Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Head transplant work continues

Today in mad science: an Italian neurosurgeon claims to be proceeding full steam ahead with a plan to transplant a human head.  That's according to an article in the delightfully-named German magazine Ooom, which reveals that 

• The world’s first human head transplant will be performed within the next ten months.
• The procedure will be performed in China.

And:

Many experiments have already been conducted and, according to Prof. Canavero, have yielded “incredible results, which will change the course of medicine.” ...The world’s first head transplant reportedly poses far fewer surgical and medical obstacles than previously assumed. The duration of the procedure will allegedly be significantly shorter than 72 hours.

That's just the start. Coming up next,

We are currently planning the world’s first brain transplant, and I consider it realistic that we will be ready in three years at the latest. A brain transplant has many advantages: first, there is barely any immune reaction, which means the problem of rejection does not exist. The brain is, in a manner of speaking, a neutral organ. If you transplant a head with vessels, nerves, tendons and muscles, rejection can pose a massive problem. This is not the case with the brain. What may be problematic, however, is that no aspect of your original external body remains the same. Your head is no longer there; your brain is transplanted into an entirely different skull.

"Where will they get the brains?" a typical Infocult reader might ask.  Our scientist gamely replies "Have you heard of the company Alcor?"

As soon as the first human head transplant has taken place, i.e., no later than in 2018, we will be able to attempt to reawaken the first frozen head.

That means you aim to transplant one of the frozen brains into a donor body?
Precisely.

Just to complete the "bwahahahaha" and Frankenstein aspects of this,

In a few months, we will severe a body from a head in an unprecedented medical procedure. In this phase, there is no life activity – not in the brain, not anywhere else in the body. The patient is dead, clinically dead. If we bring this person back to life, we will receive the first real account of what actually happens after death. The head transplant gives us the first insight into whether there is an afterlife, a heaven, a hereafter, or whatever you may want to call it or whether death is simply a flicking off of the light switch and that’s it.

There's more info here.

Of course, there are skeptics.  Isn't that always the way with weak and small minds, worried about their "ethics" and "reality"?

(thanks to Steven-with-two-brains Kaye)

Another creepy old computer game story: Petscop

Kotaku dives into Petscop, an innocent-seeming cute computer game with a surreal and disturbing hidden level. A YouTube let's play series follows Paul as he explores the escalating weirdness.

For more, there's a wiki, a TVTropes page, and a giant Google Doc.

Imagining United as a monster

One person on Twitter delves into United Airlines' monstrosity:

humans we are excreting sadness fluids from the United brood mother’s apology glands, we will look with all 40 million of our eyes

As every Infocult minion knows, there is a Gothic response to everything.

One very, very cruel safety film

"The Finishing Line" is a 1977 British safety movie about encouraging kids not to play on train tracks.

That is to say, it's a horrific festival of cruelty, injury, and gory death.  

The story (a short one, circa 20 minutes) is a fantasy.  An imaginative boy wonders about playing games across railroads, and the film plays it out.  What looks like two hundred kids compete in races, rock-throwing contests, and games of walking into onrushing trains.  Casualties accumulate, tended by very bland and unmoved adults.  A brass band wheezes while judges award points for accomplishments and mayhem.  It's like a dark, 1970s British version of Battle Royale (2000).

You have been warned:

(via Jesse "Not Your Crossing Guard" Walker)

Fearing VR

A British journalism site has a good article on impending VR moral panics.  

They touch the right bases, familiar to Infocult readers, including sex, violence, ethics, and addiction.

(thanks to Tim Pendry)

When the British mutilated the feared dead

Archaeologists digging near York have found evidence of very Gothic funerary practices.

Simon Mays, skeletal biologist at Historic England, said: “The idea that the Wharram Percy bones are the remains of corpses burnt and dismembered to stop them walking from their graves seems to fit the evidence best. If we are right, then this is the first good archaeological evidence we have for this practice.”

Let's back up.  Here's context, some ongoing research into human remains:

When the bones were found in the 1960s the archaeologists thought they were probably older than the village, and belonged to early Romano-British settlers whose remains were disturbed and reburied by the villagers. The truth has proved to be more sinister...

The archaeologists who studied a collection of human bones – including the remains of adults, teenagers and children excavated more than half a century ago, and dated back to the period between the 11th and 14th century – rejected gruesome possibilities including cannibalism in times of famine, or the massacre of outsiders. The cut marks were in the wrong place for butchery, and isotope analysis of the teeth showed that the people came from the same area as the villagers of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire – a once flourishing village which had been completely deserted by the early 16th century.

And now the new idea:

The archaeologists studied 137 pieces of broken human bones, found in the pits of the village. Their conclusion, published on Monday in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, is that the most plausible explanation for the burn marks and cuts found on the skulls and upper body bones was deliberate mutilation after death. The scientists believe the intention was to keep the dead from walking and spreading disease or attacking the living.

And more:

Medieval sources offer various remedies for dealing with the restless dead, believed to be individuals who were evil or cursed in life and still bore a grudge against the living in death. Solutions included digging up and decapitating or burning the skeletons. The condition of the Wharram Percy bones suggests that the bodies were decapitated quite soon after death, when the bones were still soft, and burned.

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The scariest museum collections

What are the most frightening collections from today's museums?

The Museum101 Twitter account* seeks to find out. Thoughtcatalog has a nice sampling., including this charming jar of moles, with human-like hands:

Or this nicely creepy doll head:

Or a Victorian half head:

We at Infocult applaud Museum101 and all the creepy collections it stands for.

(thanks to Todd "Trapped in a Jar" Bryant)

*Museum101 refers to Room 101 from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The era of the coffin torpedo

Not all grave robbery deterrents involved ammunition

How to protect dead bodies from grave robbing?  One clever 19th-century solution was the coffin torpedo.  The Atlas Obscura article has all kinds of good stuff.

One model was designed to work like this:

Philip. K Clover, a Columbus, Ohio artist, patented an early coffin torpedo in 1878. Clover’s instrument functioned like a small shotgun secured inside the coffin lid in order to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies,” as the inventor put it. If someone tried to remove a buried body, the torpedo would fire out a lethal blast of lead balls when the lid was pried open.

Another had a related yet different approach:

[F]ormer Circleville probate judge Thomas N. Howell, patented a grave torpedo of his own on December 20, 1881. Unlike the Clover torpedo, Howell’s gadget was a shell buried above the coffin and wired to it. This worked like a landmine and would detonate when thieves ran into the wiring.

This, global friends, is how Americans defend their dead:

“Sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat,” read an advertisement for the Howell torpedo.

(thanks to Thomas Burkdall)