Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Big Boy is proud of his kills

Big Boy is proud to share his hunt with you:

(awesome photo from Yago Colas)

Creeping dolls

No Halloween is complete without creepy dolls.  For today's specimen we present a stop-motion video for "Creep", featuring chilling Barbies.

Creep (Radiohead) - Scala & Kolacny Brothers from Alex Heller on Vimeo.

(via Coilhouse)

Halloween tech: punching and stabbing robots

"Do Robots Dream of Punching Slovenians?" asks Reason, echoing the question on all of our minds.  This references an interesting project, inteneded to, er, "assess human-robot pain thresholds."

They programmed the robot arm to move towards a point in mid-air already occupied by a volunteer's outstretched forearm, so the robot would push the human out of the way. Each volunteer was struck 18 times at different impact energies, with the robot arm fitted with one of two tools - one blunt and round, and one sharper.

The volunteers were then asked to judge, for each tool type, whether the collision was painless, or engendered mild, moderate, horrible or unbearable pain.

This is all very good, in the pursuit of creating still more ways for people to fear technology.  However, the Ljubljana team needs to catch up to the stabbing robot experiment.

Plotting against the Jersey Devil

A classic American folk monster gets the cartographic Web 2.0 treatment: mapping the Jersey Devil.

I encourage you to try ‘Streetview’ anyway. Imagine yourself alone in the pines, in the distance a harrowing scream, coming closer, and closer…

(via MetaFilter)

A sharp Poe in your eye

A glorious parade of classic Poe illustrations: that's what the very fine artist Jon Coulthart is up to on his blog.

It's the masters: Aubrey Beardsley, William Heath Robinson, Harry Clarke (my favorite), Wilfried Sätty, and a bunch of others.

Bloody fountain in Bucharest

A Romanian fountain spews blood!  It's not what you might think, Gothic-minded reader.  The gore fountains are actually part of a plan, intended for a good cause: International Hemophilia Day.

Listen to the crimson pattering, followed by the rush of wind through descending blood:

(via Arnaud Leene via Twitter)

Down with Halloween fears

How scary is Halloween?  Isn't it rife with child molesters, dangerous strangers, car crashes and tall teenagers, not to mention multiple forms of poison? 

Perhaps not.  Lenore Skenazy observes:

Elizabeth Letourneau, an associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, studied crime statistics from 30 states and found, "There is zero evidence to support the idea that Halloween is a dangerous date for children in terms of child molestation."

In fact, she says, "We almost called this paper, 'Halloween: The Safest Day of the Year,' because it was just so incredibly rare to see anything happen on that day."

(via Jesse Walker at Reason)

Watchmen from a parallel universe

The Watchmen movie from an alternate history, as if shot in the late 1960s:

Hartter is a mad genius.  We blogged some earlier work here.

Haunted Las Vegas

More images of Gothic Great Recession, seen in Las Vegas:

(via Chairman Bruce)

Zombies vs Fox News

Zombies go mainstream, continued: partisan undead, 2010:

(via Ed Webb's thinkery)