Folks, I was there in those ancient days of computing yore, and reading pixels off the screen for collision detection was exactly how I did games, too. I even still have code that does that lying around somewhere for some silly screensaver modules I wrote. Anyway:
"The algorithm to determine which pixel to check next used some fast assembler math to calculate a memory address – either one pixel above, below, to the left, or to the right of the current pixel. But since any given pixel on the screen was really just a memory address, the algorithm simply calculated a new memory location to read. So when the light cycle left the screen, the game happily calculated the next location in system memory to check for a wall crash. This meant that the cycle was now cruising through system RAM, wantonly turning on bits and “crashing” into memory. Writing to random locations in system memory isn't generally a wise design practice. Unsurprisingly, the game would generate spectacular crashes as a result. A human player would be driving blind and usually crash right away, limiting the scope of system casualties. The AI opponents had no such weakness. The computer would scan immediately in front, to the left, and to the right of its position to determine if it was about to hit a wall and change directions accordingly. So as far as the computer was concerned, system memory looked no different than screen memory."
I know this isn't the first time this has been done, but the town of Rjukan, Norway, is installing mirrors on top of local mountains to reflect light into the town square during the sunless winter months of the far north. I always love stories like this, because they show off the clever audacity of the crafty ape we call man. A related concept is that of daylighting, where architectural measures are taken to treat buildings with natural sunlight where possible. And I mentioned this has been done before; specifically, in Viganella, Italy, mirrors were constructed on local mountaintops to reflect sunlight into the city's valley, which, due to the depth of the valley, was resigned to shadows for so long in the year. Here's the trailer for the documentary about Viganella's mirror:
Oh, and the town of Rattenberg, Austria, also did the same thing, for the same reason as Rjukan.
...it might only be a mechanical "digesting" duck. Such was one of the iconic inventions of the dawn of the mechanical age, "The Duck." The steampunk creature of clockwork limbs could not only move, but simulate eating food and - sparing no effort in attention to detail - pass droppings as well, although the actual product was pre-stored and didn't involve actual biological digestion.
Such was the invention of Jacques de Vaucanson, widely considered to be one of the fathers of robotics or at least automata. He created this duck in 1738, for demos to the elite, using it to finance further creations. Before you scoff too loudly at such frivolity, keep in mind that Vaucanson's major accomplishments included automated, programmable looms, which could be programmed with punch cards - in 1745. Later this same media storage format would be used to input data into the world's first computers.
You can still generate a punched-card design at emulators like this. I would recommend the 'bcd' command from the bsdgames package on Unix systems, but that's such lost technology that it's barely worth mentioning.
Roy Sullivan got into the Guinness Book of World Records as having been struck by lightning seven times - and survived them all! This was seven separate incidents, mind you, over a period of years from 1942 to 1977. He also claimed an eighth strike which happened to him as a child, but never bothered to record it. Perhaps bothered too much by the way God seemed to have it in for him, he committed suicide by gunshot at age 71. His experience, however, form an important contribution to the specialized medical field of Keraunopathy - the study of the effects of lightning strikes on the human body.
Malden Island is a tiny uninhabited dot of land sticking up smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, part of what is today the Republic of Kiribati. It was discovered by a British sea captain in 1825. And upon discovery of this tiny ~15 square-mile island, a mystery was born.
Specifically, the uninhabited island was the site of many stone structures, including the ruins of "temples" or at least monolithic, temple-like structures. Nobody knows who could have put them there. To this day, your theory is as good as anybody else's. Very little else is known about or written about this site; however, I did find one crackling good conspiracy theorist who classifies it as 'forbidden archeology.'
Of all the feral children stories, the green children of Woolpit seem the most curious. They were two Flemish children who walked up to farmers in Suffolk, England, in the 12th century. The children, a boy and a girl, both had green skin. After dumping a fanciful story of a distant twilight land called "Saint Martin", which may or may not have been true, the children were adopted into the community and eventually went on to live normal lives and regain normal skin color. It turns out that the skin pigment could have been a symptom of a nutritional deficiency, called 'hypochromic anemia.' Similar to how leaves turn color in the fall, the lack of red blood cell pigmentation simply leaves other elements of the body to lend a skin color instead. Whatever you do, do not search Google images for 'hypochromic anemia'. They're not nearly as pretty as you're picturing it. But perhaps encounters with people afflicted with this condition accounts for widespread folklore tales of little green elves, gnomes, leprechauns, and other mythical humanoids - maybe they were just malnourished, and so short, and anemic.
During the height of witch-hunting in the 15th century, there was a book published in Germany that was a sort of "Witch-Hunting for Dummies" guide, name of Malleus Maleficarum.
Full page scans available at Cornell's online repository, and while you're there, they have a few other witch-related tomes to check out for all your witchery needs. There's also a full site devoted to this and other witch-related beliefs, even into the present day. But even practices for catching plain old criminals wasn't much better. For instance, there was the process of cruentation, in which an accused murderer was brought together with the corpse of the presumed victim and ordered to lay their hands upon the carcass. If the dead body should then spontaneously begin bleeding from its wounds, that would be a sign from on high that the defendant was guilty. One can only imagine how many murderers got off scott-free. Many such practices are covered in the blanket category of "Trial by Ordeal," where you get all the variations on tying you up and throwing you into the river to see if you sink or swim, or plunging your hand into boiling water to see if God healed you, or simply swallowing poison, or other such life-jeopardizing trials. In some cases, surviving the ordeal unscathed meant that God had declared you innocent, while in other areas it was considered just the opposite proof, that you had escaped by the Devil's aide. Then there was the practice of compurgation, a law which meant that you could be found innocent if you could find twelve people who said they believed your side of the story. Well, who couldn't scare up twelve friends? One more curiosity is the German principle of "stadtluft macht frei," a kind of statue-of-limitations where if a serf had managed to escape capture for a year-and-a-day, they was no longer open to being re-chained. And for a final medieval law oddity, animals could be tried in a court of law exactly as if they were human.
TIL folks of a few centuries ago believed that sperm cells contained little tiny people, perfect replicas of the humans they would become. As told here. In the modern day, we've moved on past the silly idea of perfect replicas embedded in sperm or egg cells; now the anti-choice religious crowd insists that conception makes a perfect little tiny person.
Matthew 8:34 "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts."
You should turn your rebellious son over to the town to be murdered:
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear."
God commanded Saul to slaughter a whole town, including the women, babies, and animals:
1 Samuel 15:1-3 "Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
If you rape an unmarried woman, your only penalty is paying her father 50 silver coins and marrying her:
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."
If two men are fighting and the wife of one gets in the way to try to break it up, she can get her hand chopped off:
Deuteronomy 25:11-12 " When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."
Moses made a brass snake charm to cure snakebite:
Numbers 21:8-9 "And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."
God will smear crap on you:
Malachi 2:2-3 "If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them already, because ye do not lay it to heart. Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with it."
Uh... this:
2 Kings 18:27 "But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?" I can't pass up this opportunity to tie in one of my favorite works from one of my favorite web humorists, so here's the Professor Brothers (aka SuperDeluxe aka Brad Neely) with a lesson on Sodom & Gamorrah:
Well, as the video explains, the hippos - the original pair, anyway - were part of the menagerie of Pablo Escobar, famous Columbian drug lord. They adapted to the environment and roam free today, starting from a breeding pair. The life and times of Pablo Escobar read like something straight out of Scarface. Legends of his tremendous cocaine-fueled wealth even include an anecdote of how they had to store cash in a warehouse for so long that rats broke in and gnawed 10% of the stored $100-bills, destroying them. Escobar's henchmen just shrugged and wrote it off as a loss. Anyway, when you're so goddamned rich that you have a problem with rats eating your money because you can't spend it fast enough, you tend to splurge on a few indulgences. So Escobar built himself a wonderland, complete with his own zoo. What a show-off! And that's why today, hippos are now a native species in Columbia.
Two years ago, real estate agent Ashley Okland was working in this model house in Des Moines Iowa:
...when someone came into the house behind her, shot her in the head and chest, and disappeared. There's been a reward posted for information on the case, totalling up to $150,000. And not a single lead. The story has acquired some fame in my local vicinity. Because the crime happened when the area was still under development, there were no witnesses, and little hope of even catching a clue from surveillance video anywhere in the area. More baffling, Okland was a person completely free of scandal - she didn't appear to have any enemies, she was just an up-and-coming realtor who also volunteered at Big Brothers / Big Sisters. She's missed by many, all of whom express disbelief that anybody could have had a problem with her. But this case, by itself, isn't nearly as mind--blowing as you might think, when you consider the fact that 1/3rd of homicides in the United States go unsolved. That's actually the mind--blowing part. Forget all the forensic technoporn on CSI, in the real world we just have 33% of murderers getting away with it.
It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.
You've probably heard more than one stripper, poledancer, or other adult entertainer claim that she's doing this to work her way through college. But how about, when you're done, you keep working to put somebody else through college, too? And that was the inspiration for the idea of the lapdance scholarship...
"The LapDance Scholarship was founded in December 2010 by Hailey Jude Minder, a self-proclaimed vaginally-funded experience artist. As an artist, Hailey has always been interested in, and often troubled by, the sources of fine arts funding. Having become somewhat disenchanted with the whole search for funding and the sources of such funds, Hailey set out to make her own. Moonlighting as a stripper twice a week, Hailey is bringing funding for the arts into the trenches. She has funded her own art in this manner and now wishes to help her fellow artists achieve their goals."
Courtesy of The Great God Pan Is Dead, where the complete story also involves the amazing story of the project to turn copies of dildos into art. One of which I'll post here, because to hell with being squeamish about it...
Sure, you've seen classic WWII propaganda cartoons before. We've all probably watched the Donald-Duck-in-Nazi-land to death. But this is a rarer one, from the cheeky, loopy, surreal animation of Tex Avery. All the staples of Avery are there - fourth-wall-breaking post-modern sign gags, wolf whistles at a girly magazine, literal listening devices made out of giant ears that would tickle Salvador Dali, and improbably gag weapons.
Oh, and unfettered racism, nationalism, and jingoism. And buy some more war bonds, dammit!
Not many artifacts from 500 years ago strike this kind of balance between "astounding" and "skin-crawlingly creepy", but this windup toy mechanical monk certainly claims the title. The thing works perfectly; on winding, it marches around in a square moving its arms and head, mouthing (presumably) Latin chants. Here's a video of the device in action:
It's just one example of automatons, a lost art of entirely clockwork mechanical toys and figures. In this day and age, the sum total of animated figures most people may encounter in a lifetime is at a theme park. We know some of the arts from this era, such as cuckoo clocks and coin-operated fortune tellers, but few appreciate just how hard Renaissance people worked to try to make convincing androids using only gears, chains, and springs.
You'll find many more examples at the UK site House of Automata. Here's a few more fascinating artifacts from this lost, magical era:
And there were quite a variety of clever mechanisms deployed for these. For instance, why wind a toy when you can power it entirely by dumping in a bucket of sand?
And here's a Chinese magician set from 1920 - doing an actual magic trick!
Either this chart is too confusing or there was some nauseatingly impossible feats of coupling and whelping going on (some of these look like they had 3 parents?). It takes inbred family trees to new... something.
What, did you think old airplanes just get patched up and sent back in the sky? Silly you.
That's an aerial the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, just near Tucson, Arizona. Messy Nessy calls it a "boneyard" but unless you're deliberately invoking imagery from The Who's Tommy, I don't see the connection. It's a junkyard, for planes instead of cars.
If we fret every time a CRT monitor goes into a landfill, what happens when we run out of places to put all these planes?
"Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, "We are not allowed that!" When Pismenskaya asked, 'Have you ever eaten bread?' the old man answered: 'I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.' At least he was intelligible. The daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. 'When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing.'"
It was the Lykov family, members of the pre-Bolshevik Russian Orthodox church. When the Bolsheviks overtook Russian, Orthodox believers fled to the mountains - and apparently, some of them fled deeper than others. This family was discovered hundreds of miles from the nearest human habitat. They had been holed up on a homestead farm for 40 years,m and had completely missed world history from 1936 to 1978. They had noticed the satellites in the sky at night, but concluded that "People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars."
And the matriarch of the family is the only surviving member today. Here's a video interview with her, although you'd have to translate from the Russian.
Here is the perfect Industrial Gothic set-up: A city with only 90 residents, told whom to vote for, tightly controlled, existing as a paradise exclusively for corporations. You say corporations are people? Well just wait until they kick you out of your house and take over!
The few residents "lucky" enough to get in enjoy largely ceremonial occupations at cushy wages. But it comes at a price: You live as a virtual prisoner of the city council, told what to do, and especially how to vote. One citizen's experience:
"Algee said he got his ballot by mail and decided to go to City Hall to fill it out and turn it in; as he stood at the counter, a city employee hovered nearby, watching him mark his choices.
'I pointed to one of their candidates and looked at her and she nodded, yes, that one,' he said. 'So I went to the next one and looked at her and she nodded again. That's how it worked.'"
The eerie government setup of Vernon, California, has led to uncontested incumbent elections since 1980. A quote from that Wiki:
"Most of the city's less than 90 voters are city employees or connected to city employees who live in homes rented at a nominal fee. In 1979 a firefighter tried to run for mayor and was immediately evicted and told he couldn't run. In 2006 a group of outsiders tried to move into Vernon and run for office. The city tried to cancel their registrations but was ordered to allow them to run and to count the ballots. Almost none of the city employees voted for them. Leonis Malburg, the mayor for fifty years, was convicted of voter fraud, conspiracy, and perjury in December 2009. In May 2011, the former city administrator Bruce Malkenhorst, Sr., accepted a plea deal for misappropriating $60,000 in public funds."
In spite of the austere population, close to 100,000 people are employed at warehouses and factories within the city limits. The city motto is indeed "Exclusively industrial". With the tightly controlled government fortress and virtually no one to cry foul, companies can get away with things in this city that us mere mortals are denied. For instance, city leaders had the power to kick Southern California Edison out of town and build their own power plant - which charges them rates 40% lower than the California standard.
Public Access TV in the 1980s - they were desperate for content! "It's the law." - Anybody could air their videotape and everybody did. For being such a wholesome enterprise, they sure pushed the sex, sex, sex. And drugs. And sex. And ventriloquist acts. And wacky costumes. And unbelievably untalented schmoos. But mostly lots and lots of sex. Basically if 4chan got to run TV, this is what it would look like.
We don't even have this much liberty on the Internet now - what happened?
