ChaoticMusings

John Doe · Still Here!

RE: Amazing True Life

Digger · Admin

Throat singing is a method of using the human voice to produce two different tones at the same time. It sounds alien to Western ears but has been practiced in several cultures, particularly in Eastern Asia. The skill has been updated recently to allow it to be performed alongside western musical instruments, but in its traditional form it employs only the voice.

Digger · Admin

When the Prince Rupert’s drop is made in the water, the outer layer becomes a solid while the inner glass remains molten. As the inner glass cools, it shrinks in volume and creates a strong structure by pulling against itself, making the head of the drop incredibly resistant to damage. But as soon as the weaker tail is broken, the stress is released, allowing the whole drop to erupt into a fine powder.

Digger · Admin

While light is technically the only thing we see, we never see it moving. Moments after you flip a light switch, the light from a bulb has already crossed the room. So fast is light that only on the largest scales would it be conceivable that you could track its movements—until now.Using a camera capable of taking 1 trillion frames per second, scientists have been able to create videos of light moving across everyday objects like apples and Coke bottles.

Firing a laser pulse that only lasts for 1 quadrillionth of a second, the researchers could capture what amounts to a bullet of light as it passes over things.Other teams have already improved on the techniques used to create the video above. Using a camera able to take 10 trillion frames per second, they can follow a single pulse of light rather than having to repeat the experiment for each frame.

Digger · Admin

A frozen lake can be a haunting place. As the ice cracks, eerie pinging noises can echo across the surface. Looking down, you might be able to see animals that have become frozen and trapped. But perhaps the most amazing ability of a frozen lake is to form waves of ice that crash on the shore.

If only the top layer becomes solid when a lake freezes, it is possible for the ice on top to move. If a warm wind passes over the lake, the whole sheet of ice may begin to move. All that ice has to go somewhere.

As the ice reaches the shore, the sudden friction and stress causes the ice to shatter and build up. Sometimes, these ice waves can be several feet high and travel inland. The cracking of the crystals that make up the ice sheet gives the creation of ice waves an eerie tickling sound like thousands of glasses being shattered.

Digger · Admin

Digger · Admin

In the ancient world the colour purple was a rarity. The word purple derives from the Latin Purpura, and that from the Greek Porphrya. The Greeks knew only one source of a purple dye, a secretion of a certain type of sea snail. To make up any significant amount of dye it was necessary to harvest vast quantities of snails. This made the resulting dye hugely expensive. For centuries only the very rich could afford purple. In many cultures the color became so associated with royalty that commoners were banned from wearing it.

Digger · Admin

The Tarantula Hawk is a frightening hulking beast of a bug. It was given its name because it hunts and eats (and lays eggs in) tarantulas.

The real terror, however, comes not from what they can do to other bugs, but from what they can do to you. While their venom isn’t deadly, it is so painful that a single sting can incapacitate a man. According to Justin Schmidt, the worlds foremost expert on painful bug bites and stings (he allowed himself to be stung or bit by just about everything and recorded the results) the only thing you can do if one of these stings you is lay on the ground and scream until it’s over.

A Platypus has hair, but also a beak. It lays eggs but also produces milk (despite having no nipples). And if all of that wasn’t enough, these Frankenstein animals have half-inch spurs on their tiny little feet that produce venom.

Not just any old venom, either, but the most long lasting and painful venom in the animal kingdom!

According to people who have been spurred by an angry platypus, the pain is immediate, completely devastating, and unending. Worse yet, no painkiller can be used against it. Not even morphine can stop the pain, nothing works to stop it except the complete deadening of the affected area.

The muscles in the area will wither away, and you’ll find yourself shivering, sweating, and throwing up from the pain and the venom. Worst of all is that this excruciating pain lasts for up to 3 months. You’ll suffer, vomit, and be crippled by pain every day for 90 long, long days.

You won’t die…but you’re going to wish you had.

Digger · Admin

A worn, ragged-looking man shows up in a rural Haitian town claiming to have died on May 2, 1962. One of the problems with this picture is that the year was 1980. Clairvius Narcisse swore that he had been pronounced dead in Deschapelles, Haiti, at Albert Schweitzer Hospital. He also said that he was awake and conscious during the entire ordeal.

Narcisse also claimed that he had been completely paralyzed and could do nothing but lie there in horror as he was pronounced dead, nailed into a coffin, and unceremoniously buried alive. He also claimed that the bocor (Haitian witch doctor) who had made him a zombie had also dug him up and forced him to work as a zombie.
In Haiti, zombies are not only common in folklore but commonly feared as well. Scientists have uncovered innumerable reports of the bodies of friends and family members coming back to life. According to the legends, zombies are not aware of anything in their surroundings so they are generally harmless unless, of course, you allow them to regain their senses by eating salt.

Despite countless reports, investigators could locate little evidence either proving or disproving the phenomenon. A common theme with the zombie stories concerns people dying without receiving any medical care before their alleged deaths. This raises the red flags of fraud and possible mistaken identity for investigators to deal with.
Right about this time in the early 1980s, anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis just happened to be in Haiti to investigate the causes of zombies. Davis was there at the request of anesthesiologist Nathan Kline, who theorized that a drug was somehow involved and that it could have valuable medicinal uses. Davis was hoping to get his hands on samples of these zombie concoctions so that they could be chemically analyzed in the US for medicinal purposes.

Davis managed to gather eight samples of zombie powder from four different regions of the country. The ingredients in all of them were not the same, but seven of the eight had four ingredients in common. They were the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (derived from puffer fish), the marine toad (also containing numerous toxic substances), the Hyla tree frog that secretes a very irritating but not lethal substance, some other ingredients derived from indigenous animals and plants, and even ground glass.
The use of puffer fish was the most intriguing to the scientists because the active ingredient tetrodotoxin causes both paralysis and death, and those poisoned with it are known to stay conscious right up until it occurs. The scientists theorised that the powder would create irritation if applied topically and subsequent scratching would break the skin of the victim and allow the tetrodotoxin to enter the bloodstream.

This would paralyse the victim and cause him to only appear to be dead. After the family buries the victim, the bocor returns and digs up the grave. If everything goes according to plan and the victim survives the horrific ordeal, the toxin would eventually wear off. Through the use of other debilitating drugs, the victim could come to truly believe that he had been turned into a zombie.

Digger · Admin

During World War II, two biological warfare research facilities were owned and operated by the Japanese Imperial Empire. This was in complete violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention and the resulting ban on chemical and biological warfare.

These research facilities were called Unit 100 and Unit 731 and were commanded by Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro. Under his command, 3,000 Japanese scientists and researchers labored at infecting human subjects with dangerous diseases such as the anthrax virus and the black plague.
Before dying of their respective afflictions, these test subjects were then eviscerated, or surgically gutted, with no anesthesia whatsoever in order to study the effects of these diseases upon human organs. Due to the highly secretive nature of these units, a complete list of their horrific experiments is not available.
Actual testimony from participating surgeons helps to shed some gory light on these gruesome experiments. One medical assistant, who wished to remain anonymous, described his first vivisection in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: “I picked up the scalpel . . . he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly.”

Unit 731 did not stop at vivisections since they were known to try out new biological weapons on their subjects, including dirty bombs loaded with plague-infested fleas or deadly cultures. One horrific experiment conducted by the Japanese scientists involved placing subjects dubbed “logs” inside pressure chambers to see how much pressure it took to blow their eyes out of their sockets. Other subjects were forced to stay outside during winter until their limbs were frozen solid so that Japanese doctors could find better ways to treat frostbite.

Unit 731 was also tasked with developing better toxic gases for the Japanese army. “Logs” made perfect subjects for these morbid experiments, too. A graduate student in Tokyo found documentation in a bookstore describing horrendous experiments conducted on humans during the war. The documents speak of the adverse effects of massive dosages of the tetanus vaccine, with tables indicating the time it took victims to die. It also described the bodies’ muscle spasms.
During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army used biological and chemical weapons developed by Unit 731 to kill or injure at least 300,000 Chinese victims. At least 3,000 Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and Chinese victims also died due to the experiments conducted by Unit 731 in the six years between 1939 and 1945. Not one prisoner came out alive.

Digger · Admin

While not exactly like the hat worn today, the fedora was once a costume piece in an 1880s play named Fedora. (The play was named after the lead character, a Russian princess, not the hat itself.) At the time, the fedora was a men’s hat, so being worn by a woman carried significant meaning, but the play made it an icon of female empowerment because the actress who played the princess was the strong-willed Sarah Bernhardt. Bernhardt was known for being sexually liberated and often took male roles.
Her personality made her a symbol for women’s rights, and other women took to wearing her hat as a way to express their independence. As the fedora grew in popularity, it eventually became a staple of women’s fashion.[1]The fedora’s popularity increased, and while it retained the masculine image women wanted to claim as their own, its association with women’s rights was gradually forgotten. Both sexes were wearing the fedora, but an aggressive ad campaign focused on increasing its popularity among men, partially using the very same masculinity females had come to associate it with. By the 1920s, it had successfully migrated to men’s fashion to be worn by many of the famous (and notorious) figures of the time.

Digger · Admin

A chef’s hat, actually called a toque, isn’t just part of a chef’s uniform; it says a lot about the chef and his level of expertise. There are many different stories about how the modern chef’s hat came to be.

One story, possibly legend, says that the hat’s history stretches back thousands of years to when Assyrian chefs wore pleated cloth headdresses like their king. Another legend says that it’s based off hats worn by cooks in Greek monasteries.The hat as seen today, though, is said to have been partially created when a chef named Antonin Careme put cardboard in his own hat to create the tall version of the headgear. Aside from its height, the most easily recognisable part of the hat itself are the famous pleats.

There is an old saying that claims the 100 folds in a chef’s hat represent 100 ways to cook an egg, but this is most likely just a myth.The pleats are usually mistaken for nothing but a stylistic aesthetics, but the more pleats on the hat, the more skill and experience the chef has. Originally, a single pleat represented a recipe the chef had mastered. More pleats meant more recipes. This eventually became somewhat less about the number of recipes so much as a matter of experience. The height of the hat serves a similar purpose, with taller hats representing rank and knowledge.

Digger · Admin

Top hats went out of fashion when their expense and inconvenience caused lightweight, cloth hats to become popular. But even after they went out of style for the common man, they still had considerable influence in politics.It was tradition for a US president to be inaugurated wearing a top hat. Kennedy, however, killed the presidential hat. JFK actually followed the tradition of wearing a top hat for his inauguration, but he took it off for his speech in order appear more with the times.

This spelled the beginning of the end for the inauguration hat. Johnson did not wear a hat and probably put the final nail in the top hat’s coffin.But the top hat was far more influential in the UK Parliament, where the wearing of one was an absolute necessity. It was so vital that one speaker even had to be “allowed” to wear a soft hat because a hard one “subjected him to headache.”

There were very specific protocols for hat-wearing in Parliament. The hat had to be taken off when entering, put on when seated, and taken off again if rising. If a message from the queen was being delivered, it was hats off. To raise a point, the speaker was required to cover his head with a hat. The hat was so critical that if a Parliament member placed one on his seat and left, it meant he was reserving his place, since leaving without it was unimaginable.

Digger · Admin

Panama hats are not from Panama. They are made in Ecuador. The hat received its famous moniker when Ecuadorian hat weavers shipped their product north to labourers digging the Panama Canal. The labourers’ hats stood out clearly in newspaper photographs, which lead to an increased demand.

There are only a handful of craftsmen left who can actually make the finest quality. Some hats have upwards of 3,000 weaves per square inch. Perhaps the greatest Panama hat ever woven was created in 2015, featuring 4,000 weaves per square inch, a feat exponentially harder than a 3,000-weave hat, which is no small feat itself. The 4,000-weave hat is so superior that dealers had a hard time putting a price tag on it.

Digger · Admin

Yellow fever is a viral disease spread by mosquitoes that still kills 30,000 people each year despite there being an effective vaccine available. In the past epidemics of yellow fever would spread through North America and people would regularly leave cities for the safer countryside during ‘the fever season.’ Since it was such a peril a young medical student called Stubbins Ffirth decided to investigate.

Certain that it was impossible for the disease to pass from one person to another he tried to infect someone using samples from victims. The person he tried to infect, as you might guess from this list, was himself. He took vomit from yellow fever patients and drank it. He also rubbed it in cuts on his own body for good measure. He did not contract the disease. Perhaps that was not the infectious route, he considered; so he then poured vomit onto his eyeballs. Still no fever. He then progressed through blood, saliva, and pus.

Still in robust health Ffirth decided he had confirmed yellow fever was not infectious and published his results. Unfortunately all his samples had come from patients who had passed the infectious stage of the illness and yellow fever is very much a transmissible illness. He never found out he had drunk vomit for nothing.

Digger · Admin

Some bands will go to any lengths to make sure that their work is as disturbing as possible. In one case, Stalaggh, now known as Gulaggh, decided that getting the screams of actual mental patients was a must for their album Projekt Misanthropia. That was easier than it sounds, since one of the members actually worked at a mental institution and was able to get the express permission of every patient used for the album.

The band then gathered the patients in an abandoned chapel and asked them to scream for several hours.Asked about the resulting controversy, the band said they were delighted. “We appreciate the fact that people consider us controversial, this makes them interested in listening to our projekts and this way we can penetrate their weak minds with pain and fear. We do not label our own projekts.

The more people debate our projekts, the more our message and Audio-Terrror spreads, so we welcome it.”It’s worth noting that the band don’t consider the album to be black metal, preferring to call it “Nihilistik Misanthropik Audio-Terrror.”

John Doe · Still Here!

I knew a lot of this - but where are you getting the information from Digs?

Seems like an excellent site. XXX

Digger · Admin

This photograph was taken on August 14, 1945, by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and published a week later in Life magazine.

The photo was a spontaneous event (not posed) that occurred in Times Square when it was announced that the war on Japan had ended. Eisenstaedt was taking pictures rapidly at different events during the celebrations, and did not have an opportunity to get the names of the two individuals. Because the faces of both people involved are covered, several people have claimed to be the subjects. The identity of the nurse in the photograph was not known until the late 1970s, when Edith Shain wrote a letter to Eisenstaedt to say that she was the woman in the picture.

In the 40s she didn’t think it was dignified to be photographed kissing, but she said times have changed. Of all the nurses claiming to be the one, Eisenstaedt has only backed Shain. Edith Shain who died at the age of 91, recalled the moment and said that a sailor grabbed her in an embrace and kissed her, and she thought she might as well let him kiss her since he fought for her in the war. Several men still claim to be the sailor in the photo. The one who stands out the most is Glenn McDuffie, who was 18 when the photo was taken. When he described the kiss on Good Morning America, he said, “It was a good kiss. It was a wet kiss… Someone asked me if it was a tongue kiss. I said, ‘No tongue, but it was a nice kiss.'”

McDuffie has passed five polygraph tests confirming his claim. Interesting Fact: Most are unaware that another photo was taken of the same couple at about the same time at a different angle, by Navy photo journalist Victor Jorgensen. It is also a popular poster. It was published in the New York Times the following day and titled “Kissing the War Goodbye”

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Digger · Admin

John Doe wrote:
I knew a lot of this - but where are you getting the information from Digs?

Seems like an excellent site. XXX

Here and there

Digger · Admin

https://listverse.com/