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Prior to the advent of photography, if you wanted a lasting memento of your uncle’s dead face, you could either undertake the extremely expensive proposal of commissioning a painting — of which time was of the essence because of the putrefaction of the model — or you could have a death mask made.
Sad news out of England today. It seems a human cannonball act in Detling suffered a mishap and a safety net was not “engaged” as it should have been. Although the original article at CNN.com forces us to read between the lines, this likely means that the daredevil was shot out into the air with nothing there to catch him. They failed to identify the young man who passed away at the Scott May’s Daredevil Stunt Show at the Kent County Showground.
Blow Your Mind: The Quest for Cyberimmortality
by Robert Lamb | April 22, 2011
Death is always strange, but modern technology has a way of making it stranger still. My father died last month and, as I relate in this podcast, one of the first things I did after I heard the news was to call his cell phone. I’m not entirely sure why. But call I did, and I interacted with the digital remnants of the man that was. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve e-mailed his account a couple of times as well, an act that feels equal parts weird and therapeutic. What does it all mean?
Terror Management Theory: Yes, Virginia, you’re going to die
by Josh Clark | February 17, 2011
It’s not difficult to see that we humans have our hang ups. We have a long history of murdering one another when a religious or political difference arises. Key parties are just gross. Your local sports team is inferior to my local sports team. Yet, as distasteful as other cultures and opinions that counter our own may seem, they’re just as much evidence that other people need to distract themselves from their inevitable deaths as we do. We all have that in common, at least, and we all tend to delude ourselves equally.
Dirty War Index Gives the Rest of Us Easy Number to Judge Conflict
by Josh Clark | February 16, 2011
A group out of King’s College, London undertook the gruesome task of poring over nearly 100,000 violent deaths of Iraqi civilians between 2003 and 2008, the time when war-torn Iraq was at its most war-torn. The researchers used data obtained by the British non-governmental organization Iraq Body County and created what they called a Dirty War Index.
Decapitating Rats to Determine if Decapitating Rats is Humane
by Josh Clark | January 31, 2011
I once said that if you’re wearing a lab coat you can pretty much do anything you want to a rat. This sentiment was shouted down via email by a number of lab researchers who listen to the podcast. Since the early 20th century, a number of states have had on the books laws that provide standards of treatment for lab animals and in 1966 lab animals finally came under federal protection in the U.S. Animal Welfare Act. Since then the treatment of animals used in experimentation has been defined and further regulated by successive measures over the following years.
Makes you think – YouTube post turns into two dozen dead people in an hour
by Marshall Brain | November 10, 2010
It seems impossible… …yet it really happened. At the 5:00 point he makes the point that all of the pieces for something like this had already materialized. They had never all combined together in this way, but they had all been seen individually. The slide is only on the screen for a few seconds, but [...]
This came in from a visitor via email – How does cremation work? If you watched Avatar there is that brief scene where Jake’s brother’s body is cremated. Is that how it really works?
One of the best videos ever produced on the modern cremation process can be found here…
Yesterday the famous plastic surgeon who did all the work on Heidi Montag died. He was in a car that went over a cliff. Apparently he lost control because he was typing in a tweet on his phone. He was tweeting about his dog…
This video really is creepy. You just don’t expect your food to act like it is still alive…
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