Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Weird lightning strike wipes out hundreds of reindeer simultaneously

A strange lightning strike took out hundreds of Norwegian reindeer, all at the same time.

“Officials surmised that an extremely high discharge of electricity from the storm on Friday afternoon—and the interaction of the lightning with the earth and water—had electrocuted the animals,” according to the New York Times. “Olav Strand, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, inspected the site on Sunday, and said the animals appeared to have died ‘as if someone just turned off a switch.’ The air was filled with a smell that seemed both sweet and sour, he said.”

(thanks to Ed Webb)

On the uses of robot babies on humans

Schools and communities have been assigning robot dolls to young women in order to convince them not to get pregnant, the idea being that a better sense of actually having a demanding little creature would be daunting.

It is unclear what about the program failed to stick, though researchers have a few ideas. Robot dolls leave teenage boys — i.e., would-be fathers — out of the equation, as University of Notre Dame, Australia, teen pregnancy expert Julie Quinlivan noted in a companion article at the Lancet. Nor, the clinician noted, is a robot doll an adequate simulator for an actual child.

“Anecdotally, a lot of the students really enjoyed the program,” study author Sally Brinkman, of Australia’s Telethon Kids Institute, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There was a lot of positivity around the program, so it didn’t really work in putting the kids off.”

and:

“We’ve had midnight telephone calls from parents saying: ‘Please tell me how to turn it off, my daughter’s going crazy,’” as Janette Collins, a London-based youth counselor said to the Financial Times last October. “It’s the very few girls who score really well that you have to look out for. In my experience they’re the ones who go off and get pregnant for real — you’ve accidentally taught them they can cope.”

The Earth quietly gnaws on North Dakota

Sometimes the Earth's war on humanity occurs very quietly, in small steps, as in North Dakota.

Hopfauf said that since his home was built in 2004, about one-third of the backyard has sunk with the hill along with a tree line and a walking path — all of which are tumbling into a nearby creek.

The Bismarck Park District has blocked off the walking path because it’s no longer safe.

More:

[S]ome backyards dropped as much as 7 feet in June. Jim Hopfauf is one of the homeowners affected by the collapsing hill where houses are perched in north Bismarck. He told The Bismarck Tribune that it keeps dropping every time it rains.

It's just one step.  One little move in Gaea's quest for human destruction.

(thanks to Steven "From the Pit" Kaye)

Hellraiser, 1950s style

This receives the Infocult seal of approval.  For you Hellraiser fans:

 

(thanks to Randy McCall)

A mass funeral for clowns

In 1918 a train crash in the upper American midwest killed nearly 100... clowns. Is there a word for a clown massacre?

On the night of June 22, 1918, members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus were asleep in the rear cars of their train. It was 4am, and the train had stopped just outside Hammond, Indiana to cool an overheated axle box. They were en route to their next performance in Hammond, and then on to Monroe, Wisconsin. They would never make it.

There was certainly a mass clown funeral.

There were 127 injured and an estimated 86 dead. A mass grave was dug in a 750-plot section of Woodlawn Cemetery recently purchased by the Showmen’s League of America. Many of the remains were unidentifiable, or known only by their stage names, so headstones at Showmen’s Rest are marked with names like “Baldy,” “Smiley,” and “Unknown Female #43.”

(thanks to Clyde)

A Gothic presidential ad

We may have the most Gothic campaign ad of 2016:

It's very Gothic to see actual blood attached to candidates.

Let's see which horror-themed ads come next.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Hidden bodies are NOT a part of the exhibit

They call it the corpse flower for a reason. Here's a sign in New York:

(thanks to Ed Webb)

Intergenerational vampirism is no longer a metaphor

Elizabeth Báthory Peter Thiel is one of a group of rich people trying to improve their health through someone else's blood.  Transfusions from young people, to be Gothic and precise.

 Seriously:

Healthy participants aged 35 and older get a transfusion of blood plasma from donors under 25, and researchers monitor their blood over the next two years for molecular indicators of health and aging.

It's part of a general biological process called parabiosis.

There are nice callbacks to the Dracula-style wealthy vampire theme.  (Recall that there were many stories of poor, peasant vampires from the 1700s on.  Stoker helped redefine the vampire as aristocrat, a theme picked up in our by Anne Rice)

The study is patient-funded; participants, who range in age from late 30s through 80s, must pay $8,000 to take part, and live in or travel to Monterey for treatments and follow-up assessments...

There are widespread rumors in Silicon Valley, where life-extension science is a popular obsession, that various wealthy individuals from the tech world have already begun practicing parabiosis, spending tens of thousands of dollars for the procedures and young-person-blood, and repeating the exercise several times a year.

The metaphors and jokes just make themselves, don't they?

(photo by Justin Hall)

How severed human feet work

The How Stuff Works podcast approached the severed human feet story.

Along with exploring issues of shoe technology and ocean chemistry, they bring in the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as partial explanation, a variety of apophenia.

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)

Radioactive beasts haunt post-atomic zone

Here's a nicely Infocultish headline:

Rampaging Radioactive Wild Boars Causing Havoc

In the Fukushima area, denuded of human activity, boars are now very comfortable.

The posthuman landscape looks like this:

In the four years since the disaster, the boar population has increased by 330 percent. In the 12 mile radius of the “exclusion zone” alone, there are an estimated 13,000 radioactive boars thriving...

In an interview with Japanese newspaper, Mainichi, assistant ecology professor, Okuda Keitokunin, said, “Wild boar along have been taking advantage of the evacuation zone, entering vacant houses in areas damaged by the [disaster], and using them as breeding places or burrows.

(thanks to Ted Major)