, and I definitely encourage everyone to check out the new 2015 Everest Death Pool thread. 2014 was one of my favorite threads ever. But last year Everest did the opposite of eating the rich. It vomited out the rich while eating the poor in record numbers. Though that one girl who had a book sold about her climbing experience even before she went and then didn't get to climb was hilarious. Edit: It occurred to me that some people might not know about this so here's the Wikipedia page on the 2014 disaster that killed 16 Nepalese guides and shut down climbing on the southern side of the mountain. Mister Bates posted:Everything I've read about J Edgar Hoover has made him come across as one of the worst human beings the United States government has ever employed. Guy was a motherfucker, and he wasn't even a particularly competent or efficient motherfucker either. There's a reason why the completely nonsense cross-dressing story keeps going around. Everyone would like the monster emasculated. Random Stranger has a new favorite as of 21:52 on Mar 2, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2015 21:47
|
|
|
Nckdictator posted:
Just like the British to boil all their meat.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2015 20:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 8, 2024 11:38 |
|
|
Oh Hell No posted:Yeah, if the Jews and the Slavs had just taken one for the team and let themselves be exterminated, we could have avoided a lot of that mess. Look, all I'm saying is we just let Hitler have the Sudetenland and there won't be any more problems.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2015 21:10
|
|