Be Excellent To Each Other

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.

Hah, yes. I remember being blown away by that when I came across it in Nuclear Electric's training materials in '97.

Sort-of-related-OMFG-nature!-thing: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/05/21/the ... h-century/
A longish read, but a fascinating one.

Probably read a PC/360 graphics thread.

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.

Also, fuck!



Not always wise to scoff at folk tales kids.

Fascinating read that, Grim...

Cheers!

We'd be knacked the oceans decided to do that

On the subject of cool science and whoa! Can someone please explain what killed those Russian Students?

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

Still gives me the heebie jeebies.

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.

A wizard did it.

I'm satisfied with that explanation. Case closed.

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!

I started today by reading the Dyatlov Pass and Lake Nyos.

I finished it by watching Inside.

Thoroughly disturbed. Thanks Beex!

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.)

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.

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.



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.