Category Archives: Weird

Dept. of GAAAAAA

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250px-Krampus.pngIn parts of Europe, Santa is accompanied by [Krampus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus), which is deeply, deeply fucked up if you ask me.

Birthers? 9/11 Truthers? Positively sane compared to…

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Middle Ages Denialists. I shit you not:

The Phantom time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß) in 1991. It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

Wow. (Via Nix over on Facebook.)

Here’s something I didn’t know

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In biology, some animals have what’s called negligible senescence:

[N]egligibly senescent animals do not have measurable reductions in their reproductive capability with age, or measurable functional decline with age. Death rates in negligibly senescent animals do not increase with age as they do in senescent organisms.

In other words, they tend to live until something actively kills them. They’re still vulnerable to disease or violence, but absent that they just keep living. Examples include some tortoises and — get this — lobsters, who can live 100 years.

Dept. of the Very Weird, or, Life in the Future

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For a very, very long time, I’ve been a subscriber to a very old-skool geek lisstserv the traditions of which prohibit me from naming. It’s been around for probably 20+ years, and I’ve been a subscriber for probably 10 years.

I have no interaction with any of the listmembers in the real world. Its geographical centers of gravity are Boston and the Bay Area, and I live in Texas. It, like the Well, is just a good place to go for profoundly intelligent conversation amongst the overeducated. It’s a good thing, if you like that sort of thing.

Anyway, comes now Facebook.

By now, all of us on these networks are unsurprised to discover online that two friends we see as belonging to unrelated social spheres are in fact connected by a third circle previously unknown to us. This is the “small world” aspect of Facebook and similar services, and it’s a big part of the appeal — you get to see your own social networks from other perspectives, so to speak, and that gives us all a little buzz. But last week something even weirder happened.

Facebook, like most such services, has a “people you might know” list. I’ve long assumed that this mostly worked off friends-list comparisons — if you were friends with Bob and Mary, and both Bob and Mary are friends with Jack, it might think that you, too, might want to be “friends” with Jack. Of course the algorithms go many more steps into the trees, and of course they’re more elaborate than this, but that’s the root of the tool, or so I assumed.

My weird event, though, suggests that something even more subtle is going on. I logged in last week to discover that Facebook was suggesting that I might want to be friends with H.M. I do not know H.M. in real life, but she is also a longtime subscriber to the listserve I mentioned above. We have no friends in common. I doubt we have friends of friends in common, but I cannot tell this. (It is possible, I suppose, that Facebook has found some way to convince Safari — my “disposable” browser, which I fully reset every time I run it for privacy reasons — to allow its scripts to sniff the addresses in Mail.app, but this seems unlikely (more unlikely, though, is that such a thing is possible AND that I’d be unaware of it)). I’d very much like to know how Facebook determined that H.M. is someone I might now, but unlike (e.g.) LinkedIn, FB does not disclose how many steps away a person is.

The whole thing reminds me of something my friend Laura said to me a while back: “We have only begun to realize the degree to which the Internet, via Google, is going to radically change  the way we work with information.” We were discussing social recommendation services like LibraryThing, but this H.M./Facebook development suggests that our social networks themselves — the real ones, not the shadows on the cave wall given us by Facebook — are the real places we’ll see weird developments.

Dept. of Gibsonian Future Scenarios

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In La Paz, you’ll find Route 36, a lounge unremarkable except for its primary product:

“Tonight we have two types of cocaine; normal for 100 Bolivianos a gram, and strong cocaine for 150 [Bolivianos] a gram.” The waiter has just finished taking our drink order of two rum-and-Cokes here in La Paz, Bolivia, and as everybody in this bar knows, he is now offering the main course. The bottled water is on the house.

Sometimes, people use their talents for evil.

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I suppose that it’s possible for someone with excellent video editing skills, an encyclopedic knowledge of the original Star Trek, a healthy (?) appreciation for Nine Inch Nails, and a latent Kirk/Spock Slash obsession to combine their interests in a way that’s not evil, but I’ll be damned if I can think of one.

On the other hand, there’s this.

Wait. You did know about the whole “Kirk/Spock” thing within slash fan fiction, right?

Oh.

Sorry. And this on the heels of having to explain “hentai” on Sunday. I guess I’m just evil. (Though, in my own defense, this showed up on the premier of Mad Men.)

Things we couldn’t possibly like more

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A monkey in India has started, apropos of nothing, helping a dude herd his goats. Said monkey has had zero training or guidance, and has apparently just picked it up by watching.

“She takes out the goats for grazing and brings them back. A shepherd is usually required to accompany the goats all day long and bring them back in these hills. But because of her, manpower can be spared. She is as good as a shepherd. The only thing is that she does not speak, but otherwise carries out all responsibilities.”

They say they feel confident that the goats will be safe when Mani accompanies them.

Mani is said to make a strange sound when she discovers a goat is missing or when danger lurks.

“She makes a strange noise if she finds a goat missing. Even though such a large number of goats go out for grazing, nobody accompanies them. If Mani is with them, we are confident that she will bring back the goats safely, wherever they might go.”

Today’s weird Internet find

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“FLIP (Floating Instrument Platform) is the US Navy’s oldest, and most unusual, research vessel. Commonly referred to as the FLIP ship, it is actually a 355ft long, spoon-shaped buoy which can be flipped from horizontal to a vertical position by pumping 700t of seawater into the ‘handle’ end whilst flooding air into the ‘cradle’, causing it to rise up out of the sea.Once the 28 minute transformation from horizontal to vertical has taken place, 300m of the buoy are submerged underwater, keeping the 700 long-ton mass steady and making it perfect for researching wave height, acoustic signals, water temperature and density, and for the collection of meteorological data.“.