Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

iPod zombies threaten citizens, British paper calmly reports

The mp3-wearing undead are terrorizing British drivers, shrieks the London Times.

Beware, iPod zombie cyclists are on the rise

It's an imaginative claim. As the Guardian points out, the article is a tissue of small points stretched thinly.  For example,

The latest DfT figures show that 820 cyclists were killed or seriously injured in the three months to June, a 19% rise on the same period in 2008. It is not known how many of these cases were caused by people listening to music because the DfT and the police do not record the information.

But the article will make a guess anyway.  Similarly,

Abigail Haythorne, 17, died after pulling out into an oncoming car. She had an MP3 player in her pocket, and her earphones tucked inside her neck scarf, and [the coroner] said it was possible she was wearing them when she was struck by the car.

"It was possible," not certain.  But we're talking about the devil technology, so a stab in the dark is as good as, well, as stab in the dark.

...and that's about it for evidence.  The Times spots people complaining about bikers on discussion fora and blogs, proving that major newspapers don't stint on research.

Creatively assigning death to technologies is an old, established meme.  What's the cultural vibe around London bicycles these days?

(thanks to Ted Major)

Old, weird Dogtown

Dogtown "gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any given moment and renew an ageless rite there"

A new book describes a Gothic landscape in New England.  It's called Dogtown, and Bill Kaufman does a fine job in sketching out its dark contours:

compris[ing] 3,000 acres outside Gloucester, Mass., on Cape Ann, a peninsula about 25 miles northeast of Boston. It is a forested, primeval patch of land—its hills, as Henry David Thoreau noted, "strewn with boulders, as if they had rained down." This Dogtown has attracted artists, witches, nature lovers, creeps—and even darker spirits.

and

in February 1839, Dogtown's last resident, an ex-slave named Cornelius Finson, was carried off to the poorhouse. "All that was left," writes Ms. East, were ruins, lore and "a haunted reputation."

The author voyaged to the place,

convinced that it contained "part of the hidden America I had wondered about since childhood"—that old, weird America of unhanged witches and unhinged seers.

Joyce Carol Oates, America's queen of the Gothic, also offered a review:

East soon finds herself, like the protagonist of a mystery, ever more deeply involved with the colonial ruin—is it a place of mystical wonder, or is it an accursed landscape? In colonial times, Dogtown was a marginal area of Gloucester said to be a “haven” for former slaves, prostitutes and witches; in the 20th century, it was largely abandoned and became a sort of uncharted place where, in a notorious 1984 incident, a mentally deranged sex offender murdered a young woman teacher in the woods.

I'll keep an eye out for a copy.  Anyone looked into it yet?  And how accessible is the place?  It would make a fine escape from Boston's horrors.

Meanwhile, I'll close the laptop and walk out onto the mountainside, to haul wood amidst chilly morning fogs and the cries of animals.

(via Jesse Walker)

A Peruvian fat-sucking monster, or something worse behind the grease screen?

The Peruvian body fat killings story has detoured into another branch of horror.  Initially the news was about a gang nicknamed after the pishtaco, a legendary monster who liked to murder people and suck out their fat (see below for more).

But pish tosh, said the Peruvian government.  The police chief who first announced the existence of such a homicidal gang has been suspended:

Initial doubts were compounded when police from the region where the crimes were alleged to have taken place said they knew nothing about a gang of murderers killing people for their fat.

Why make up such a story?  To draw attention away from something else, perhaps.  The area in question is a popular haunt for drug trafficking.  Or maybe the idea is to distract us from death squads.  Horror to cover horror.

The pishtaco is a neat story.  Check this account, which feels like a mix of vampirism with the Indian Mutiny:

Pishtaco has got white skin and kills the Indigenous to use their body fat. Pishtar is the Quechua equivalent for the verbs “to cut up, to kill”. The belief is still prevalent today, but has origins far back in history, probably reaching back to the conquista by Pizarro and others. The conquistadores used the body fat of dead natives as an antiseptic to treat their own wounds – a natural antiseptic called unta, in Quechua. As the Spanish killed a incredibly high number of natives, Pishtaco lived on. In naval wars with Chile, Pishtaco killed the natives to fuel the ships with their processed fat. When news about the Second World War reached Peru, Pishtaco killed to grease cannons and guns. Later on in history, Pishtaco killed to produce kerosene.

(thanks to my spooky wife; image from here)

Gothic horror or horrible hoax?

It must have been like being buried alive, for decades: a car accident left a Belgian man in a coma, diagnosed as being in a vegetative state...but he was actually conscious, while totally paralyzed, for 23 years.

"I screamed, but there was no one to hear," he says in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. Three years ago, neurologist Steven Laureys used modern scanning techniques to discover that Houben's cerebral cortex was, in fact, functioning.

The awful tale reads like a nineteenth-century horror narrative, perhaps a Blackwood's story of extreme experience (cf Poe's hilarious parody and analysis):

I am called Rom. I am not dead. The nurses came, they patted me, they sometimes took my hand, and I heard them say "no hope." I meditated, I dreamed my life away—it was all I could do.

But is this true, or is the recovery a fiction adding another layer of horror to reality?

Perhaps the story is based on a different kind of horror.  James Randi and others have noted that "facilitated communication" [FC], whereby another person helps a disabled one use a keyboard, the means by which Houber expresses himself, has often been criticized for adding content that isn't there.

This FC claim is simply untrue, a farce, a lie – and the “facilitator” knows it! And no, this man is not going to write a book, but the "facilitator" is, and if this humbug is not stopped, she'll make a fortune doing so. Put a stop to this, someone!"

If the FC is bogus, what kind of consciousness is housed in that coma-sapped brain?

(via Arnaud Leene)

One criminal business model: killing for sellable fat

One Peruvian criminal enterprise sounds like something from horror or pulp fiction: criminals kill victims, extract the corpses' fat, and sell in on the black market.

The gang allegedly targeted people on remote roads, luring them with fake job offers before killing them and extracting their fat.

The results were sold to cosmetics companies.  Like Fight Club, people end up using people products on their flesh.

This isn't a new thing, or a fad, but a longstanding business:

Police said the gang could be behind the disappearances of up to 60 people in Peru's Huanuco and Pasco regions.
One of those arrested told police the ringleader had been killing people for their fat for more than three decades.

Longstanding enough to attain some historical resonance:

The gang has been referred to as the Pishtacos, after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat.

There's surely a missing new media angle here.  Isn't it really... crowdsourcing taken to the ultimate?

(thanks to my truly scary wife)

Hadron collider as Lovecraftian horror, continued

I know it's easy to pick on The Register, but still, this is fine stuff:

'Something may come through' dimensional 'doors' at LHC
Attack of the Hyperdimensional Juggernaut-Men

It's all riffs on some remarks from scientists at LHC.  Er, based on brainy boffins' bright ideas.

The article has tons of fun with this theme, but finally stoops back to science at the end.

Dr Bertolucci later got in touch to confirm that yes indeed, there would be an "open door", but that even with the power of the LHC at his disposal he would only be able to hold it open "a very tiny lapse of time, 10-26 seconds, [but] during that infinitesimal amount of time we would be able to peer into this open door, either by getting something out of it or sending something into it.

"Of course," adds Bertolucci, "after this tiny moment the door would again shut, bringing us back to our 'normal' four dimensional world ... It would be a major leap in our vision of Nature, although of no practcal use (for the time being, at least)...."

(thanks to Randy McCall; any new Canadian feet, Windsor man?)

Feeding blood to your machines

Best science headline of the day:

Yeast-powered fuel cell feeds on human blood

One presumes the blood is contributed voluntarily. 

A team at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has created tiny microbial fuel cells by encapsulating yeast cells in a flexible capsule. They went on to show the fuel cells can generate power from a drop of human blood plasma.

This idea has some ancestry in sf.  Our first thoughts might turn to The Matrix (1999) (best use of "coppertop!" as a swear word).  But the concept goes further back to Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991).  There's probably earlier stuff, too.

All kinds of horror stories could be built upon this. Think about the hard-working hacker, or office temp, whose vitality is slowly, slowly drained away from overwork.  Or the victim is parasited to death without ever learning the cause, a la Quiroga's brilliant "The Feather Pillow" (pdf).  Or, as with The Matrix, an evil force forces people to power these batteries with their lives.

Gizmodo offers an even more disgusting idea, since these tiny machines have a

major problem with waste products. That waste is created as those particular batteries involve microbial yeast-based fuel cells that steal "some of the electrons produced when the yeast metabolizes glucose" in order to create a small current. While the entire process works just fine, the yeast cells are at risk unless the waste products are removed. We can't exactly let the waste be dumped into the blood stream, so until there's a some kind of cleaning process, the batteries are trouble as they either they die off or poison your bloodstream while trying to survive.

On the fearsome digital media side, how long before someone uses this story as a rhetorical figure for overdependence on technology?

Rise of the bone-eating worms

A monster is awaiting its stories: the bone-eating worm.  Just say that out loud, to yourself, or to a stranger, preferably in the dark.  Then read on:

eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones.

Osedax worms chew into carcass bones, growing watery blossoms from the ossuary. 

There's a Gothic beauty to this horror:

Robert Vrijenhoek... would also like to know how[Osedax worms] manage to find and colonize the bones of dead whales in the vast, pitch-black expanse of the deep seafloor...

(via Paul McCauley, who helpfully suggests we "imagine them growing bigger, and crawling out of the sea...")

Russian cannibalism strikes again

Another Russian cannibalism story has appeared.  Out in Perm, it begins as a murder, then ends as a food service supply chain supplement:

the three men attacked their victim with knives and a hammer.

"After carrying out the attack, the corpse was dismembered. Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie kiosk," their statement said.

Why do the deed?

Their statement said that the suspects had targeted the 25-year-old victim out of "personal hostility".

Clearly!

The Beeb concludes on a perfect, understated Gothic note:

It was not immediately clear if any customers had been served.

That would be fun to research.  "Excuse me, ma'am, did you notice any unusual taste in Happy Dmitiri's Kebab Surprise this week?"

That's two Russian cannibal stories in one week.  The previous one concerned matricide, cold weather, and hunger.  It's been a year since the one before that, about Goths and tastiness.

(thanks to Todd Bryant, who surely knows how cold it gets in Pennsylvania winters)

Powerful photos from the Western Front

Some terrifying material found in this collection of one soldier's World War I photos.  Like this pile of nightmarish German barbed wire:

The interface is very odd. Don't let that put you off.

(via MetaFilter)