Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The ghosts of LinkedIn

An Associated Press article describes "ghost accounts" on LinkedIn.  These are fictional profiles, possibly created by various intelligence agencies.

Katie Jones doesn’t exist, The Associated Press has determined. Instead, the persona was part of a vast army of phantom profiles lurking on the professional networking site LinkedIn. And several experts contacted by the AP said Jones’ profile picture appeared to have been created by a computer program.

(thanks to Jesse "Not Looking To Connect" Walker)

A cranial surprise

A New York surgical procedure was supposed to remove a patient's brain tumor.  But the medical team found something quite different.

Let's arrange the story in proper Gothic order.

First, the setting:

In September, scrubbed-up surgeons in an operating room at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City opened Palma’s cranium and steeled themselves for a malignant brain tumor, said Jonathan Rasouli, chief neurosurgery resident at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Next, the surprise:

But instead, Rasouli said, they saw an encapsulated mass resembling a quail egg.

“We were all saying, ‘What is this?’ ” Rasouli recalled Thursday in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “It was very shocking. We were scratching our heads, surprised at what it looked like.”

Then the revelation:

The surgeons removed it from Palma’s brain and placed it under a microscope to get a closer look. Then they sliced into it — and found a baby tapeworm.

Behold:

We at Infocult are all about scary stories, and are therefore pleased to see the patient anticipating us:

“I want people to understand that this was such a rare occurrence,” Palma said about the tapeworm that was in her brain. “Every headache is not going to be a parasite.”

(thanks to Steven "My Brain Hurts" Kaye)

Climate change Gothic: ghost forests

Climate change is starting to show Gothic aspects.  In North America people have observed ghost forests, stands of trees killed off by salt water seeping into their roots.

 

As saltwater seeps into the forest soils, the trees die of thirst because their roots cannot take up water with high salt content. They may grow weak and die slowly, or, if a storm brings in a flood of seawater, a whole stand of trees might drown at once. What’s left behind are bare trunks and branches—a ghost forest...

Another real-world Gothic theme for us to follow.

(thanks to Steven "Ghostfinder general" Kaye)

When ancient ghosts peer out from carved eyeholes

Recent archaeology continues to give us glimpses of the disturbing past.  For example, deer skull headgear from 11,000 BCE, possibly worn for ritual use.

Here's one that's extraordinarily well preserved:

Archaeologists have a tendency to associate non-utile pre-agricultural artifacts to religion, but the Cambridge archaeologists involved at Star Carr raised the postulation that the deer headdresses “may have been items of camouflage worn while hunting.” While the visual of 30 plus hunters creeping through a woodland dressed as deer sets one’s imagination on fire, Dr Joy told reporters that “part of the antlers were removed… One suspects the deer wouldn’t have been fooled!”

Humanity has always been Gothic.

(via the Green Mountains of Madness Facebook group)

Technology that scares children

Infocult is pleased to learn of a fine research project aimed at discovering which technologies terrify children.

The scientists offered some fine examples of digital dread:

Kids want to understand how technology works and what information a device is collecting. For example, when a child asked a digital voice assistant if it would kill him in his sleep and it said, "I can't answer that," the child was concerned.

or 

The children were also wary of Maslo, an app with a large black dot as its interface, because it looked like a "black spirit" or a "black hole."

or

Kids don't like it when technology does things unexpectedly, like automatically knowing their name or laughing. To kids, laughing could communicate hidden, and possibly malicious, intent.

and

Another kid thought that laptops were creepy because his parents taped a piece of paper over the camera to "keep the robbers away."

Here in the stygian Infocult crypts, we approve of this work.

(thanks to Colin Howells)

Another scary clown story

Police in a Tennessee town investigated a scary clown event.

At first, it looks quite creepy:

The man, with a white painted face and red nose, was driving a silver or gray sedan and the children believed he motioned for them to come to his vehicle, as he tried to entice them with candy.

The vehicle never stopped and the children ran, they told officers.

A quick investigation de-Gothic'd the story:

Police have located the man who was spotted in a clown costume. He is an older man who dresses up once a year on his birthday as a clown and hands out candy Today, is his birthday. We went to a couple of places where he frequents and they verified he was at those places this morning dressed up as a clown. They say is a nice man that dresses up and is known to give out candy. Police had contact with him and he said he had been dressed up as a clown and did not mean any harm. There was also nothing that indicated police that his actions were intentionally harmful or meant to scare anyone. The businesses and locations he was spotted all fall in line where he was at today.

Adding in all caps, "EVERYONE CAN NOW BREATHE!!!!"

(thanks to Jesse "Floppy Shoes" Walker)

Today in mad science: keeping brains alive after bodily death

We at Infocult are always delighted to read scientific articles with opening lines like: "In a challenge to the idea that brain death is final..."

"Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem" concerns preserving a pig's brain after its body died.

Here we describe the restoration and maintenance of microcirculation and molecular and cellular functions of the intact pig brain under ex vivo normothermic conditions up to four hours post-mortem.

Some details:

We have developed an extracorporeal pulsatile-perfusion system and a haemoglobin-based, acellular, non-coagulative, echogenic, and cytoprotective perfusate that promotes recovery from anoxia, reduces reperfusion injury, prevents oedema, and metabolically supports the energy requirements of the brain. With this system, we observed preservation of cytoarchitecture; attenuation of cell death; and restoration of vascular dilatory and glial inflammatory responses, spontaneous synaptic activity, and active cerebral metabolism in the absence of global electrocorticographic activity. These findings demonstrate that under appropriate conditions the isolated, intact large mammalian brain possesses an underappreciated capacity for restoration of microcirculation and molecular and cellular activity after a prolonged post-mortem interval.

You may imagine ways of applying this to other animals, including humans.

This week in eyeball and insect horror

We can stretch our imagination through fiction, but the real world contains an awful lot of horrors on its own.  Case in point: a Taiwanese women visited a clinic to see about some eye pain.  The cause?  A group of bees were living under her left eyelid, drinking down her tears.

Scroll down Haley Weiss' account for still more tales of eyeball horror.

Cyberfear from the 1980s

Someone helpfully compiled a group of 1980s editorial cartoons, each attacking a digital menace of the time: video games.

They offer a fascinating glimpse of early cyberfear.  We can see some nascent themes: computers striking at children; the specter of addiction.  There are also plays on game mechanics, like people being attacked by Space Invaders, or players devoured by Pac-Man.

For example:

(thanks to Jesse "Player 1" Walker)

"movement inside the torso"

Horror stories often concern death or dead bodies.  Today's real life horror story comes from a Philadelphia hospital, where a corpse turned out to have a surprise.

Unzipping the body bag, a handful of forensic examiners in the room saw something they’d never seen before.

Something was moving around in the torso of the rotting, still-clothed cadaver with a “decent-sized cavity” where the chest and internal organs once resided. 

Think of the examiners' mental state at that point.  Then:

“One of the techs saw movement inside the torso,” according to a source, who heard about the case later that day directly from someone in the examination room. “They quickly and correctly ascertained that one of our town’s prolific Norway rats was living ... in that semi-exposed torso cavity.”

Which has bad enough, but things ramified:

the group brainstormed how best to remove the rat, which had apparently developed a taste for human flesh and organs...

From the way the body was decomposed, the flesh decomposed, the body hollowed out, it looked as if the rat had been in there for a little while.

Again, imagine the participants' minds once they realized this.

One had a definitive response:

Someone from Vector proceeded to yank the animal from the body by hand and – after being asked “you’re not going to kill it, are you?” – stomp it with a boot. This move, while brutal, helped stave off public-health concerns about a rat roaming the city with bloodlust coursing through its veins.

“The rat had to be terminated,” said the eyewitness...

Philadelphia Gothic, or just medical horror?

(thanks to Jesse "Nom Nom Nom" Walker)

Sinkhole versus zoo

Gaia continued her campaign against human civilization by opening a sinkhole under a Kentucky zoo.

It was pretty large: "roughly 50 feet deep and almost the size of a football field."

No casualties, either animal or human, so this was probably just an exploratory probe.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Digging into Momo

Sam Kriss offers a lyrical version of the Momo urban legend.  He riffs on the stories, building his own and turning them into eerie, short horror tales.

For example,

Another child died in southern Germany. Investigators opened up her phone, and found it was three inches wide, six inches high, and infinitely deep. In those black depths, in that tunnel that bore through invisible dimensions, it was the nest of endless screaming crows.

Some are funny:

The Guardian has started adding a brief message to the end of its online articles. Every time a reader like you makes a contribution to The Guardian, no matter how big or small, it goes directly into funding our journalism. I can’t stop hearing it in Momo’s voice, that hoarse scratching black-feathered croak.

And others are just surreal:

I didn’t notice, at first, what the things I read online were really saying. Democratic lawmakers fired back against the President’s claims on social media, urging you to UNBURDEN YOURSELF OF YOUR SKIN AND DISCOVER THE SHINING MINERAL LIFE INSIDE.

Thanks to Tim Pendry for sharing it.

PS: here's Snopes on just how fake the Momo story is.

A darkness in YouTube

Some YouTube videos aimed at children also include notes about suicide, according to the Washington Post. These edits include both exhortation and instruction.

One on YouTube shows a man pop into the frame. “Remember, kids,” he begins, holding what appears to be an imaginary blade to the inside of his arm. “Sideways for attention. Longways for results.”

It's not clear from the article how many of these videos exist or how many people have seen them.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

The FDA cautions Elizabeth Báthory

Today's real-life Gothic headline comes from Ars Technica, who reports that

Blood of the young won’t spare rich old people from sadness and death, FDA says

That's referring to an FDA statement against people using plasma from young folks.  That use may approach Gothic conditions, in fact:

The FDA goes on to note that such infusions are known to pose a range of health risks in humans. These risks include spreading infectious disease, triggering allergic reactions, and causing lung injuries. In some people—particularly those with heart disease—the infusions can also overload the circulatory system, causing swelling and breathing trouble, the agency explains.

(thanks to Ted Major, Amanda Lee, and many more)

A mulch-ist proposal

"A Mulching Proposal" * is a fine bit of Gothic comedy.  It manages to connect and satirize big data, science, social attitudes towards the elderly, automation, and more in a few pages of shrieking horror.

Start with the subtitle: "Analysing and Improving an Algorithmic System for Turning the Elderly into High-Nutrient Slurry."  Yes.  After all, "Sometimes the problem is not how the sausage gets made, but that they’re making people into sausage."  Then proceed.

(via MetaFilter)

*The title is a play on "A Modest Proposal," a classic text and mandatory in the Infocult canon.