Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Driving the doppelgänger disorder

Inducing a doppelgänger: that was the goal of a recent medical experiment, somehow not run by mad scientists.  

Actually, Anil Ananthaswamy explores several different ways humans can really see their own doubles.  This includes by accident, which occurred when a "young man had stopped taking some of his anticonvulsant medication" and "drank copious amounts of beer and stayed in bed."  The author also explains the functions of autoscopy and heautoscopy. 

Olaf Blanke's experiments are the truly Infocultish material:

The subject was lying down, and a robotic arm stroked the subject’s back. Meanwhile, the subject viewed through a head-mounted display a video of a person being stroked on the back. The robotic arm’s stroking was either synchronous or asynchronous with stroking of the virtual person seen on the display. Again, in some subjects, their sense of location and sense of body ownership were shaken up. One of the most striking outcomes was when a subject reported looking at their own body from above, even though the subject was lying prone, face-up, in the scanner.

Ananthaswamy's book, The Man Who Wasn't There, sounds very Infocultish.

(thanks to Todd Bryant for the link; photo by Gabriele Negri)

Main Aztec skull rack revealed

"[T]here are 35 skulls that we can see, but there are many more" in underlying layers. "As we continue to dig the number is going to rise a lot."

In the latest development of Infocult-ish archaeology, researchers claim to have discovered the main Aztec skull rack.

What does this mean, beyond offering a splendid metal band name?

Racks known as "tzompantli" were where the Aztecs displayed the severed heads of sacrifice victims on wooden poles pushed through the sides of the skull. The poles were suspended horizontally on vertical posts.

Eduardo Matos, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, suggested the skull rack in Mexico City "was a show of might" by the Aztecs. Friends and even enemies were invited into the city, precisely to be cowed by the grisly display of heads in various stages of decomposition.

The Aztecs were mighty contributors to Infocult's world history.

And consider this remaining mystery:

Part of the platform where the heads were displayed was made of rows of skulls mortared together roughly in a circle, around a seemingly empty space in the middle. All the skulls were arranged to look inward toward the center of the circle, but experts don't know what was at the center.

(thanks to Steven Kaye, lifelong Infocult supporter)

Death in auto play

Are we in the age of death via auto play?  Mic Wright thinks so, putting together several trends: people increasingly publishing videos set to play automatically; the ferocious hunger for clicks; the growing presence of video recorders.

Infocult adds: humanity's deep, persistent hunger for stories of death and decay.

What next?

Our eyes are pinned open, ‘Clockwork Orange’-style, in this world of endless looping content. Your death could be monetized. Your death could be clicks. Your death could have value to people who know nothing about your hopes and dreams. Your death could be followed by cat videos.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Lovecratian headlines

Here's a glimpse into what the news would look like if written a la H.P. Lovecraft:

(click to embiggen)

Source is this BoingBoing post.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Nightmarish art, curated by Cracked

The increasingly impressive Cracked site now offers a list of seven scary artists, or "7 Artists Whose Work Will Give You Nightmares".

For example, Zdzisław_Beksiński:

The other six are excellent, fine Infocult people.

(thanks to daughter of Infocult)

Sinkhole returns for more in Florida

In Florida (of course) a sinkhole opened up - exactly where one yawned wide several years ago.

For the first one, 

In March 2013, Jeffrey Bush was asleep in his bedroom on the property when the floor collapsed and he fell in. His body was never recovered. His brother, Jeremy Bush, was in the house and tried to rescue him, even jumping into the hole. He was rescued by authorities as the ground crumbled around him.

Officials then razed the home and two adjacent homes.

And now, "The hole opened up again in Seffner, east of Tampa, and is about 20 feet in diameter..."  No deaths this time.

More on Florida: "Sinkholes are so common in Florida that state law requires home insurers to provide coverage against the danger."

(thanks to Justin Kirkes)

Touring the ruins of Minecraft

What does a Minecraft server look like after being abandoned?  This gallery reveals a chaotic mix of destruction and desolation:

This is the journey back to spawn on the 2b2t server, perhaps the longest-running consistently-populated single map in Minecraft. It has been running the same map file for at least 3 years straight. 2b2t is an absolute anarchy server, so anything goes. Here is how bad it really is.

 

This kind of decayed virtual world was a major feature of Second Life, especially as that platform fell down the Gartner Hype Cycle.

(via HackerNews)

Mass grave reveals prehistoric horror

A recently discovered set of human remains offers a grim look into prehistoric cruelty.

In the seven metre-long, V-shaped pit, researchers found the skeletons of 26 adults and children, who were killed by devastating strikes to the head or arrow wounds. The skull fractures are classic signs of blunt force injuries caused by basic stone age weapons...

More than half of the individuals had their legs broken in acts of apparent torture or posthumous mutilation. The smashed-in shin bones could represent a new form of violent torture not seen before in the group.

The violence meant more than just torment and death for the victims, apparently:

Christian Meyer, an archaeologist who led the study at the University of Mainz, believes the attackers meant to terrorise others and demonstrate that they could annihilate an entire village...

“On one hand you are curious about finding out more about this, but also shocked to see what people can do to each other,” he said.

The Guardian's caption for this image reads "A portion of a child’s skull, displaying classic signs of blunt force injuries caused by basic stone age weapons."  It's a form of total war:

The scientists’ best guess is that a small farming village was massacred and thrown into a pit nearby. The skeletons of young women were absent from the grave, which suggests that the attackers may have taken the women captive after killing their families .

More on that posthumous mutilation as eschatological warfare:

But he is doubtful that the victims’ legs were broken through acts of torture. “Torture focuses on the parts of the body with the most nerve cells: the feet, pubis, hands and head. I can’t think of anywhere that torture involved breaking the tibia.

“This is rank speculation, but there are ethnographic instances of disabling the ghost or spirits of the dead, especially enemies. Such mutilations were done to prevent enemy spirits from following home, haunting or doing mischief to the killers. These motives seem most likely to me. Or perhaps it was done to further revenge by crippling the enemy’s spirits in the afterlife,” he added.

Humanoid robot stalks out of the lab

Boston Dynamics demonstrated another robot, this time a humanoid bot that stomps around like a deranged Frankenstein's monster straight from the uncanny valley's depths.

It starts at :10.

“I’m not saying it can do everything you can do,” Raibert said, “but you can imagine if we keep pushing we’ll get there.”

(via Washington Post)

The trade in digital fictional lives and deaths

A hacker proposed that it is now quite easy to generate made-up deaths and births.  Which is interesting and alarming enough.  But see where he goes with it: a trading scheme.

Once I'd done the research on the death industry and the birth industry, I thought, "How could I combine these two things together in a criminal technique that people could use for money laundering?" So I thought that if you could register a fake person, and just put them on the shelf for, say, 18 years, could you then take advantage of that person and kill them off using the techniques I described earlier — or do things like share trading without risk? You could actually have a risk-free virtual person to cause havoc on the financial system.

And then:

then I thought you could make a little bit more advanced, and have what's called a "shelf baby," a bit like a shelf company, that actually operates and appears to be a real person. For the sole benefit that when they turn 18, you have access to life insurance policies, bank accounts, credit, and all those sorts of things that money launderers can use down the track. [emphases added]

Let's see when this first appears in fiction and journalism, then public policy.

(thanks to Jesse Walker and others for the pointer)