Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Did Facebook just escape being a haunted space?

Is not having a Facebook account an indicator of disturbing deviance?  Britain's Daily Mail does a nice job of summarizing recent arguments identifying Facebook usage with mental goodness:

accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik have common ground in their lack of Facebook profiles.

"'If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag...'"

The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant's account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted.

If so, Facebook just left the fearsome media zone.  Like email, we now consider it to be ubiquitous, coterminous with social norms.  Milestone.

(thanks to Melanie McBride)

Alien life scooped from upper atmosphere, scientists claim

"The organisms are not usual... They must be incoming."

A British research team says they are "95 per cent convinced"" that they've discovered alien life in Earth's upper atmosphere.

The scientists sent a balloon 27km into the stratosphere, which came back carrying small biological organisms which they believe can only have originated from space.

No sign of human-replacing spores yet, no matter how chilly statements like this sound: ""The earth is an open system with biology raining down on it as we speak."

More:

The samples were collected during a meteorite shower from a comet. As they hit the earth's atmosphere, the comets melt - ablate, to give it a technical term - releasing the organisms as they break down.

"The particles are very clean," added Prof Wainwright. "They don't have any dust attached to them, which again suggests they're not coming to earth. Similarly, cosmic dust isn't stuck to them, so we think they came from an aquatic environment, and the most obvious aquatic environment in space is a comet.

"They're very unusual beasts, not your normal kind of life from earth."

Awesome images:

The story gives off a fine Andromeda Strain (1969) vibe, no matter if it turns out to be true or false.

(via Hullabaloo)

Weeping Woman Park

Naming public spaces the Infocult way:

That's this La Llorona.

(thanks to Clyde on Facebook)

Fox News wants you to fear computer gaming

American tv outlet Fox News offers this terrific visualization of why you - yes, you! - should fear videogamers.

Scott Shackford's takedown is brilliant. For example,

All the killers were male. Going back to 2008, a Pew poll showed that 99 percent of teen males play video games. 99 percent. Teen girls, by the way, clocked in a respectable 94 percent. The shooters turned out to be gamers because they were guys, and guys, by and large, are gamers of some sort, as GTAV’s sales numbers show. And a certain percentage of guys are going to turn out dangerous and violent. Video games are incidental to dealing with this much larger problem.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Demonic, ghost-ridden breakfast cereal

Breakfast cereal or portal to the underworld?  Stephen Colbert discovers an awful secret.

We at Infocult would be interested in sampling Cthuloops.

(thanks to Colin Howells, Thomas Burkdall, and the rest of the Infocult legion)

Fox News versus the Wikipedia porn monster

Conservative American tv outfit Fox News is concerned that Wikipedia hasn't fully purged itself of porn.

The article is entertaining and useful, as it covers a variety of cyberfear themes.  For instance, the children aspect:

“Frankly, Wales could delete a thousand images that are inappropriate for children, and the so-called 'wiki community' would just restore 900 of them."

The anarchy element:

"Wales no longer has much, if any, control over Wikipedia. Neither does the foundation," [said] Eric Barbour, a critic of Wikipedia who recently co-wrote a book on the site...

The gender aspect:

“Current Wikipedia administrators tend to be young males who don't write any content for it and love to fight amongst themselves."

And computer games, of course:

"To them, Wikipedia is a giant video game, not an ‘encyclopedia.’”

Interestingly, there's a bureaucracy/community management aspect:

But the board could not reach a consensus on the best answer, efforts were simply dropped -- and the problem has been largely ignored...

When a sword suggests cannibalism

Today's would-be anthropophagy story comes from Washington state.

Two Washington state teens are in custody after one convinced the other to attack his own mother with a sword and tried to convince him to eat her...

The boys blame the whole thing on drugs. 

Has there been an increase in cannibalism vents of late?

 

Diving for the bones

A police training exercise turned up skeletons and implications of murder.

The CNN report reads like a quiet horror story:

Darrell Splawn, a diver with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, was sent down on Tuesday, one week after the sonar located the corroding vehicles. They were right next to each other, at a depth of 12 feet and 50 feet from a marina. Visibility was almost nil.

 He, like others, had no idea how the vehicles -- which faced in different directions -- came to be in the lake.

Splawn located an open door and felt a shoe.

"It didn't really cross my mind as to a body being there. It could have just been a shoe," the trooper told CNN on Wednesday. Skeletal remains were seen when the car was brought to shore.

How is this Gothic?  Besides the shock horror, there are the embedded stories.

Cars found in lake may be from cold cases Investigators say they believe one car may have belonged to a teenager who disappeared with two friends in 1970, and the other car could be linked to the disappearance of a man in the 1960s who a federal official says was with a sibling and a friend...

Note that this is another instance of CNN Gothic.

Infocult's law: everything is eventually Gothic.

Creepy tweet time

Infocult's creepy Tweet of the day:

The text reads:

THE WEIRD SHUDDERING FIGURES YOU'VE BEEN NOTICING IN YOUR VIDEOS LATELY

SEEM LIKE THEY'VE JUST BEGUN TO NOTICE YOU AS WELL

Mmmmm, creepypasta.

Fearing the internet of things

"Why The Internet Of Things Might Try To Kill You" is the awesome title of a ReadWriteWeb post.

Brian Proffitt begins with a fine hypothetical narrative of chaos in New York following digital disaster.  Then he lays out reasons that such badness could occur.  The fear returns with lines like this:

if we're not careful, the Internet of Things could also turn out to be one of the most dangerous weapons around. Subverted by malicious intent, the Internet of Things could just as easily turn our lives into a horror movie, one in which the everyday objects we depend on have suddenly developed a new urge—the urge to kill. [emphases added]

Read on for more Gothic touches, from Stephen King to supervillains.

The article is actually well researched and detailed.