Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Return of the scary clowns

After a lull, the clown fear of 2016 may be returning.  This time, it's in Pennsylvania, and starts with children:

The children were playing hide-and-go-seek in the woods, when around 4:15 p.m. they said two men dressed like scary clowns and carrying weapons approached them.

“They were chasing us,” Dylan Milkowski, 8, said.

What a primal American horror scene: the forest, some children, then armed clowns.

The story then shifts to the adult perspective:

“I said to my kids, ‘Are you lying or something?’ and they were like ‘No, we’re being really serious.’ I looked over and they showed me where they were and there’s two guys running up a hillside,” Milkowski said.

Milkowski said he started yelling at the men.

“I just said ‘Hey what are you doing over here?’ and they just kept running and everything,” Milkowski recounted.

Dylan said the men were intimidating, especially because they were armed.

“They had clown outfits on. They had clown masks. They had pipes and they had shotguns,” Dylan added. According to his dad, one of the men was carrying a shotgun and the other was carrying a pipe.

Is it time for a new clown panic, or is this just part of American folklore now?

(thanks to Ed Webb)

A self-driving multimedia-playing hearse

Concept vehicles are all about creativity, and it's inevitable that they eventually turn to the dark side.  Consider this Canadian hearse design.

To begin with, the Aeternal is a self-driving car.

The futuristic, high-tech hearse from Imaginactive, a Montreal-based nonprofit purveyor of creative ideas, would be auto-piloted or driven by remote control and could maneuver in tight spots at funeral homes and cemeteries, thanks to wheels that move independently from one another.

It would be transparent:

The casket would be transparent to allow others to see and pay their final respects to the deceased. The cover could be taken off when the body is on display and replaced prior to burial. Caskets would need to respect certain dimensions if they need to be lowered inside the vehicle. Some of them could be made of plastic, glass, or any other material. The vehicle would be made of lightweight composite materials. For transparent coffins, the inside would automatically be kept cool since the temperature of the enclosure would rise quickly under the sun. (Note that the A/C system would be positioned on the vehicle.)

And it plays multimedia.

Music and pictures could be uploaded or streamed to the Aeternal. The vehicle could project holographic content on the floor and speakers could play the deceased’s favorite music during the procession. Those features are at the discretion of the family since they can easily be disabled.

C|Net helpfully points out what Infocult readers have long known:

Mourners, for example, can already visit tombstones with video screens that let the dead communicate in an endless loop. And the Memorial RosettaStone Tablet makes it possible for cemetery visitors to stream photos and even messages from the deceased to any internet-enabled mobile device by touching it to a headstone.

(thanks to Steven "Teamster of the Damned" Kaye)

Tiny glimpses of the end of humanity

National Geographic explores the small, post-apocalyptic dioramas created by Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber.

Their goal, says Nix, is to create and photograph “open-ended narratives—models of a post-human metropolis in the future, after an unknown catastrophe.” To “unlock, engage, and provoke” viewers’ imaginations, “we want [them] to contemplate the present. Do we still have a future? Will we be able to save ourselves?”

These are very small spaces.  This photo brings home the scale:

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)

Several ways technology addles minds

Tammy Kennon offers a list of new mental disorders brought about by digital technology.  It's a fun, apparently tongue in cheek catalog, driven mostly by mobile phones and social media.  

One seems actually novel:

Fauxcellarm, phantom ringing, and ringxiety are new to our lexicon, thanks to the universal presence of our buzzing, pinging smartphones. These terms refer to the perception that one's mobile device is ringing (or, more precisely, vibrating) when, in fact, it is not. David Laramie, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, studied this phenomenon for his dissertation. Among the 320 adult mobile phone users he polled, two-thirds of them reported experiencing phantom ringing. That is, they "heard" their phone ringing when it actually wasn't.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Clothing robots with human flesh

Two British scientists have gone the Infocult route in recommending a new way to handle artificially grown human tissue.  They recommend attaching the new meat to robots, so the machines can work it into flexibility.

What would this humanoid-bioreactor system look like? It could possibly be built on top of a humanoid robot with "soft robotics" muscles made from electroactive polymers, and the growing muscles could piggyback on those to get their exercise. It would also need to be covered in soft, stretchable sensors to monitor the health of the growing tissues. The result might look a bit like the University of Tokyo's Kenshiro robot, whose actuators make realistically human movements. Its body would be covered in squishy, fluid-filled bags of engineered tissue. Patients needing tendon replacements in their hands might be able to shake hands or play piano with a robot who is wearing their future tendon grafts.

Annalee Newitz concludes:

Looking to the future, Mouthuy and Carr suggest that this could be the first step toward "biohybrid humanoids" with "cell-based actuators." In other words, this robot would be like the Terminator, whose metal endoskeleton is covered in human muscles, tendons, and skin. Obviously, if we want to create truly humanoid robots, it would make sense to eventually create ones whose musculoskeletal systems are made from cellular tissue rather than stretchy polymers. After all, this tissue is self-repairing and perfectly designed to stretch and contract.

(thanks to Steven "the flesh is all mine, I promise" Kaye)

Driven mad by a possessing bug in Pennsylvania

A Pennsylvania man, arrested for a crime, offered this unusual explanation for his act:

Martin and his wife told state police that after he had been confronted about the child pornography, he cried and crawled on his hands and knees, stood up, and fell back down, the DA's office said. That's when they said a 6-8 inch bug with a million legs crawled out of his mouth, according to the office.

Martin and his wife said the bug had possessed him, and that it made him download the child pornography, the DA's office said. 

On the one hand (or millionth leg) this can be a set of neurons firing random images across the couple's brains.  On the other, what does it suggest about our time or culture?

(thanks to Ed "not an exterminator" Webb)