New Zealand Man Decapitated by DIY Hovercraft

The danger of greatly increased accessibility to DIY tech. is that it disregards the question, "Should I be doing this?"

    

There's no question that "Do It Yourself" (DIY) technologies have become increasingly more accessible to private citizen enthusiasts. I remember standing in a "workshop" (a basement tool bench) where an air-vent panel from the wing of an airplane sat under florescent lights. "My dad's building his airplane," my friend reported nonchalantly. His dad was an accountant. This was my first experience with things like airplane "kits", for DIY'ers that, having received their pilot's license, simply wanted to make their own airplane (from someone else's plans and materials). I consider this somewhat akin to the guy that wants to drywall his own basement (that being me, with some help), but on an entirely different level. I wanted to save money, learn a bit more about a trade, and challenge myself. Companies are seeing this in many enterprising adults (mostly men) and have commercialized it, providing fairly advanced technology in easy-to-do DIY kits. However, what greater accessibility to these kinds of pre-packaged tech endeavors comes a greater degree of danger; the danger of human error. There is no way to certify that just because an individual feels they followed the directions that they haven't missed something along the way. In the case of the airplane kit, that airplane needed to be certified by an aeronautics professional before even being taken to a hanger. What's really scary is when individuals with just enough knowledge to think they can build something, locate the materials, develop the plan, and implement all on their own.

     A 40-year old Auckland, New Zealand man was exactly this type of ambitious guy. He had put together a DIY hovercraft that he had, according to Gimodo.com, tested in his backyard. Evidently thrilled with the results he took his girlfriend and three kids to the beach to test it out. In the process of running it up and down the beach, he had neglected to notice the absence of a critical safety feature; a protective cage or grid around the air-intake side of the actual "fans". One of the blades broke free during his exhibition and shot through the air-intake (rather than out, the way it should have) and decapitated the man. He was killed instantly. At the time of this article it was unknown whether the man had experience with hovercrafts or where he had purchased the DIY kit. "At the moment there are no regulations. You cannot register hovercraft on the road and they do not have warrant of fitness. So you can build them and operate them off the road without rules,'' someone involved with the case noted to New Zealand online news, Stuff.

     In February of last year a Michigan man rigged a DIY jetpack to a sled, was not following any kind of kit. According to News.com.au, he rigged it out of an old car muffler, gasoline, and gunpowder with a wick. He began sledding down the hill after a friend lit the wick. It exploded immediately, covering him in flames and resulting in 2nd degree burns to his face and the right side of his body.

     There are plenty of reports of people created kitset jetpacks in the news as well. Inevitably, this is the kind of commercial-venture-meets-human-behavior that results in government regulation. Eventually it will be necessary for the parents to step in, slap the hands of companies selling kits that tell people how to build bombs they can strap to their backs, and to curtail the handfuls of people (again, mostly men) that are desperate to illustrate natural selection.

Earthquake Light and Earthquake Clouds

"Earthquake lights" and "earthquake clouds" are an excellent example of something that almost everyone thought was crackpot bunk, until enough photographs and first-hand experiences were accumulated by enough reputable people that it was finally acknowledged as a real thing by science. In the case of earthquake lights, it was the "earthquake swarm" that hit Nagano, Japan in 1965-1967 that did the trick.
Earthquake lights have been seen before, during, and after earthquakes. They don't usually last very long - typically between a few seconds and a few minutes. They often occur high in the air, which makes them visible from far away, depending on the terrain.
They are usually seen as a glow or shimmer in the air. Some instances of earthquake lights have been described as resembling the aurora borealis. Others look like a rainbow, sun dog, or just a luminescent glow in mid-air.
In our modern world where everyone is apparently carrying a video camera at all times, earthquake lights have been well documented in both photographs and video. Here is some video of earthquake lights observed half an hour before the 2008 Sichuan earthquake hit China.
The mechanism behind earthquake light is unknown. People speculate that it could be the result of piezoelectricity from tectonic plates crushing or rubbing against large quartz deposits. Others, that the impending earthquake disrupts the local magnetic field, causing a sort of earthbound aurora. Needless to say, this phenomenon has been somewhat difficult to either study in the field or reproduce in the lab!
Earthquake clouds have been known to humanity for centuries. According to this website, "ancient Chinese and Italians were aware of unique clouds that gave sign preceding large earthquakes." Science seems willing to accept that large earthquakes could be preceded by unusual cloud formations, but skeptical of those who claim to be able to predict earthquakes based on cloud formations they see days or even weeks before the earthquake occurs.
These clouds have often been accompanied by a temperature increase along the fault line. Understandable, given the magnitude of the forces that gather behind an earthquake. And understandable as well that the heat might disrupt cloud formation. As to whether earthquakes disrupt the local magnetic field, this has (like earthquake light) proven to be difficult to measure.
One problem with putting too much belief in phenomena like these is the risk of confirmation bias. After a big earthquake, it's natural to remember back to anything unusual that occurred, and then draw a conclusion based on a faulty cause and effect.
 

Is The FBI About To Catch D.B. Cooper?

Big news this week in the ages-old D.B. Cooper case! D.B. Cooper is famous here in the Pacific Northwest, both for the dapper nature of his crime, and for the enduring mystery of his identity. Did he really get away with it? Did he plunge to his death? Has he spent the last forty years living out a comfortable life somewhere, or are his remains quietly moldering somewhere in the trackless wilderness?
This week we learned that the FBI is investigating an unnamed "object," and is working to get fingerprints and possibly DNA evidence from it. What is the object? Where is it from? Who does it incriminate? We don't know. So far, facts are maddeningly being held back.
What we do know is that the provenance of the object is said to be pretty solid. A law enforcement agent learned of someone directly connected to the case. Said law enforcement agent is the one who passed along the tip. Hopefully this means that it is a solid lead, unlike the hundreds (thousands?) of crackpot leads which have been submitted to the FBI over the years.

We also have been told that the person being implicated as D.B. Cooper is a new suspect, not someone who has been identified or interviewed before.

Beyond that, we know nothing. How frustrating!

On the day before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man who identified himself as "Dan Cooper" bought a plane ticket with cash at Portland International Airport. He bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. He wore a black raincoat, a dark suit, "a neatly pressed white shirt," a black tie, and a mother of pearl tie pin. Once on board the plane, "He lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and water." (It's all so very "Mad Men"!)

Mid-flight, Cooper quietly announced to a stewardess that he had a bomb in his briefcase, and that he was taking the plane hostage. When the plane landed in Seattle, police handed over his requested $200,000 cash and parachutes. After releasing the passengers, Cooper demanded that the plane fly him to Mexico. However, he jumped from the plane mid-flight, while it was over southern Washington.

Unfortunately for those hoping that Cooper successfully landed and went on the lam, in 2007 the FBI revealed that Cooper apparently selected a non-functioning parachute from the group that was supplied to him. It had been marked with an X, meaning that it was an instructional pack only.

Is Earth's "Trojan Asteroid" Nibiru?

NASA recently announced that Earth has a "Trojan asteroid." This newly discovered celestial body is naturally being fingered as Nibiru by many people. But is it really?
First, some science. Each orbiting planet has up to five possible "Lagrange points." These are points along the planet's orbit in which some other object can also orbit, without getting in anyone's way or falling in or out of orbit. Think of them as balance points, balancing the gravity of the main planet, the sun, and any neighboring planets.
The Lagrange points are places where a relatively small object (like a big chunk of rock) can orbit in synch with the main planet. These items, stuck in geosynchronous orbit, are called "Trojan asteroids." Many planets have Trojan asteroids tagging along in their wake, or running up ahead. We have identified nine Trojans in Neptune's orbit, four Mars Trojans, and so forth.
It's reasonable to expect that Earth would have a few of these Trojans as well. The problem is that, in the most likely location for them, they would only be visible during the day. And it's pretty hard to spot objects in outer space during the day!
But every day NASA comes up with some new imaging technology. And they recently developed technology which allowed them to identify an Earth Trojan, which was given the romantic name 2010 TK7.
Early data is that 2010 TK7 has a diameter of about 900 feet. We do not yet have any information on its possible composition. However, knowing that it's there, it becomes a better candidate for exploration than Mars, due to its proximity.
So is 2010 TK7 the famed rogue planet which is prophesied to scream in from outer space and destroy all life on Earth in the year 2012? I rate this possibility as EXTREMELY unlikely. (All caps: EXTREMELY.)
For one thing, it is a simple fact of astrophysics that by definition a Trojan asteroid cannot impact the main planet. If there were even the slightest possibility of collision, it wouldn't be a Trojan asteroid, end of story.
For another thing, 2010 TK7 is pretty small. For reference, the moon's diameter is 2,156 miles. Comet Hale-Bopp is 25 miles in diameter, Halley's Comet is 6 miles in diameter, and Chicxulub (the comet which destroyed the dinosaurs) was 7.45 miles in diameter. By comparison, TK7's 900-foot diameter seems unlikely to destroy the entire planet.
Don't get me wrong, it would be a problem if it somehow was able to make Earth impact! But it's a far cry from being able to wreak the sort of effects that are rumored for Nibiru.
 

The United States' Haunted Places Part 2

 

I started writing about haunted places in the United States the other day.  It’s funny how when you start thinking about ghosts, your certainty that they are all around you just grows and grows.  And manifests itself everywhere.  Late at night, the towel hanging on the back of the door can be an otherworldly creature or the footsteps from upstairs aren’t your neighbors, but a foe coming to haunt you.  Just late at night. You know you agree.  Join in the ghostly hysteria and let’s visit some more of the most haunted places in the United States: 

 

Lincoln Theater.  Decatur, Illinois. Old theaters like the Lincoln are rife with ghosts and ghost stories. The theater first opened in 1916 and was constructed on the site of an old hotel that burned down in 1915. Some say that the ghosts of the fire’s two victims still haunt the theater today. It is said that in the old theater, which is closed most of the time except for special events, you can hear foot steps and feel icy chills when nothing is near you. Ghostly presences at this theater have been captured both on camera and on film. 

 

1921 First Avenue. The Kells Building.  Seattle, Washington. The Kells Building in Seattle used to house one of the most notorious mortuaries at the turn of the 21st century, Butterworth & Sons Mortuary.  Because of a number of epidemics that swept the Seattle during early decades of this century, city officials offered $50--a huge sum of money at the time--for dead bodies.  Butterworth offered to cremate bodies if people would bring them to him--taking $25 of their pot and giving them the other half.  Needless to say, the bodies of people who had died from unnatural causes made up a huge portion of his business. 

 

Today, Kells Irish Pub does a good business in the bottom of the building, but nothing can stay open in the upper floors.  Several restaurants have gone into the space, but have the owners have fled before their leases were up.  Some say that a parade of the dead walks through the floor; others say that the murals on the walls begin screaming. Kells tried to open a business on the main floor in spring of this year, but couldn’t get enough contractors to stick around long enough to finish it. 

 

Key West, Florida. Captain Tony’s is a bar that, before its current incarnation, used to be the stomping grounds for the sailors and renegades that used to frequent the sunny city.  Pre-bar, Captain Tony’s was supposed to be the site of the island’s morgue and the tree that stands in the middle of the bar was supposed to be the tree on which pirates and criminals were hanged. Writer Ernest Hemingway, too who called island home for thirty years, is supposed to haunt his home, which has been turned into a museum about the novelist.  Clicking sounds from his typewriter are often heard and some claim to see the novelist's ghost wandering the grounds. One of the most haunted objects also finds a home on the island’s art and history museum.  Robert the Doll, a toy given to painter Gene Otto in the 1900’s, is supposedly possessed by an evil spirit.  Otto became terribly afraid of the doll when he was a child, saying it would throw furniture around the room and threaten him. Otto’s parents said they saw the doll moving and neighbors would see it pacing the hall when the Ottos were away. 

 


 

 

The United States' Haunted Places Part 1

Pike Place Market, Bell Witch, Winchester Mystery House

 

I’ve gone on Seattle’s Ghost Tours twice recently so, needless to say, I’m getting into paranormal  activity.  I never thought of myself as a believer in ghosts, never really thought about it much at all, really.  But certainly some of the stories we learned on the tour and some of the famous ghost stories across the United States are hard to dispute.  Here is a ghost story from Seattle area and a bit about a few of the most haunted places in the United States.  Do you believe in ghosts?  See if you can prove some of these scary tales false: 

 

Jacob. Seattle, WA.  Our tour guide told us about a child’s ghost haunting a store in Pike Place Market’s indoor area called the Down Under.  The boy first started haunting what used to be a bead store.  The owners were always coming into their store in the morning to find their carefully organized beads strewn around the room.  Sometimes the spirit, who they dubbed “Jacob,” would match a strand of beads hanging on a wall to a workers’ dress.  Most convincing of all, the store owners looked up at their shop from the street one night to see two darkened windows that they didn’t recognize from inside the shop.  When they went back inside, they knocked on the wall to find it hollow.  Turns out that the post office that had formerly occupied the space had boarded up a huge space with a plaster wall. They knocked down the wall and inside it they found piles of beads, a pile of pennies and a pile of packaged beads that they had labelled themselves within the last few weeks. They didn't even know the room existed. Some believe Jacob was one of the children brought to the market to be quarantined during the Spanish Flu epidemic in Seattle in the early 20th century or was an orphaned boy who worked there.   

 

Bell Witch. Adams, Tennessee. The Bell family of Tenessee began experiencing a haunting at their home in 1817.  The incidents started out mildly enough--knocking and scratching sounds at the door, blankets pulled from beds.  But then the unexplained occurrences became more sinister.  Family members were kicked, scratched, stuck with pins. Soon, the ghost found a voice and identified itself as a neighbor of the Bells’ named Kate Batts, a still living person. Batts had bad blood with the patriarch John Bell over the sale of slaves.  Her temper wasn't assuaged yet. John Bell fell ill with a mysterious illness one day. Batts' spirit voice took responsibility for his illness, but also tormented him and wouldn't let him rest. John Bell was so distressed that he drank a black liquid, killing himself.   

 

Winchester House. Santa Clara, California. Sarah Winchester’s life was marked by tragedy and a huge, huge fortune.  She first lost her baby and soon after, her husband.  Her husband, the heir to the hugely successful Winchester rifle fortune, left her $20 million dollars on his death--a huge sum in the the late 19th century.  After her husband’s death, Sarah consulted a spiritualist who told her that Sarah’s husband was speaking, telling her to leave Connecticut and go to the California and buy a house.  Sarah followed the orders, buying a house in Santa Clara county and building it and rebuilding it for the next 36 years. Sarah kept contractors at the house 24-hours a day because she thought the house was haunted by the spirits of the men killed by her husband’s rifles.  

 

Dead Man Wakes Up

A 50 year-old man who suffers from asthma passed out in South Africa on Sunday. His family, assuming the worst, decided not to phone the police or take him to the hospital. Instead, they phoned the private mortuary directly.
I'm guessing that either there was a conversational SNAFU, or the mortuaries in South Africa aren't so good with the follow-up. They picked up the man's body and transported it back to their cooler without question.
24 hours later, the man woke up in the cold, dark, sealed morgue.

He began screaming, and I'm sure you can't blame him. The morgue attendants fled in terror, but eventually "put on their brave faces" and returned to find, not a screaming ghost (as they had first assumed) but a disoriented and cold middle-aged man.

The victim was taken to the nearest hospital for hypothermia treatment. I can only imagine the conversation with his family members when he returns.
Before "The Serpent and the Rainbow" became a rather bad 1998 Wes Craven movie starring Bill Pullman, it was a fascinating non-fiction book by anthropologist Wade Davis on the possible origins of the zombie myth. Davis included a long and fascinating chapter on the topic of the "waking death" phenomena, and how difficult it can be to pronounce a body actually dead.
This theme was revisited in the also-very-excellent book Stiff by Mary Roach.

Before EKG machines, death was often determined by observing the patient's respiration and heart beat. However, there are circumstances (as witnessed by this poor South African man) where both the respiration and heart beat can be so slow and shallow as to be nearly undetectable by most ordinary means. They would show up on a modern hospital's finely tuned high tech equipment, of course. But in the absence of a multi-million-dollar EKG machine, what are you to do?

In the modern world, this kind of thing doesn't often happen. But in less developed areas, and in the past, it was not entirely uncommon for the "dead" to revive. This is also no doubt the source of many cultures' rituals which involve the dead body lying in state for a period of time before being buried. After all, as Davis concluded, the only true sign of death is the presence of decay and putrefaction.

The lesson is clear: if someone seems non-responsive, don't just call the mortuary, okay? Call an ambulance and get the doctors to declare them actually dead! This gentleman is just lucky he "died" over the weekend, otherwise I imagine he would have already been buried. Shudder!
 

Has The Zodiac Killer's Crypto Been Cracked?

Survey says: probably not.
There are many unanswered questions surrounding the Zodiac Killer. He was never caught, and the 340-word cipher which he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle has never been cracked. Until this week, when a Massachusetts man named Corey Starliper claimed to have cracked the code and revealed Zodiac's true identity.
There are several reasons why a cryptogram might never be solved. Unfortunately it isn't true that, as Starliper is quoted in the local newspaper, "Any code created by man can be cracked by man." For example, it has been widely tested and verified that messages encrypted by one-time pads cannot be cracked (barring a scenario where the one-time pad is not thoroughly destroyed after use, which is how these things often go).
It is also true that 340 random letters cannot be cracked. Might the Zodiac Killer have deliberately sent a block of gibberish to the newspaper, in order to vex investigators? His first few missives were trivially cracked by random amateur public sleuths (after they were published in the newspaper). This certainly would have stung the man's ego.
As much as we might want the mystery to finally have been solved, Starliper's work has been pretty thoroughly torn apart online. Problems identified so far include:
  • Starliper begins with the observation that 340 is the area code for the U.S. Virgin Islands. However, this number wasn't assigned to the USVI until 1997.
  • The substitution cipher changes frequently - sometimes as often as every letter. Seemingly at random. Using this metric, you can make anything say anything.
  • Starliper's work has been sent to a professional cryptographer who reviewed it and declared it "not valid."
  • Starliper began by changing the non-alphabetical symbols (like < and > ) into what he perceived as being their nearest alphabetical counterparts. This flies in the face of cryptography convention, to say the least.
  • Starliper's decrypt also brings no new information to the table, and isn't nearly as nutty as the other confirmed Zodiac letters (in which he explains that, for example, he is killing people to use their souls as slaves in the afterlife).
  • It points blame on Arthur Leigh Allen, who was the only prime suspect during the initial investigation. However, only circumstantial evidence has ever been provided for Allen's guilt. And a 2007 DNA test on the saliva used to close one of the Zodiac Killer's envelopes tested out as not matching that of Arthur Leigh Allen.

What is the Big Deal About Inception?

Everyone and their ex-babysitter has been raving about the blockbuster film Inception, so my husband and I finally decided to check it out during our date last weekend. I don’t know if it’s because we had been watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 only hours prior, or if it was because we were sleepy, or because it was simply a crap movie, but we really were left feeling like it was, well, a crap movie. I really wish we’d have watched something else instead, or perhaps simply slept.

“Oh, it makes you think!” people raved. Really? Do you really think this movie called for that much thinking? Because when I was in college, one of the number one rules when writing fiction was to NEVER write “and then I woke up!” You don’t write “Everything Was Just a Dream” stories or movies. That’s why that horrible movie, Next, was so awful. I don’t care if you wake up from said dream or not; if it’s not happening, it’s really not worth telling about. You can write about it in your journal or you can call up a psychic to have it analyzed; just don’t bore us to pieces by making a movie about it.

And that’s exactly how my husband and I felt—bored out of our minds. There was too much snow, too many slow-mo scenes, too many parts that dragged on and on and on… And we’re not even DiCaprio haters! (I’ve found that most people who don’t like the movie claim it’s because they don’t like Leo.)

The acting was, ah, so-so. I liked Cillian Murphy, oddly enough, the most; the rest of the cast seemed very one-dimensional, which is no surprise, since it was all a damn dream, and nobody mattered. In fact, if anyone complains about people being one-dimensional, the creators could easily just say, “Hey, they’re supposed to be; it’s all a dream!”

Yeah, that’s not a “smart movie,” or even an engaging one. It’s lazy, is what it is. The Matrix was much more successful at what I guess Nolan was trying to get across here.

If you want a good thinking movie, you could try my husband’s favorite movie, The Game. A couple of my favorite thinking movies are Mystic River, Little Children, Winter’s Bone, and The Silence of the Lambs. Hell, Law Abiding Citizen, one of the most horribly titled movies ever, is better than Inception in terms of making you think—and as a bonus, you get Gerard Butler! (I realize that most of my selections are gory, gloomy, or both; I guess I just like films that make you think AND that are sad.)

I think knowing that Christopher Nolan was at the helm made it even more disappointing, since I normally love his work. Oh, well, at least I watched it and it’s over with, and, unlike so many awestruck folks who are so enamored with the movie, I didn’t even have to pinch myself.

Canada's Lethal "Highway of Tears"

Highway 16 stretches more than 800 miles across Canada, from Prince Rupert on the coast east through the Rockies to the border with Alberta. Since the 1970s, as many as four dozen people (mostly young women) have gone missing along this stretch of isolated wilderness highway. Some of them were later found dead, but most have simply vanished.
Many Canadians are calling this another series of botched RCMP investigations. Most damning, the RCMP didn't get involved until recently, when a white woman went missing. However, according to tribal leaders, 43 aboriginal women had already gone missing by that point. Did media and police interest only awaken when a white woman's life was lost? It certainly seems that way.
It's unlikely that a single answer will be found for all the disappearances, but they certainly seem to follow several different clusters. The earliest cluster is in the 1970s, of women who were hitchhiking. Highway 16 was - and still is - a major trucking route. 18-wheelers ferry goods from the Prince Rupert shipyards into the interior of Canada. It would be a simple matter for a trucker to pick up a lone woman, then dump her body anywhere in the trackless wilderness along his route.
Another cluster happened in the 1980s, mostly women who worked at hotels along the highway. They were sexually assaulted, strangled, and their bodies dumped. The RCMP launched an investigation at the time into a possible serial killer, calling it the "highway murders" case. Several potential subjects were identified, but it seems that the investigation eventually fizzled out.
The high-profile death of tree planter Nicole Hoar in 2002 sparked another investigation which strove to tie together several of the deaths, including three 15 year-old aboriginal girls who were murdered in 1994. This investigation is technically ongoing, although aboriginal leaders argue that "authorities are mostly just talk" at this point.
Meanwhile, women continued to vanish. The most recent victim was Madison Scott, a 20 year-old woman who was last seen at 3AM at a local campsite. Several days later police found her truck and camping gear, but Scott had vanished, and search parties were unsuccessful.
The RCMP has frequently come under fire for failing to take reports of vanished women seriously, and for bungling high-profile cases in which underprivileged women were the victims. Many people feel that serial killer Robert Pickton would have been caught a lot sooner, if the RCMP had taken an interest in the disappearance of several dozen prostitutes in the Vancouver area.  And once the RCMP was involved, the case was bungled at several points. (In some ways, it looks like a miracle that Pickton was caught at all.)

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