Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Death by elevator

San Francisco elevator kills one man, while another one listens.

The person who was stuck in the elevator told rescue personnel that he was riding the elevator when he heard a "crunching sound" in tandem with a scream as the elevator stalled...

We at Infocult have been tracking elevator deaths for a long time.

(thanks to Steven "The Lift" Kaye)

Startups can be zombies, too

The zombie meme shambled a little further this week, as one commentator decries the rise of the zombie startup.

[T]here are startups out there who are still “operating” but might as well not be...

[A]ny company that shows little to no growth in web traffic in the past year that claims to still be operating is probably a zombie.

Note that the post aims to ward off criticism of a service's failure.

One scary childrens' book

Among some images from an alternative America we find creepy artifacts, like this one:

Keep reading Liartown.  And check your Netflix.

New lifeform found under polar ice

Russian scientists imitated all kinds of horror fiction this week, announcing the discovery of - really - new forms of life under Antarctic ice.

The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said.

Just to drive the point home:

He said it was not even possible to find the genetic descendants of the bacteria. "If this had been found on Mars everyone would have undoubtedly said there is life on Mars. But this is bacteria from Earth."

No word on shuggoths.  Yet.

Fear the algorithm

A new twist on cyberfear might be surfacing this season, as people blame algorithms for embarrassments.

For example, a Solid Gold Bomb t-shirt advised us to

What a terrible product!

But wait, there's more.  As one critic notes, this might be "Algorithms as excuse. Algorithms as plausible deniability for your poor taste."  Listen to the apology text:

[W]e did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process that was compiled by only one member of our staff...

So they blame the machine, while admitting some human involvement.  It's akin to blaming computer games for mass killings.

Not convinced?  Read on:

Solid Gold Bomb founder Michael Fowler decided to create a flood of parodies. He gathered up a list of words, threw them into a script and pressed ‘go’.

Fowler describes culling a list of ‘millions’ of generated phrases down to 700, and checking the phrases for graphical approximation to the original, apparently without noting the contents.

"without noting the contents".  This isn't machine error, but a human mistake.  And:

He claims to be as surprised as the rest of us that an offensive combination ended up in the database. (In fact, several offensive combinations showed up, which is to be expected if you put words like ‘rape’ or ‘choke’ or ‘hit’ in your list of verbs.)

Indeed.

It's important to keep our critical gaze turned on cyberculture and its emerging aspects.  But we also need to bear in mind our (American, at least) tendency to shift blame onto the machines.

(thanks to Jesse Walker; image via BoingBoing)

One glorious Count

Welsh science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds offers this nice sketch of Christopher Lee as Dracula:

 

Gothic/sf simile of the week

The best Gothic/sf hybrid simile of the week award goes to Market Watch.

Have you ever felt like Ripley — Sigourney Weaver — at the end of Alien? After the monster has wiped out all of her fellow crew members, she decides to kill it by blowing up her spaceship, the Nostromo. She sets the ship’s self-destruct mechanism and races for the escape shuttle — only to find the alien now blocking her way.

The next few minutes are a hair-raising race against time. As Ripley barrels back through the long corridors of the space ship, “Mother,” the voice of the ship’s computer, ominously counts down the time left until everything will go kaboom in a blinding, space-bending explosion.

The stock market feels a little like this.

Yeah.

In an unrelated semiotic vein, "Greedometer indicator" is a fun phrase, too.

(link via Naked Capitalism; image from Wikipedia)

Texas Gothic

A British news site relishes this bit of Lone Star Gothic:

US teens 'had three-way sex on corpses of men they lured to their house, strangled to death and hog-tied'

What's not to like?

For bonus points, "After killing the men, Landerman jumped on their backs and 'surfed' on their dead bodies, according to reports."

And "the police chief, said Massaro, Landerman and Miner were 'very much surprised' when police walked in on them".

(thanks to John Morgan chez Facebook)

The zombie inversion

Cute idea for a story:

#greatmovieideas An ambitious science experiment gone horribly wrong successfully reanimates people who "died" by drowning in cold water (hich preserves most brain information). Unfortunately, the revivees wake with global episodic amnesia - they have most of their skills, but not their names or lives, and the reviving process makes them look pale, and occasionally bleed from their ears. Also unfortunately, they smell so incredibly delicious that it triggers some primal emotion - no ordinary human being can resist trying to eat them. Soon the zombies are fleeing through the streets, chased by the ravenous hordes of living humans.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Robots take one step closer to planetary dominion

We're seen how the Big Dog robot can stomp around. Now it can also pick up and toss huge cinderblocks over its "shoulder."  Presumably to destroy human rebels.

Watch the video of humanity's overlords to come in action:

One commentator notes: "I love how the "mouth" looks like it's growling/howling in fury and triumph with its "head" held high after throwing the block..."

Infocult: tracking the evolution of creepy robots, one staggering exercise of power at a time.

(via Slashdot)