Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Crack rips across Wyoming

The Earth continued her war against the human race by tearing open a giant crack in Wyoming.

Earlier last month, a hunter in Wyoming was out in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains when he came across a crack in the earth. The next time anyone went to see it, just a few weeks later, it had grown to a gigantic gash—2,250 feet long (that's two-fifths of a mile*) and 150 feet wide. 

"It doesn't make any sense, where it happened it's just like the ground opened up, and the size of it is just huge," hunting company owner Sy Gilliland told local news outlet KUSA.

No casualties... this time.

(thanks to Steven "Lloigor Man" Burnett)

The PlayStation terror

A Belgian official warns us that terrorists are scheming with PlayStations.

Jambon also reportedly warned of the growing use by terror networks ofthe PlayStation 4 gaming console, which allows terrorists to communicate with each other and is difficult for the authorities to monitor. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp,” he said.

(Although it turns out there was no evidence actually connecting the Paris attacks to a single console)

Forbes followed suit. Fox News joined in, proclaiming a "joystick jihad."  Italy is taking steps.

(thanks to Jesse "The Controller" Walker)

Stealing people's brains

Gothic horror meets true crime in Indianapolis:

A man has admitted stealing human brain samples and other tissue from a medical museum.

Prosecutors said Wednesday that 21-year-old David Charles pleaded guilty to burglary and was sentenced to four years in jail, with three years suspended.

Charles was arrested in December 2013 after a San Diego man who purchased about six jars of brain tissue on eBay for $600 alerted authorities. The tissue had been stolen from the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis, where a piece of paper had a bloody fingerprint matching Charles.

The museum's director said at the time of the theft that the tissue came from autopsies conducted between the 1890s and 1940s.

Infocult: your guide to stylish crime.

(link thanks to Todd "Abby Normal" Bryant; photo by Michael Horton)

Producing mutant, shapeshifting worms

In the annals of weird science: one team has figured out how to reshape the heads of worms.  Specifically, "worms with the heads and brains of other species."

Normally, G. dorotocephala sports a pointy head with two elongated, earlike projections (called auricles) next to the eyes. After treatment, some of the worms developed their normal heads, while others grew rounded heads like those of S. mediterranea; heads with thick necks and pointy, catlike "ears" like those of P. felina; or triangular heads like those of D. japonica.

But don't worry, if you're concerned about species purity.  "The changes are temporary for the worms, whose heads begin to revert back to their original shapes in weeks."

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

The internet is poisoning us: an old angle on media fear

A new article compares the internet to ancient Rome's system of water supply based on lead pipes: technologically advanced, useful, and poisonous.

[Roman lead plumbing] was this amazing technological infrastructure. It was beautifully made, it provided them with an incredibly high standard of living and it also slowly, gradually made them irretrievably sick and insane*. It poisoned them day by day.

Seeing something as figuratively or literally poison is a classic fear meme.

Mental illness is a more recent, but still potent charge:

what if in 2000 years we look back on our current internet, and think of it as a fascinating but heartbreaking tale of hubris. A moment in time where people were consuming a type of technology they knew wasn’t good for them because it conferred status and prestige. And that thing they craved so much was slowly making them lose their minds.

Note the interesting class angle:

we look back at it now as this thing that was simultaneously a fascinating part of how their culture worked, and the invention of a new kind of urban living but also as something that was slowly but surely making the ruling class into people who were desperately ill with terrible impulse control without ever realizing it or understanding why.”

The author and interlocutor don't bother to translate this to the full range of contemporary society deeply invested in (and by, if I may tweak the metaphor) the internet.  Perhaps they could make use of the lead-crime hypothesis.

The hidden face lurking in our minds

When we look at objects we sometimes see shapes that aren't really there, including human faces. One project just tried to suss out a kind of average face recognized by folks.

Using an algorithm usually used to average out the faces of real people, Robby Kraft instead used it to average out around 2,500 images taken from the glorious Instagram hashtag #FacesInThings. Essentially, it’s just a lot of random every-day objects that bear a passing resemblance to human faces—some more so than others.

The result is a gentle stare from nightmares:

(thanks to Jesse "not the face in that cloud" Walker)

US Civil War dead on the march

American Civil War dead are threatening the living, according to Smithsonian.  It's not a zombie thing, but a problem of arsenic used in some corpse embalming procedures.

“A Civil War-era cemetery filled with plenty of graves—things seldom stay where you want them to,” says Benjamin Bostick, a geochemist at Columbia University. "As the body is becoming soil, the arsenic is being added to the soil.” From there, rainwater and flooding can wash arsenic into the water table.

That means old cemeteries full of deceased soldiers and civilians present a real problem for today’s homeowners. The federal government says it's only safe for us to drink water with 10 parts per billion of arsenic or less. But in 2002, a USGS-sponsored survey in Iowa City found arsenic levels at three times the federal limit near an old cemetery.

“When you have this big mass of arsenic, there’s enough to affect literally millions of liters of water at least a little bit,” Bostick says. 

(many thanks to Amanda Lee)

Sinkholes gnaw on Mississippi

The Earth's campaign against human civilization shifted ground this week, as a major sinkhole ripped open a chunk of Mississippi.

Witnesses at the scene reported hearing a series of booms before the power went out and sinkhole opened up.

WTOK says officials were called out to the scene about 7:15 p.m. Saturday and officials have said an estimated 15 vehicles were swallowed by the sinkhole..

We're told the hole is roughly 50 feet wide and extends from the front of the restaurant all the way to Sowashee Creek, nearly 600 feet.

RT has some fine, disturbing photos:

and

(thanks to Steven Burnett)

"Otherwhere": fine scary audio storytelling

"Otherwhere" is a fine bit of audio horror. It starts off as a local public radio host interviewing one Dr. Arlen Childs about his new religion or psychic program. Childs is a channeler, and claims to have made contact with an unusual entity.  Saying anything more will spoil the delights.

Plus, the show has some fine art:

(thanks to Scott Danielson)

The screams of atoms as a reactor tears them apart

At MIT a physicist recorded the sounds of atoms being torn apart in a reactor.  Interestingly, they sound not unlike "a child screaming bloody murder at the top of his or her lungs."

Listen to the shrieking in this video, around :06.

Infocult: describing the world, one secret hellish scream at a time.

(thanks to Randy McCall)