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 Post subject: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 20:20 
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If I read this wiki entry and there hadn't been any references I'd probably have dismissed it as fiction. But, as is so often the case, reality proves to be stranger than the strangest fiction. (And more awesome).

Science is cool. I'm beginning to regret having spent so much of my life dicking around with computers when there are awesome discoveries like that to be made.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 20:23 
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Hah, yes. I remember being blown away by that when I came across it in Nuclear Electric's training materials in '97.


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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 21:55 
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Sort-of-related-OMFG-nature!-thing: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the ... h-century/
A longish read, but a fascinating one.

Quote:
The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles around.

Quote:
There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or “death agony”: The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 21:58 
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Probably read a PC/360 graphics thread.


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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 0:34 
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Grim... wrote:
Sort-of-related-OMFG-nature!-thing: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the ... h-century/
A longish read, but a fascinating one.

Quote:
The doctors found a catastrophe far greater than they could have imagined: Overnight, something had killed nearly 1,800 people. Plus more than 3,000 cattle and countless wild animals, birds and insects—in short every living creature for miles around.

Quote:
There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or “death agony”: The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died.


I read about that as a kid in my Uncle Rob's Fortean Times folder of magazines I got off of him. It gave me nightmares.

Honest, between those pylons and the reservoirs dotting the Pennine hills above my house waiting to belch forth deadly gas, it's a wonder I ever got any sleep.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 0:36 
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Also, fuck!

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The deaths had all occurred within about 12 miles of Lake Nyos, which some local tribes called the “bad lake.” Legend had that long ago, evil spirits had risen out of the lake and killed all the people living in a village at the water’s edge.


Not always wise to scoff at folk tales kids.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:29 
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Fascinating read that, Grim...

Cheers!

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:54 
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We'd be knacked the oceans decided to do that :S


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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:57 
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On the subject of cool science and whoa! Can someone please explain what killed those Russian Students? :S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Still gives me the heebie jeebies.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 9:57 
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Wiki link to Lake Nyos... makes it seem slightly less worrying that the local fish pond might gas me. Also slightly better write up and less fingers in the air.


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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 10:15 
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Zardoz wrote:
On the subject of cool science and whoa! Can someone please explain what killed those Russian Students? :S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Still gives me the heebie jeebies.


A wizard did it.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 10:19 
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Sir Taxalot wrote:
Zardoz wrote:
On the subject of cool science and whoa! Can someone please explain what killed those Russian Students? :S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Still gives me the heebie jeebies.


A wizard did it.


I'm satisfied with that explanation. Case closed.


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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 23:33 
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Another cool science thing (after my original and Grim...'s cool CO2 belching lakes)...

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/55826/who ... lain_this/

Super conductors are cool. I (attempted) to read up on what's going on there, and I'll admit it mostly went over my head... something to do with how a super-conductor, when cooled to super-conducting temperatures, passes the magnetic field back out to the magnet (the flux trapping effect? ?:| ) causing the super-conductor to both repel and attract the magnet.

Very cool, though!

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 23:35 
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I started today by reading the Dyatlov Pass and Lake Nyos.

I finished it by watching Inside.

Thoroughly disturbed. Thanks Beex!

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 23:42 
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Zardoz wrote:
On the subject of cool science and whoa! Can someone please explain what killed those Russian Students? :S

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

Still gives me the heebie jeebies.


8)

Never heard of that before. Brrrr. BRRRR.

Interesting little San Francisco Chronicle opinion ed. on it here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 022708.DTL

As for what did it... better you don't know...

(Anyone ever seen the movie Stalker? Gets me thinking of that.)

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Fri Apr 09, 2010 23:52 
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Dyatlov pass my foot. Bear, avalanche, everyone evacuating because someone farted and hooning out, unprepared, into the cold... there's a million mundane explanations for it, none of which require us to discard Occam's razor.

This is a thread about cool science things, not uncool "unexplained" mysteries. Yvette Fielding approached me earlier to start a new show based on this very thread, thanks to mention of Dyatlov pass, and you don't want that to happen, do you?

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 0:05 
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End of an Era wrote:
Dyatlov pass my foot. Bear, avalanche, everyone evacuating because someone farted and hooning out, unprepared, into the cold... there's a million mundane explanations for it, none of which require us to discard Occam's razor.

This is a thread about cool science things, not uncool "unexplained" mysteries. Yvette Fielding approached me earlier to start a new show based on this very thread, thanks to mention of Dyatlov pass, and you don't want that to happen, do you?

Bears have been known to give people tans. And, sure they can break your ribs and skull, but with no external injury? I want to disbelieve, but the facts (as presented on the various sites) are not easily explicable.

And even if they were: it's not like a rational explanation of Lake Nyos makes the mass death any more 'cool'. Just less mysterious.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 0:25 
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throughsilver wrote:
And even if they were: it's not like a rational explanation of Lake Nyos makes the mass death any more 'cool'. Just less mysterious.


It's cool because that's how awesome nature is. Given that discovery, and sadly people died, we're richer for the experience and know of that danger. The coolness of science is that it can be explained without attributing it to some farty-lake-dwelling god.

throughsilver wrote:
Bears have been known to give people tans. And, sure they can break your ribs and skull, but with no external injury? I want to disbelieve, but the facts (as presented on the various sites) are not easily explicable.


But they're not facts. The facts are that a group of people died. There's no reason to put any of their deaths down to yettis, aliens, Russian nuclear experiments, the West launching a pre-emptive strike or anything else. They got spooked and they ran - as experienced skiers, I reckon they got spooked by what sounded like an avalanche, couldn't find their way back to camp and died as a consequence.

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 0:37 
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End of an Era wrote:
throughsilver wrote:
Bears have been known to give people tans. And, sure they can break your ribs and skull, but with no external injury? I want to disbelieve, but the facts (as presented on the various sites) are not easily explicable.

But they're not facts. The facts are that a group of people died. There's no reason to put any of their deaths down to yettis, aliens, Russian nuclear experiments, the West launching a pre-emptive strike or anything else. They got spooked and they ran - as experienced skiers, I reckon they got spooked by what sounded like an avalanche, couldn't find their way back to camp and died as a consequence.

As I said, the facts as presented. But, with respect, your reckoning is no more persuasive than the family members who saw strangely coloured relatives, or a missing tongue.

I'm not looking for any weirdness to be the solution. I'm saying there is no solution, that people have conclusively arrived at. I'd like to think the events were as simple as you reckon. But surely investigators at the site might have thought the same things as you?

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 Post subject: Re: Cool science thing
PostPosted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 0:55 
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throughsilver wrote:
End of an Era wrote:
throughsilver wrote:
Bears have been known to give people tans. And, sure they can break your ribs and skull, but with no external injury? I want to disbelieve, but the facts (as presented on the various sites) are not easily explicable.

But they're not facts. The facts are that a group of people died. There's no reason to put any of their deaths down to yettis, aliens, Russian nuclear experiments, the West launching a pre-emptive strike or anything else. They got spooked and they ran - as experienced skiers, I reckon they got spooked by what sounded like an avalanche, couldn't find their way back to camp and died as a consequence.

As I said, the facts as presented. But, with respect, your reckoning is no more persuasive than the family members who saw strangely coloured relatives, or a missing tongue.

I'm not looking for any weirdness to be the solution. I'm saying there is no solution, that people have conclusively arrived at. I'd like to think the events were as simple as you reckon. But surely investigators at the site might have thought the same things as you?


Well, put it this way - the bodies weren't recovered immediately. The weird orange tan could be the effects of winter sun-burn coupled with exposure. Was it all-over, or just the face and hands? The bitten off tongue, the fractured skull and twelve broken ribs are far more likely to have been due to some explainable calamity rather than some unknown force - why didn't they all suffer the same injuries?

And we can't look at radiation either - there's no mention in the reports about what type or quantity of radiation was found. Many things are radioactive, including granite for example, so without real figures this is a misnomer.

There's nothing weird here that can't be explained with known phenomena. There's no reason to attribute to this event something that couldn't occur in the natural world, and given that we've already covered natural fission reactors and farting lakes I'm willing to accept anything if there is real, scientific, proof.

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