Zombie Transformation

Horned-head

Just found it startling, that's all. Wikimedia commons images can surprise you sometimes.

What was up with the green children of Woolpit?

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.

Your Whacko Conspiracy Video of the Week

Meet Macon Carrington, who has his own YouTube channel and would like to have a word with you about the secret, horrific rituals that Scientologists and Freemasons inflict on hapless kids. With demonstrations on dolls and better special effects than most History Channel shows.

Oh, he's also nuttier than squirrel scat and hair-raisingly creepy besides.

DISCLAIMER: Which is not to say that Scientologists or Freemasons are exactly nice people, and in fact there is evidence that Scientologists have done mean stuff to people before.

Perpetual motion museum - bent your mind watching people try to bend the laws of physics

"Hey, guys! I've invented a design for a 125% efficiency motor, and if you all fund my Kickstarter in return for a share of the profits in my new motor company, I can eventually build 500 of these things on a 3-ton scale and produce the world's first kinetic power generator! Who's in?"

"Hello? Anybody?"

Welcome to the world of The Museum of Unworkable Devices, a huge, engaging site documenting one of the most futile fields of study in engineering, the history-long quest for perpetual motion. Within, Donald E. Simanek serves as a James Randi of the engineering world, showing us endless attempts at overbalanced wheels, spinning magnets, wild stunts with hydraulic pressure, and machines which baffle the limits of the imagination as surely as they thumb their nose at Newton, Archimedes, and Einstein.

The site also works as an education in physics principles. For instance, did you know that the ball along the bottom ramp of this device reaches the goal first?

Be sure not to miss the FAQ, "Why won't my perpetual motion machine work?", where Simanek explains it all like you're 5. Ought to be required reading in high school science at least.

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Perpetual motion ties into a related fallacy emerging in computing.

I've recently investigated thoroughly the latest cult, sure to usurp Scientology as the most tenacious, known to some of you already as the "Singularity". The "Singularity" is the point at which computers are supposed to surpass human brains in intellect, at which point they will continue on their own to build even smarter computers, and so on ad infinitum until we're all living in the Matrix.

I'll stop for a paragraph so you can fight the urge to puke. Deep breathing helps.

The idea of  the Singularity (which has been "just a few years from now" since about the 1700s) and the bogus search for a perpetual motion machine is evident when you consider that computers do nothing until a human writes a program for them. And it's quite daunting for a human to write a program that causes a computer to be smarter than a human, since by definition the human is not smart enough to write it. And computers really are not smarter than humans at anything, they just appear to be in certain fields by virtue of brute force and speed - for instance, they beat you at chess by calculating six moves ahead from every possible move, including the ones we would eliminate through common sense. Like the would-be perpetual motion inventors, Singularitarians seek to boost the IQ of machines by making them smarter than they are so they can write themselves, just like overbalanced wheels seek to gain infinite momentum by making objects be heavier than they are so they can push themselves.

Every time, I pin down some Singularity zealot and ask them "How could you write a computer program that was smarter than yourself?" The answer is always "We'll have a computer program write the program!" I bounce back "OK, how do you write THAT program?" "We have the computer write that program, too!" Oh, I see. We'll write a program to write a program to write a program to overwhelm common sense, just like we'll trick those nasty old laws of physics by spinning a wheel inside a wheel inside a wheel...

The totally cosmic dolphin cult is alive and well

Just in case you were thinking that the New Age hippies had backed off from the dolphins, this LiveJournal observer has bad news:

"I hadn’t realized that among a certain segment of profitable 'eco'-tourism it is a commonly-held belief that dolphins not only have achieved higher consciousness and are intimate with the secrets of life, but also use telepathy to transmit their teachings.

"My favorite interaction with a dolphin-oriented wingnut occurred at the dump. As we threw our trash in the big stinky dumpster, a woman pulled up in her SUV plastered with hippie/new age bumper stickers. Dressed in all white, she asked us, 'Have you seen the dolphins?'

"'Not today,' I answered.

"'They’re out there right now. Did you know that humans are the only animal that fears when it doesn’t need to? Dolphins only fear when they are in danger?'"

Penn 'n' Teller's Bullshit did a whole episode on dolphin New-Age-ism, BTW:

The latest roundup of Scientology's weirdness

The Hole

Pictured above: "The Hole", a private prison run by the members of Scientology. This facility in Riverside, California, recently came to light thanks to an expose book by Lawrence Wright. A full story on the writing of this work is here. To quote:

"Wright’s investigations into “The Hole,” a hidden Scientology gulag in southern California where errant Church members are sent to perform menial tasks and take part in 'orgies of self-abasement,' led him to break the story of an FBI investigation—since aborted—into human trafficking."

There are also more detailed descriptions of The Hole activities at the Wikipedia page. It basically sounds like a concentration camp straight out of the Holocaust or Khmer Rouge.

The child labor camp in Australia

Here is an Australian news magazine special on the "RPF", the Rehabilitation Project Force, a sprawling complex in the middle of an Australian suburb.

Kaja Ballo

In 2008, a young girl in France who was reportedly happy beforehand voluntarily took a personality test handed out by the church of Scientology. When she got the results, they apparently devastated her and she committed suicide, leaping to her death. Some speculation has had it that the church's method of tearing people down to convince them that they'll need the church in their lives had some bearing here.

In fact, all of the above stories have the theme of "disconnection" in common, the act of severing all ties with the world outside the church, be they family, friends, or professional. This is a practice in common throughout all cults and attempts at brainwashing.

Meanwhile, this column in Esquire cautions us that none of us should be too smug; given a weak enough moment, any one of us could be sucked into Scientology.

I close with a plea: We're all more aware about the cult of Scientology and what a nasty mental virus it is - our awareness of it is growing by the day. That's a good thing. But what OTHER things could we be seeing grow more prominent today that could turn into tomorrow's cult? We should be looking at those things, too.

Making an Easter Island statue walk

To test a theory as to how the natives of Easter Island could have transported the massive statues that are their claim to fame, scientists used a technique involving only technology available to the islanders at the time to move the statue along a road. Read more here at anthropolgy.net, which also tells of how the island was successfully settled and farmed thanks to islander's resourcefulness.

The coolest mummy in Thailand

Meet Luong Pordaeng, a Thai monk who died sitting in this meditation pose in 1973 and has kept up a startling degree of preservation ever since. He is displayed today in a temple in Koh Samui. They put the sunglasses on him because his eyes, still open, have deteriorated.

A ticket to the future for $10 - what a charmingly wacky idea!

From the main page of the Time Travel Fund:

"Time Travel, once it becomes feasible, will initially be very expensive yet it will become more and more economical as time goes by.

The concept is that one day, it may be possible for people living far in the future to retrieve you from your current frame of reference (their past - your present) and bring you into the future (their present - your future.)

That is the purpose of the fund. The simple answer is, we pay them to bring you into the future."

Hey, the link is there, it's your money. Make up your own mind! Look how studiously they compute that compound interest!

Me, I don't have much faith in a page that says "Page has been formatted for Internet Explorer V6.0 and above, 800x600 resolution." That sounds to me like they don't know didly about the future. And if the money was worth it to those future people, wouldn't they want to send somebody back to fix the website so visitors have more faith in it and they make more money?

Karni Mata, the Hindu Rat Temple

There's a lot more videos on YouTube where that comes from. The temple of Karni Mata comes complete with silver gates, marble carvings, hundreds of hidey-holes, and that stylish checkered flooring (pity the poor sap that has to clean it!).

Supper time for the well-tended-to rats:

Hindus and animal-housing temples just seem to go together. There's also the Ubud Monkey Forest and temple in Bali, where they have so many temples it's all you can do to find a non-holy place to pee (unless they have a special pee temple too?).

A hot gallery of sun gods

Belenus

The Celtic sun god, observed in Gaul, Cisalpine Gaul, and Celtic areas of Austria, Britain and Spain. Variation of Apollo. BeleniX, an open-source Solaris distro (now defunct), is named in his honor.

Freyr

The Norse Pagan sun god, also widely renowned for being a phallic fertility god. It's really, really hard to find depictions of him that don't involve a dick, dildo, or other suggestive depictions. Even here, you've doubtless noticed that big ol' sheathed sword he's lugging around. Oh, that's his wild boar, an indispensable sidekick.

Horus

The ancient Egyptian god, great-daddy of all gods and more like the god of the sky - the sun was his right eye and the moon was his left. Since sky = flight = birds in Egyptian parlance, he's usually depicted as a man with a falcon's head. The symbol of "the Eye of Horus" is still today the most iconic symbol of Egyptian mythology. However, you could just as easily nominate Aten or Ra as the Egyptian sun god - they were all intertwined, Egyptian theology being a very convoluted subject.

Moloch

A bit scarier than your average sun god, Moloch was worshiped by

Canaanites, Phoenician and the general neighborhood in North Africa. He's got something of a bad-ass reputation, even a Satanic one, because he's one of the few gods expressly forbidden by name in the Christian Bible. Leviticus names worship of Moloch as yet another stoning offense not once, but twice. Jeremiah again mentions him as the sub-fire-god under Ba'al. In fact, wherever the Bible speaks out against idolatry, it's pretty much talking about this guy. The scary part is, his worshipers sacrificed human children to him.

Sol

Well, now, we're probably on familiar ground here, right? Yes, the Roman sun god is the very same from which we draw all root words referencing the sun in English and most Western culture. Sol was the sun, Luna (another Roman hand-me-down name to English) was the moon, and Janus was related, being the two-faced god of transitions, beginnings, and endings, and hence invoked with the rise and set of the sun and moon. And also hence, we name the first month of the year January in Janus' honor, because that's when the year turns over.

Surya

The Hindu sun god, also the head of all sky gods and again, associated with general fertility, nature-worship, fire, etc. Still very much actively observed in Hindu circles today; he has temples with services attended at dawn and everything.

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Solar deities are simply a dime a dozen, the complete Wiki on them here.

Here's a thought to all this: Isn't it an interesting coincidence that every part of the world founded its own religion based on the brightest object in the sky? Certainly, if one is compelled to identify the natural object most likely to be the embodiment of a deity, the sun fits the bill. But what superstitious monkey-minds we have! When we consider the vast array of sun gods and the remarkable similarities in ideas about them, it tells us much, much more about how the human mind works than we'd care to admit.

And before you get too smug thinking that the God of Jews, Muslims, and Christians is any different, and hence (if you observe one of these faiths) not at all based on silly star-worship, take a gander at "Jesus Christ in comparative mythology" and ask yourself why "Sunday" is observed as "the Lord's day" and Christ's birthday is celebrated at the winter solstice.

But here's a far more complete article on sun worship and its place at the roots of modern religion, courtesy of The Review of Religions.

Not so smug now, are you?

Cryptozoology's big disappointment, the Fiji Mermaid

The Fiji Mermaid, often ranked today as one of the top ten science hoaxes, was a hoax exhibited by P.T. Barnum at sideshows. It was later revealed to be a top half of a monkey sewn onto the bottom half of a fish, and rather artlessly at that.

However, one need not think that early beliefs in mermaids were entirely founded by superstition; there is a rare congenital birth deformity known as Sirenomelia, in which a baby is born with the legs fused together.

A post about it here, but be warned, some photos are shocking. And Googling the name in images isn't advised for the nervous, either.

The Hebrew psychologist who thinks Moses was stoned out of his melon

Hallucinogenic drugs have often been supposed to be responsible for many fantastic accounts of miracles and general religious phenomenon, from the Salem witch trials and panic to various sightings of the Virgin Mary. However, not many dare to apply such a theory to one of the head honchos of half the religions in the world, indeed, the man who could be said to be the basis for all modern law.

But Professor Shanon has had enough of this reverence for miracles. In his paper Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis, he details numerous parallels between visions and experiences of Moses and hallucinations experienced under various psychedelics.

Pause and consider that this is not at all a far-fetched theory. Early humans had no concept of mind-altering substances beyond alcohol - to them, if you ate something, it either killed you or it didn't. When some attachment between altered states of consciousness and a previously consumed food did eventually dawn on people, they immediately took it for a connection to spiritualism. Marijuana, ayahuasca, peyote, and the famed "magic mushrooms" have all been connected to spirituality in beliefs such as Shamanism and Rastafari.

In the event depicted as the "theophany", Moses' experience includes thunder and lightning, a pillar of fire, trumpet calls when no instruments are present, the whole mountain smoking and quaking, and a voice booming out of the sky. Anybody who's experimented with doses of LSD or other psychedelics can relate. Note that it's not merely a matter of seeing and hearing hallucinations; one's thoughts and emotions become very confused during such experiences and one's own ideas may become the strangest experiences of all. Feelings of religious awe and emotional epiphanies are frequent and common in the psychedelic experience, even in doses not sufficient to trigger visual and aural hallucinations.

The problem is that the exact drug available in the Jerusalem area at the time that could have caused such an experience is not known. However, even plain old rye bread can become infected with the fungus known as ergot, and there is evidence of cases of ergot poisoning present in nearby Europe. Shanon's theory merely points out similarities between Moses' reports of miracles and the effects of drinking Ayahuasca, and leaves it at that. This drink is prepared from plants of the psychotria genus, which only grow in tropical regions.

This is not to say that such a drug would have to have been imported. There may have been species of another plant with psychedelic effects growing in the Mediterranean region around the 1500s B.C., and simply become extinct by now. One such example that we know of was silphium, a plant used to produce a drug widely thought to have been used for birth control - among many other uses.

Artist haunts us with Norwegian Tree Troll manifestation

From artist Kim Graham, who reveals that her Norwegian heritage, Montana upbringing, and viewing The Lord of the Rings inspired her to bring an authentic tree troll to life.

The Internet needs a new patron saint!

Well, the current reigning patron saint of the Internet and computers in general is Saint Isidore of Seville, an Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades, and considered to be the last scholar in the ancient tradition. Based on this flimsy pretense and nothing else, this man, who died in the year 636 having missed even the invention of the Difference Engine by a millennium, was decreed to be the patron saint of the Internet, and all of computing technology, programmers, and students.

Mind you, this is the same guy who joined in the general Catholic persecution of Jews, by passing "Canon 60 calling for the forced removal of Jewish children from the parents and their education by Christians and Canon 65 forbidding Jews and Christians of Jewish origin from holding public office".

Internet users, programmers, and techie stemmers of all kinds - are you ready to join me in crying "bunk"?

BUNK!!

We have far better candidate for the patron saints of programming, computing, and Internetting:

Saint IGNUcious, the tongue-in-cheek alter-ego of Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and spiritual father of all software. Listen, if I stood them both up before Saint Peter at the pearly gates, I'd bet Isidore would be nervously shuffling his feet and eying the side exit before Peter was done reading the half of the list of Stallman's good deeds.

Tim Berners-Lee He got to be in the Olympic opening ceremonies through virtue of creating the World Wide Web, the improvement which opened the Internet up to the masses. That's gotta be worth a brownie point or two.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the inventors of both Unix and the C programming language. All modern operating systems - no matter how loudly Microsoft lies otherwise - descend from Unix, and all modern programming languages descend from C. I mean, literally the patron saints of computing and programming!

And finally, Douglas Englebart:

What, you don't know who Douglas Englebart is??? I explain in that link. He invented the modern GUI computing interface - the mouse, the icon, the menu, the graphical interface, hypertext... all the pretty pictures on the screen that let you use a computer without having to type in hexadecimal runes at a command prompt. Before Microsoft, before Apple, before even Xerox. And he did it all as research at Stanford university, way back in 1967. Now just look at that picture and that serene, beatific smile on that saintly face: doesn't he look like a saint?

Vatican, your choices suck! Each of the people I've named here did what they did in the genuine desire to benefit all of mankind by putting more computing power into the hands of the masses, potentially doing the human race more good than any ten canonized saints, and they all did it with no thought to their own profit or power.

If your religion can't recognize that these are the true saints, then there's something wrong with your religion.

The Anomaly of Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome

 

"Bangungot" is a word from the Tagalog language meaning "to rise and moan", but that belies the true terror of this word: it refers to a syndrome in which people mysteriously die in their sleep, with no previous indication that there was anything wrong with them. The name comes from the tendency of victims to cry out and thrash in their sleep before expiring.

Before you stay up all night in terror: It only appears to affect people of southeast Asia, including Thai, Hmong, and Filipinos, and then only young males of median age 33.

Medical research is beginning an inquest into this syndrome, but so far everyone's baffled. While the syndrome is well-known among these ethnic groups, it is shrouded in urban legends and old-wives' cures, said to be caused by everything from eating a heavy meal before bedtime to being visited by a vengeful female spirit, with a folk remedy of pinching the big toe of a sleeper as a preventative cure. It's even been culturally compared to the urban legends of UFO abductions in the US, and the old-world concept of a "night terror" or sleep paralysis, so eloquently depicted in Johann Heinrich Fussli's painting The Nightmare, shown above.

Of course, the idea that a scary dream that can actually kill you also is at the root of another pop cultural icon, the Nightmare on Elm Street series with the character of Freddy Kruger being a nocturnal assassin.

However, one possible clue to the syndrome's cause is that this tends to affect only refugees from those countries; people already undergoing a large amount of stress, who might naturally be subject to spontaneous cardiac arrests and related events.

The mystery coffins of Arthur's Seat

Edinburgh, Scotland, is home to Arthur's Seat, a group of hills that forms most of Holyrood Park. One of its claims to fame is having been written about by author Robert Louis Stevenson, and another is speculation that it could have been the location of Camelot. But a third claim to fame is a mysterious find made in 1836, with implications macabre at best and chillingly creepy at worst.

In a cave on Arthur's Seat, five boys discovered 17 tiny coffins with wooden dolls. The dolls are about four inches long, their coffins carved from authentic pine and decorated with iron. The coffins were buried in the cave floor in neat rows of eight, the rows stacked one atop the other and the lone top coffin beginning a new row. All of the dolls are dressed individually, obviously representing different people. And perhaps the most unsettling detail of all, the coffins appeared to have been buried over a long-term period of time, with the top ones being fresher and the lower layers being more decayed, suggesting that they were installed over a period of years and weren't just part of a gruesome children's game. Since their discovery, they've had a history in and out of collector's hands and now in a museum.

No one knows anything else about their story. Speculations include the theory that they might have been representational burials for sailors lost at sea, but why then hidden in a cave and not identified? Every other theory suggests some form of magic ritual - perhaps magic by a Pagan sect, since Scotland has Pagans as part of its history. Or a murderer committing this act to appease the spirits of his victims? Dolls sacrificed by generations? Representation of the victims of Edinburgh serial killers Burke and Hare?

It should be noted that Burke and Hare were anatomy murderers, who committed their deeds for profit, selling the bodies to doctors who used them for medical instruction. Since the corpses were then dissected and studied for science, it stands to reason that no un-defiled body would remain, and the murderers, being financially motivated, would suffer enough guilt over their trade that they felt motivated to commit this token gesture of remorse.

It's impossible to think about them long without having the imagination run wild. If they don't feature as a plot device in some future horror novel or film, it won't be for lack of suggestion.

The Bizarre Images of the temple of Seti I, Abydos

Seti I was a pharaoh in the 19th dynasty of Egypt, the son of Ramesses I and father of Ramesses II. His temple is located in what is known today as the sacred city of Abydos, Egypt, which is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt. The walls are decorated with a host of inscrutable hieroglyphics, including a catalog list of the cartouches (symbols or seals) of every Egyptian pharaoh before him.

What grabs the attention of modern onlookers, however, is the uncanny resemblance between some of the symbols on the walls and modern inventions, including helicopters, submarines, and zeppelins:

This oddity has fed rumors of ancient aliens or time-travelers on the usual sites. However, there are perfectly mundane explanations for these figures, in that they aren't really detailed to begin with, have decayed several centuries, and could be depicting perfectly ordinary everyday objects of the time, or perhaps, like the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci, been a particularly bright attempt at imaging the future. After all, our modern flying machines do indeed resemble natural flying creatures, and if any preindustrial artist would have been asked to imagine a man-built flying machine in the future, very few could argue against designing something that looks fairly like what devices we have today. You wouldn't imagine that an airplane shaped like a fish or turtle could fly, could you?

The complete diagram of the temple:

 Abydos became a popular necropolis in ancient Egypt, containing many temples and burial sites devoted to Egyptian royalty. This has also led to the general area becoming a focus for all sorts of cult and superstitious activity throughout the decades. More research into this intriguing historical area here.

Stuffed, Mounted Griffin, Anyone?

Sarina Brewer is a taxidermist who makes fantastic creatures from mythology, and this is her website.

Brewer is a devoted wildlife preservationist and naturist who also volunteers at the Science Museum of Minnesota. She follows a "waste-not, want-not" policy, so that none of the animals she works with were killed for the express purpose of taxidermy. Obviously, when you follow a policy like that, you end up with lots of spare parts, and well, this happens...