STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

Did Time In This Dungeon Turn Vlad Into The Impaler?

The real story of Vlad III of Wallachia, better known as Vlad the Impaler and inspiration for Count Dracula, includes a period when he was held hostage in Tokat Castle in Tokat, Turkey. Archeologists restoring the castle have recently discovered two dungeons, a secret tunnel, storage rooms and more that they believe was used to imprison Vlad.

What’s interesting about this discovery is that it brings to light what may be one of the reasons Vlad went bad. This period of imprisonment occurred when Vlad II I was a young boy, not yet a teen, and is not the period when he was arrested and held prisoner in Hungary as an adult.

According to historians, Vlad III, son of Vlad II Dracul (“Dracul” means “dragon” and the title signified that Vlad II was a member of the Order of the Dragon, a chivalry group founded to defend Christianity in Eastern Europe against the Ottoman Empire) and his younger brother Radu, were held in one of the dungeons as hostages by the Ottomans to control their father. They were released upon his death in 1447, when Vlad returned to Wallachia to assume the throne. It’s believed that this imprisonment is what instilled the hatred of the Ottomans that led Vlad to his war with them when he was said to have killed over 20,000 people, impaled them and put them on display to discourage the enemy.

A tunnel entrance under Tokat Castle.

What happened to Vlad in that Tokat Castle dungeon to turn him into the killer who inspired Bram Stoker’s famous story? That remains to be discovered, says archeologist İbrahim Çetin.

The castle is completely surrounded by secret tunnels. It is very mysterious.

Mysterious indeed. Like all stories, legends and myths surrounding Vlad the Impaler, the mysteries only get deeper.

[MIKA27]

Lobsters Were Once Only Fed To Poor People And Prisoners

That big plate of surf and turf now costs an arm and a leg, thanks to lobster’s recent resurgence in popularity. But, as David Foster Wallace’s famous essay, Consider The Lobster illustrated, throughout Colonial-era America, the crustacean was considered among the least desirable foods one could put in their face — a garbage meat fit only for the indigent, indentured, and incarcerated.

These days a live lobster will go for easily $US5 a pound, according to the Main lobster industry, though they can easily spike 20 per cent or more in a single season, as they did in 2012, climbing as high as $US14 depending on how many fishermen can catch.

However, when the colonists first arrived on the shores of New England, they faced the opposite problem: an overabundance of the shellfish. An unimaginable overabundance. Lobsters used to wash up on shore in drifts two-feet tall. One 17th century British historian by the name of William Wood visited Newfoundland and noted, “Their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten [except by the Indians who] get many of them every day for to baite their hooks withal and to eat when they can get no bass.”

The lobster also quickly earned a reputation for being a vacuous bottom feeder, willing to put anything — no matter how barely edible — in its craw. People ate so much lobster they got sick of it — though it doesn’t help that they only cooked lobsters dead back then, not alive as we do today.

People got so fed up with lobster meat, in fact, that they stopped eating it altogether. Or at least the respectable members of society did so. Instead, they began feeding it to their livestock — as well as the financially destitute, criminals, and indentured servants — rather than eat it themselves. According to 19th century Kentucky politician and social observer, John Rowan, the meat quickly became synonymous with lower classes of society and quipped “Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation.” The meat was so reviled that indentured servants in one Massachusetts townsuccessfully sued their owners to feed it to them three times a week at most. We should all be so unlucky.

The stigma stuck for years. During the Victorian era, you’d spend about 53 cents per pound of Boston baked beans but just 11 cents per pound of lobster. However, some folks were willing to give lobster a shot as far back as the 1850s. Sure, it’d be the lowest price item on the menu — roughly half of what you’d pay for even chicken — and nobody would be caught dead eating one but it was available. Lobster was something you’d feed to your cat, not your dinner guests.

It was actually the rise of seasonal tourism in the 1870s — wherein the well-to-do from New York and Washington would retreat to Boston from the region’s oppressive heat and humidity that lobster began becoming a sought after item. Visitors, upon returning home from their vacations, would find themselves still craving Boston baked beans and boiled lobster. And, more importantly, willing to pay handsomely to get more.

This led to the popularization of canned lobster which had recently been invented in 1841. This process, which required an assembly line of boilers, shellers, and other industrial mechanizations as well as an army of workers to man them — helped jumpstart the Maine fishing industry and grow it into the monumental economic and aquacultural powerhouse that it is today.

[MIKA27]

Magnetic Nanobeads Can ****** Bacteria And Virus Out Of Blood

Sepsis is an nasty and surprisingly common way to die. The illness is triggered by blood infections but, ultimately, it’s your own immune reaction — not the bacteria or virus — that poisons you to death. Filtering those pathogens out of blood right away, though, could be a promising treatment. Enter a new device made of magnetic nanobeads coated in sticky proteins that attract bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

Scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have created what is essentially an artificial spleen. The device made of wire and plastic may not resemble the fleshy organ in our bodies, but its series of blood channels mimics the microarchitecture of spleens.

Blood passing through these channels encounters magnetic nanobeads coated with a protein called mannose-binding lectin (MBL). MBL is a natural immune protein that binds to the surfaces of bacteria, viruses, fungi, pathogen, and toxins; this super general binding is deliberate because sepsis can be caused by any number of microbes. The nanobeads can then be easily filtered from the blood, pathogens and all.

So far, the “biospleen” has been tested on rats with blood infections. The next trials are on pigs and eventually, if all goes well in a couple years, in humans. For the leading cause of death in hospitals, a new treatment for sepsis could not come soon enough.

[MIKA27]

Here's A Natural Gas-Powered Cargo Ship Getting Its 490-Tonne Engine

Work on TOTE shipholding’s new Marlin-class cargo ships is progressing quickly. Late last month crews were photographed installing the vessel’s main engine, a 490-tonne behemoth that runs on liquefied natural gas rather than diesel.

“This large slow speed (two stroke) dual fuel engine is the first of its kind in the world” said Phil Morrell, Vice President of Commercial Marine Operations for TOTE Services, in a press statement. “Using this engine in our new Marlin class vessels will not only drastically reduce our SOx, NOx, particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions as a result of using liquefied natural gas, but it will also improve our efficiency meaning these ships will require less energy to travel the same distance and help preserve the environment.”

The General Dynamics NASSCO shipyard in San Diego is currently working on both this ship and its twin sister. Should construction continue on schedule, these vessels will hit the high seas at the end of next year and late 2016, respectively.

[MIKA27]

Russia's Real-Life Superhero Is A Girl Who Wreaks Vengeance On Litterbugs

Over in Russia right now, there's a bike-riding vigilante, patrolling the nation's streets and exposing its worst litterbugs. Forget Wonder Woman because 'Elusive Girl' is here to fight the good fight!

In every major cities around the world, littering is often a problem - the result of sheer laziness on the part of those who can't be bothered to dispose of their trash in a bin. If you're a litterbug in Russia though, you'd better hope that Elusive Girl doesn't catch you in the act.

The unknown female biker, armed with her GoPro camera she scoops up their discarded trash tracks the culprit down and throws it right back at them - often directly into their car. It doesn't matter if it's ashtrays or cigarettes of McDonalds milkshakes, if you drop it- expect it to come flying back at you.

You have to applaud her bravery (you never know how a stranger will react) for really taking a stand and making a statement. So many of us see people littering everyday, but so few of us speak out about it.

In the event that things do turn sour, her seriously powerful bike that allows for a sharp getaway if things turn nasty. 'Elusive Girl' whomever you are, we salute you!

[MIKA27]

How Gangs Took Over Prisons

Originally formed for self-protection, prison gangs have become the unlikely custodians of order behind bars—and of crime on the streets.

On a clear morning this past February, the inmates in the B Yard of Pelican Bay State Prison filed out of their cellblock a few at a time and let a cool, salty breeze blow across their bodies. Their home, the California prison system’s permanent address for its most hardened gangsters, is in Crescent City, on the edge of a redwood forest—about four miles from the Pacific Ocean in one direction and 20 miles from the Oregon border in the other. This is their yard time.

Most of the inmates belong to one of California’s six main prison gangs: Nuestra Familia, the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Black Guerrilla Family, the Northern Structure, or the Nazi Lowriders (the last two are offshoots of Nuestra Familia and the Aryan Brotherhood, respectively). The inmates interact like volatile chemicals: if you open their cells in such a way as to put, say, a lone member of Nuestra Familia in a crowd of Mexican Mafia, the mix can explode violently. So the guards release them in a careful order.

“Now watch what they do,” says Christopher Acosta, a corrections officer with a shaved head who worked for 15 years as a front-line prison guard and now runs public relations for Pelican Bay. We are standing with our backs to a fence and can see everything.

At first, we seem to be watching a sullen but semi-random parade of terrifying men—heavily tattooed murderers, thieves, and drug dealers walking past one of five casual but alert guards. Some inmates, chosen for a strip search, drop their prison blues into little piles and then spin around, bare-assed, to be scrutinized. Once inspected, they dress and walk out into the yard to fill their lungs with oxygen after a long night in the stagnant air of the cellblock. The first Hispanic inmate to put his clothes on walks about 50 yards to a concrete picnic table, sits down, and waits. The first black inmate goes to a small workout area and stares out at the yard intently. A white guy walks directly to a third spot, closer to the basketball court. Another Hispanic claims another picnic table. Slowly it becomes obvious that they have been moving tactically: each has staked out a rallying point for his group and its affiliates.

Once each gang has achieved a critical mass—about five men—it sends off a pair of scouts. Two of the Hispanics at the original concrete picnic table begin a long, winding stroll. “They’ll walk around, get within earshot of the other groups, and try to figure out what’s going down on the yard,” Acosta says. “Then they can come back to their base and say who’s going to attack who, who’s selling what.”

Eventually, about 50 inmates are in the yard, and the guards have stepped back and congregated at their own rallying point, backs to the fence, with Acosta. The men’s movements around the yard are so smooth and organized, they seem coordinated by invisible traffic lights. And that’s a good thing. “There’s like 30 knives out there right now,” Acosta says. “Hidden up their rectums.”

A corrections officer at Pelican Bay conducts a search for contraband in an inmate's cell.

Understanding how prison gangs work is difficult: they conceal their activities and kill defectors who reveal their practices. This past summer, however, a 32-year-old academic named David Skarbek published The Social Order of the Underworld, his first book, which is the best attempt in a long while to explain the intricate organizational systems that make the gangs so formidable. His focus is the California prison system, which houses the second-largest inmate population in the country—about 135,600 people, slightly more than the population of Bellevue, Washington, split into facilities of a few thousand inmates apiece. With the possible exception of North Korea, the United States has a higher incarceration rate than any other nation, at one in 108 adults. (The national rate rose for 30 years before peaking, in 2008, at one in 99. Less crime and softer punishment for nonviolent crimes have caused the rate to decline since then.)

Skarbek’s primary claim is that the underlying order in California prisons comes from precisely what most of us would assume is the source of disorder: the major gangs, which are responsible for the vast majority of the trade in drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, behind bars. “Prison gangs end up providing governance in a brutal but effective way,” he says. “They impose responsibility on everyone, and in some ways the prisons run more smoothly because of them.” The gangs have business out on the streets, too, but their principal activity and authority resides in prisons, where other gangs are the main powers keeping them in check.

Skarbek is a native Californian and a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London. When I met him, on a sunny day on the Strand, in London, he was craving a taste of home. He suggested cheeseburgers and beer, which made our lunch American not only in topic of conversation but also in caloric consumption. Prison gangs do not exist in the United Kingdom, at least not with anything like the sophistication or reach of those in California or Texas, and in that respect Skarbek is like a botanist who studies desert wildflowers at a university in Norway.

Skarbek, whose most serious criminal offense to date is a moving violation, bases his conclusions on data crunches from prison systems (chiefly California’s, which has studied gangs in detail) and the accounts of inmates and corrections officers themselves. He is a treasury of horrifying anecdotes about human depravity—and ingenuity. There are few places other than a prison where men’s desires are more consistently thwarted, and where men whose desires are thwarted have so much time to think up creative ways to circumvent their obstacles.

Because he is a gentleman, Skarbek waited until we’d finished our burgers to illustrate some of that ingenuity. “How can you tell what type of cellphone an inmate uses,” he asked, “based on what’s in his cell?” He let me think for about two seconds before cheerily giving me the answer: you examine the bar of soap on the prisoner’s sink. The safest place for an inmate to store anything is in his rectum, and to keep the orifice supple and sized for the (contraband) phone, inmates have been known to whittle their bars of soap and tuck them away as a placeholder while their phones are in use. So a short and stubby bar means a durable old dumbphone; broad and flat means a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Pity the poor guy whose bar of soap is the size and shape of a Samsung Galaxy Note.

The prevalence of cellphones in the California prison system reveals just how loose a grip the authorities have on their inmates. In 2013, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confiscated 12,151 phones. A reasonable guess might be that this represented a tenth of all cellphones in the system, which means that almost every one of the state’s 135,600 inmates had a phone—all in violation of prison regulations. “Prison is set up so that most of the things a person wants to do are against the rules,” Skarbek says. “So to understand what’s really going on, you have to start by realizing that people are coming up with complicated ways to get around them.” Prison officials have long known that gangs are highly sophisticated organizations with carefully plotted strategies, business-development plans, bureaucracies, and even human-resources departments—all of which, Skarbek argues, lead not to chaos in the prison system but to order.

Craig Canary, an inmate in Pelican Bay’s Security Housing Unit, in his solitary-confinement cell

Skarbek trained in an economic school of thought known as rational-choice theory, which aims to explain human behavior as the product of reasonable decisions by economic actors. In many cases, rational-choice theory has shown behaviors to be rational that at first appear wild, irrational, or psychopathic. When people are encouraged or forced to act against their economic interest, they find work-arounds as surely as water blocked by a boulder in a stream finds a way to flow around it.

In 1968, one of the founders of rational-choice theory, Gary Becker, wrote a pioneering paper, “Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach,” premised on the idea that the prevailing view of crime required revision. According to prior dogma, criminals were best understood as mental defectives, crazy people who couldn’t control their impulses. Becker, who won a Nobel in economics in 1992 and died this past May, suggested instead that criminals offend because they make careful calculations of the probability and likely cost of getting caught—and then determine that the gamble is worthwhile. This insight, Skarbek says, opened the study of crime up to economic theory.

Skarbek attended graduate school at George Mason University, a bastion of rational-choice theory. Its faculty is also friendly to unorthodox subject matter: Robin Hanson has published papers about using betting markets to augment democratic government, and has proposed that it is rational to freeze one’s head after death; Peter Leeson wrote The Invisible Hook, a 2009 account of the economics of piracy. Skarbek’s doctoral adviser, Peter Boettke, showed how the behavior of the Soviet economy actually made sense if you viewed it as controlled not just by the government but also by the black- and gray-market activities of citizens.

Prison, Skarbek claims, is the ultimate challenge for a rational-choice theorist: a place where control of the economic actors is nearly total, and where virtually any transaction requires the consent of the authorities. The Soviets had far less control over their people’s economic activity than prison wardens do over the few dollars available for prisoners’ commissary purchases. Both settings have given rise to alternate currencies and hidden markets. Most famously, cigarettes have become the medium of exchange in many prisons. But when they are banned, other currencies take their place. California inmates now use postage stamps.

Among the fundamental questions about prison gangs—known in California-corrections argot as “Security Threat Groups”—is why they arise in the first place. After all, as Skarbek notes, California had prisons for nearly a century before the first documented gang appeared. Some states don’t have prison gangs at all. New York has had street gangs for well over a century, but its first major prison gang didn’t form until the mid-1980s.

The explanation, Skarbek says, can be found in demographics, and in inmate memoirs and interviews. “Before prison gangs showed up,” he says, “you survived in prison by following something called ‘the convict code.’ ” Various recensions of the code exist, but they all reduce to a few short maxims that old-timers would share with first offenders soon after they arrived. “It was pretty simple,” he explains. “You mind your own business, you don’t rat on anyone, and you pretty much just try to avoid bothering or cheating other inmates.”

But starting in the 1950s, things changed: The total inmate population rose steeply, and prisons grew bigger, more ethnically and racially mixed, and more unpredictable in their types of inmate. Prisons faced a flood of first offenders, who tended to be young and male—and therefore less receptive to the advice of grizzled jailbirds. The norms that made prison life tolerable disappeared, and the authorities lost control. Prisoners banded together for self-protection—and later, for profit. The result was the first California prison gang.

That moment of gang genesis, Skarbek says, forced an arms race, in which different groups took turns demonstrating a willingness to inflict pain on others. The arms race has barely stopped, although the gangs have waxed and waned in relative power. (The Black Guerrilla Family has been weakened, prison authorities told me, because of leadership squabbles.) The Mexican Mafia was the sole Hispanic gang until 1965, when a group of inmates from Northern California formed Nuestra Familia to counter the influence of Hispanics from the south. Gang elders—called maestros—instruct the youngsters in gang history and keep the enmity alive.

What’s astonishing to outsiders, Skarbek says, is that many aspects of gang politics that appear to be sources of unresolvable hatred immediately dissipate if they threaten the stability of prison society. For example, consider the Aryan Brotherhood—a notoriously brutal organization whose members are often kept alone in cells because they tend to murder their cell mates. You can take the Brotherhood at its word when it declares itself a racist organization, and you can do the same with the Black Guerrilla Family, which preaches race war and calls for the violent overthrow of the government. But Skarbek says that at lights-out in some prisons, the leader of each gang will call out good night to his entire cellblock. The sole purpose of this exercise is for each gang leader to guarantee that his men will respect the night’s silence. If a white guy starts yelling and keeps everyone awake, the Aryan Brothers will discipline him to avoid having blacks or Hispanics attack one of their members. White power is one thing, but the need to keep order and get shut-eye is paramount.

Another common misconception about prison gangs is that they are simply street gangs that have been locked up. The story of their origins, however, is closer to the opposite: the Mexican Mafia, for example, was born at Deuel Vocational Institution, in Tracy, California, in 1956, and only later did that group, and others, become a presence on the streets. Today, the relation of the street to the cellblock is symbiotic. “The young guys on the street look to the gang members inside as role models,” says Charles Dangerfield, a former prison guard who now heads California’s Gang Task Force, in Sacramento. “Getting sentenced to prison is like being called up to the majors.”

But Skarbek says the prison gangs serve another function for street criminals. In a 2011 paper in American Political Science Review, he proposed that prison is a necessary enforcement mechanism for drug crime on the outside. If everyone in the criminal underworld will go to prison eventually, or has a close relationship with someone who will, and if everybody knows that gangs control the fate of all inmates, then criminals on the street will be afraid to cross gang members there, because at some point they, or someone they know, will have to pay on the inside. Under this model, prison gangs are the courts and sheriffs for people whose business is too shady to be able to count on justice from the usual sources. Using data from federal indictments of members of the Mexican Mafia, and other legal documents, Skarbek found that the control of prisons by gangs leads to smoother transactions in the outside criminal world.

Gangs effect this justice on the inside in part by circulating a “bad-news list,” or BNL. If your name is on a BNL, gang members are to attack you on sight—perhaps because you stole from an affiliate on the outside, or because you failed to repay a drug debt, or because you’re suspected of ratting someone out. Skarbek says one sign that the BNL is a rationally deployed tool, rather than just a haphazard vengeance mechanism, is that gangs are fastidious about removing names from the list when debts are paid.

No scholar writing in the law-abiding world, I was told by guards at Pelican Bay, can capture the reality of prison life in all its brutality. I was prepared for that to be true, even just based on my own reading. In 2005, Don Diva magazine interviewed a former guard at Rikers Island, who described the conditions of prison life in vivid terms. “[in each cell] you have a filthy toilet with no cover, a rusty sink, and a metal frame they call a bed,” he told the magazine. “Inmates use the toilet as a refrigerator in the summer to keep milk cool.” More vivid still was his description of inmate survival tactics:

Inmates are legendary for keeping razors in their mouths. Being able to “spit out a razor” is like a magic trick in jail. You could be in the mess hall, get into an altercation with another inmate, and the next thing you know he’s spit out two razors from both sides of his mouth and your face is slashed up … A ****** will become Houdini when it comes to survival. Spitting razors became such a problem that inmates immediately punched other inmates in the mouth as soon as an argument began. This was so that if the other inmate did have razors in his mouth, he would cut his own mouth up before even getting the opportunity to spit them out.

But I found that the staff at Pelican Bay had already been thinking about prisons the way Skarbek does. While I was there, Lieutenant Jeremy Frisk, the prison’s Institutional Gang Investigator, delivered a half-hour PowerPoint presentation focused on the managerial ingenuity of the gang leaders. One of the last slides featured a picture of the Chrysler chairman and 1980s business icon Lee Iacocca. “He was a very good manager,” Frisk said, “and turned Chrysler around from the brink of bankruptcy. And he could do that just from his management strategy: he never turned a wrench on a car, never assembled a door. But because of his ideas, they could make millions of dollars.” Frisk said gang leaders are the Lee Iacoccas of the prison world: brilliant managers of violence. (Since that presentation, I have found it impossible to look at a picture of Iacocca without imagining him stuffing his cheeks and rectum with razor blades.)

Pelican Bay opened in 1989 as an upgraded version of two famous old California prisons, San Quentin and Folsom, both of which still house inmates but function, as they always have, like enormous holding pens, hardly optimal for supervising a population of violent psychopaths who plot constantly to subvert the rules of the institution. Even the most secure housing at San Quentin, says Pelican Bay’s acting warden, Clark Ducart, was built so prisoners could all go from their cells to the yard together, with 50 men moving as an ungovernable mass. The walkways were narrow, and exposed prisoners to each other in ways that encouraged attacks. “As you walked guys to the shower,” he told me, “they’d get stabbed or speared.” Pelican Bay, by contrast, allows much greater levels of control, and a much more oppressive existence for anyone trying to plot a crime. The population is sectioned into yards and blocks that might have little contact with one another, and that allow the inmates to be managed with special attention to their gang affiliation. Upon identifying a gang member, the prison can modulate his location, freedom, and level of surveillance, to a degree that inmates have called stifling and inhumane.

On every cellblock at Pelican Bay, the guards post plastic identity cards on the wall, to keep track of which inmate is in which cell. These cards include each inmate’s name and photo. But the most-important information is conveyed by the cards’ color, which roughly correlates with probable gang affiliation: green for northern Hispanics, pink for southern Hispanics, blue for blacks, white for whites, and yellow for others, including American Indians, Mexican nationals, Laotians, and Eskimos. The information is crucial to the smooth running of the institution. Maintaining balance in a cellblock, and not putting a lone gang member in a situation where he might be surrounded by members of a rival gang, requires constant attention on the part of the corrections officers.

Out in the yard, when Acosta and I watched the inmates gather by gang, the guards knew exactly what was happening, and they could have intervened and broken up obvious gang activity. And it was obvious: nearly all gang members have gang tattoos across their torsos, and some have markings on their faces too. As Robert Mitchum growled in the remake of Cape Fear: “I don’t know whether to look at him or read him.”

Each interaction we observed between a correctional officer and a prisoner resembled bargain more than diktat. Before yard time finished, the guards let me inspect cells with them. The cells were livable, especially in comparison to the Rikers Island ones I had read about, even if the whole block had a dank locker-room smell. When I peeked in an inmate’s cell, I saw a dirty metal object in the sink. It was blunt and had a wire attached. “Stinger,” Acosta said. “Inmates use it to boil water. It’s illegal, but if the inmate isn’t doing anything wrong, a guard might let it pass.” He said that if a guard discovered a contraband item during an inspection, he might place it on the inmate’s bunk, just to show that he knew about it and could confiscate it at any time, if the inmate didn’t behave.

The guards asked inmates to show me a technique called “fishlining,” which involves attaching an object to one end of a string, sliding it out of a cell and into the hallway, and then using the other end of the string to yank it across the floor, this way and that, until it slides in front of the desired cell. A shatter-toothed Aryan Brother smiled at me and said he could send a book to an adjacent cell this way. (On his shelf: a single-volume edition of The Chronicles of Narnia and a Teach Yourself book on German.) The fishlines work as a way to distribute contraband, but are also used, Skarbek told me, as a sort of corporate communications system—like pneumatic tubes for prisoners.

The messages inmates send include extensive questionnaires for new arrivals. Nuestra Familia is particularly sophisticated, and, in a sure sign of bureaucratization, the gang even has an initialism for its new-arrival questionnaire: NAQ. “When you get put in your cell, and the door slams shut, you might get a fishline with a piece of paper on it,” Skarbek says. “And you’ll be expected to answer the questions in full.” The survey might include questions about your offense, your judge, and your relatives in other prisons. But it could also ask where you lived on the outside and what resources you have that could be valuable to the gang. The questionnaires are collated and checked. At some prisons, inmates use their cellphones to confirm details on Facebook, and Skarbek says they have been known to open LexisNexis accounts. Gang members are trained in micrography—the writing and decipherment of very tiny letters—so they can produce tightly rolled pieces of paper, called “kites,” to be transported from prison to prison in the usual orifice. These activity reports circulate around the prison system. Christopher Acosta showed me a kite that had been intercepted at Corcoran State Prison, reporting on a gang’s battle with a rival there.

An inmate doing push-ups in the SHU’s exercise yard, a small concrete room with an overhead skylight where inmates are allowed to spend an hour and a half a day and receive their only exposure to sunlight

Finding kites is difficult, because guards cannot cavity-search every inmate every day. The only way to control known gang members is to confine them under strict conditions that make communication almost, but not quite, impossible—no freedom of movement or circulation with the general prison population, for example, and only rare, carefully monitored visits.

Over the years, California has tried two broad strategies for gang management. The first was to break up gangs and scatter their members to distant prisons where their influence would be divided and diluted. That strategy too frequently allowed gangs to metastasize, effectively seeding the whole prison system, and even other states’ and the federal system, with gang activity. The current strategy, implemented in the 1990s, is to identify high-level gang members (a process called “validation”) and bring most of them to Pelican Bay.

Pelican Bay is far from the gangs’ strongholds of Los Angeles and the Central Valley. In every direction there is little more than redwoods, marijuana farms, and seacoast. More important, Pelican Bay has the facilities and knowledge necessary to isolate and neutralize gang members. In Sacramento, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has posters on the wall showing mug shots of all the major gang leaders—the Lee Iacoccas, Steve Jobses, and Henry Fords of the underworld—grouped by the prisons they live in. Most are at Pelican Bay, probably for life, in a snowflake-shaped building called the Security Housing Unit, or SHU (pronounced “shoe”).

Of course, there are ways to control inmates that American prisons have never tried on a large scale. Skarbek points out that the ***-and-transgender unit of the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles County is safe and gang-free—so much so that prison officials have had to screen out straight Angelenos who play *** just to keep away from gangs. That jail is simply small and well administered, argues Sharon Dolovich, a UCLA professor who studied it, and it’s not clear that its methods could scale up. We could easily replicate less enlightened penal practices, too. “In other countries, they can use corporal punishments not available to authorities in American prisons,” Skarbek says—a bullet in the back of the neck is a strong deterrent to any Chinese gang that might form behind bars. Within the bounds of American civil rights, though, we are left with prisons whose smooth operation relies in part on the predatory activities of gangs—and with facilities like the SHU, which is California’s effort to control the gangs by subjecting their leaders to levels of surveillance and restriction far beyond what most American inmates face.

Walking into the SHU feels like entering a sacred space. After the clanging of doors behind you, a monastic silence reigns. The hallways radiate from the command center at the hub of the SHU snowflake, and each one has chambers on either side that sprout chambers of their own. The hallways echo with footsteps when you walk down them. There are no prison noises: no banging of tin cups, no screaming of the angry or insane. The silence is sepulchral, and even when you get to branches of the snowflake, where the inmates actually live, it seems as if everyone is in suspended animation, on one of those interstellar journeys that last multiple human lifetimes.

In fact, many are just watching television while wearing headphones. In the company of Christopher Acosta, I visited a cellblock where fewer than a dozen cells held men, most of them living without cell mates. Before entering, I met a female security guard who, after demanding that I display my identification card more prominently, showed me a board with inmates’ pictures on it, each color-coded. Hispanics and whites predominated. She showed me the slips of paper indicating that a couple of inmates wanted halal food, although she said she suspected the meal requests were a way to break monotony and create work for the staff, rather than as an expression of any authentic religious conviction. She said the inmates were allowed televisions with the speakers disabled, as well as 10 books at a time.

The other Pelican Bay inmates were enjoying time together in the main yards, but these hard-core gang members didn’t have that option. Instead, they could go to a large, featureless concrete room at the end of the block for daily solitary exercise. The “yard” had a plexiglass roof that allowed them to see the sky above, and a small drainage hole in the floor, through which they could sometimes communicate faintly with other inmates on other cellblocks. Last year, gang members used the drainage pipes of their in-cell toilets to communicate clandestinely across cellblocks and coordinate a hunger strike by inmates statewide, to protest the conditions in the SHU.

With a buzz and a clang, the guard opened the last door, and Acosta and I entered the cellblock. He warned me that no one would talk. We had spent much of the day discussing the violent proclivities of the men under lockdown at Pelican Bay—how they became experts at weapons craftsmanship, for example, and could fashion the metal post of a bunk bed or the edge of a cell door into a spear, known as a “bone crusher,” that could be flung from inside a cell and penetrate a man’s neck or liver. So I expected hostile interviews, if any at all.

One of the first men I saw turned out to be genial but squirrely. He was Hispanic, refused to give his name, and babbled away about how prison gangs are “just a thing,” never quite articulating what that meant. The only sentence he said that made any sense was that he was in for life for killing two people. The door that separated him from me was a steel plate with small holes in it. After just a few seconds of his talking, I got a headache, partly from his mad monologue and partly from the odd moiré effect of looking at him through the screen.

As I passed down the line of cells, I tried talking to everyone but got little response. One heavily tattooed Hispanic man flicked his hand at me from behind the steel door, as if to shoo away a flea. Most ignored me, and the few who paid any attention just stared at me like I was prey and said nothing other than “no.” Finally one man with large glasses and a thick black mustache said, “Prison gangs? There ain’t no prison gangs here.” He then turned to a blank wall and started doing calisthenics.

When I emerged, and the door had clanged again behind me, I told the guard I hadn’t managed to talk with anyone. She was not surprised. Any conversation they attempted, she said, might be overheard and used against them.

But there are limits to what even the most carefully designed prisons can constrain. The guard and I were talking in library voices, and no sounds came from the row of cells nearby. “It’s quiet,” I said, lowering my voice. “Can they hear what we’re saying?”

“Every word,” she said. “Every single word.”

[MIKA27]

Fantastically Wrong: Magellan’s Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia

In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan took time out of his busy schedule of sailing around the world to stop in what is now Patagonia, where he found a naked giant dancing and singing on the shore. Magellan ordered one of his men to make contact (the unwitting emissary’s no doubt hilarious reaction to this sadly has been lost to history), and to be sure to reciprocate the dancing and singing to demonstrate friendship.

It worked. The man was able to lead the giant to a small island offshore, where the great captain waited. Describing the scene was a scholar along for the journey, Antonio Pigafetta, who kept a diary of the journey that was later turned into the book Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation: “When he was before us, he began to marvel and to be afraid, and he raised one finger upward, believing that we came from heaven. And he was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist,” and had a big, booming voice. The illustration above proves it—Patagonia was once inhabited by giants that positively dwarfed the heavenly Europeans that would come to conquer them.

Alright, maybe that isn’t airtight evidence. But it could well be that the people Magellan encountered, the Tehuelche, were indeed enormous, and that therefore this myth has some grounding in reality. And our trusty explorer would be damned if he wasn’t going to try to bring back evidence in pretty much the most obnoxious way you could imagine.

Ferdinand Magellan

On that small island, Magellan had his men give the giant food and drink, then made the mistake of showing him a mirror. “Wherein the giant seeing himself was greatly terrified,” wrote Pigafetta, “leaping back so that he threw four of our men to the ground.” But once things had calmed down, the explorers proceeded to make contact with the rest of the tribe, hunting with them and even building a house to store their provisions while onshore.

After several weeks with the tribe, Magellan hit upon a scheme: He’d kidnap two of them and take them back to Spain to prove he had discovered giants. “But this was by a cunning trick, for otherwise [the giants] would have troubled some of our men.” Magellan gave them all manner of metal goods to fool around with—mirrors, scissors, bells—so they wouldn’t mind at all when he slapped cuffs and chains on their legs. “Whereat these giants took great pleasure in seeing these fetters, and did not know where they had to be put, and they were grieved that they could not take them in their hands” because their mitts already were full of other trinkets.

Magellan, though, lost his evidence during the long haul back to Spain. The giants didn’t survive. But what Magellan and Pigafetta did bring back was the tale and the new name of the land of the giants, Patagonia, the etymology of which is still unclear. Some have argued it means “Land of the Big Feet,” from “pata,” Spanish for foot. More likely, though, Magellan picked up the name from a popular novel at the time, Primaleon, which featured a race of wild people called the Patagonians.

A map by Diego Gutiérrez from 1562, showing the Patagonian giants and some mermaids playing frisbee, apparently.

But leave it to the Brits to throw cold water on the whole thing. Sir Francis Drake later made contact with the same Patagonians, as summarized by his nephew in The World Encompassed from 1628 (a smackdown worth quoting at length):

“Magellan was not altogether deceived in naming these giants, for they generally differ from the common sort of man both in stature, bigness and strength of body, as also in the hideousness of their voices: but they are nothing so monstrous and giant-like as they were represented, there being some English men as tall as the highest we could see, but peradventure the Spaniards did not think that ever any English man would come hither to reprove them, and therefore might presume the more boldly to lie.”

You may have noticed by now that most illustrations of the Patagonian giants involve Europeans handing them things. It was the map above that likely influenced them, including this drawing of Commodore John Byron conversing with a Patagonian woman.

That, as scholars put it, is a sick burn. It’s also entirely right. According to William C. Sturtevant in his essay“Patagonian Giants and Baroness Hyde de Neuville’s Iroquois Drawings,” the Tehuelche were just a particularly statuesque people. While subsequent voyages after Magellan’s measured the Patagonians up to 10 feet tall, others put them more in the 6-foot range.

“Popular interest in Patagonian giants waned as scientific reports began to appear,” writes Sturtevant. “Some 19th century estimates or measurements of individuals were still high,” upwards of 7 feet. But better samples of Tehuelche men brought them down to around 6 feet tall, perfectly reasonable for a human being but entirely unimpressive for a giant. “If we accept the lowest (and least well documented) of these means based on modern measurements of males series,” he adds, “the Tehuelche are nevertheless among the tallest populations known anywhere in the world.” By contrast, male Europeans like Magellan in the 16th through 18th centuries would have measured in the low-5-foot range. Their imaginations, though, apparently outgrew their small stature.

But why, then, do human beings vary so much in their height? There is of course the factor of nutrition, but a much more subtle influence is at work here.

The tallest man who ever lived, Robert Wadlow, with his father, who appears grumpy probably because of all the money he had to spend on his son’s giant clothes.

Animals, including humans, have a tendency to grow larger in cold climates and smaller in warm ones. This is known as Bergmann’s rule: With a big body, you lose heat less quickly, and are therefore better adapted to survive freezing temperatures. So it’s no accident that the world’s biggest terrestrial predator, the polar bear, takes to the far north, while tropical creatures, which can shed heat quicker, are better adapted to sweltering jungles. And over evolutionary time, environments can exert the same pressure on human beings. Thus would the natives of frigid Patagonia do well to grow larger than their European counterparts.

There’s also the possibility that the Tehuelche man who Magellan and his crew claimed was so tall they only reached his waist suffered from a disorder of the pituitary gland. This releases runaway levels of the human growth hormone, as it did in the tallest man in recorded history, the 8-foot-11 Robert Wadlow. Indeed, the photograph above shows Robert and his 5-foot-11 father—a man far taller than the average male in the 1500s—coming up to his son’s waist.

The human body, though, is simply not meant to grow to such heights. Pituitary giants typically have much shorter life spans than the average human because their hearts, even though proportionally enlarged, struggle to pump blood through their bodies. Wadlow himself had little sensation in his feet, eventually dying at just 22 from an infected blister that he never felt forming.

So even if it were possible to have an entire race of such giants, it would be a very unhealthy population indeed. Thus the giants of Patagonia remain nothing more than products of some sailors’ imaginations—and maybe a little bit of scurvy. Never hurts to blame scurvy.

[MIKA27]

THE RED PIG PRINT

The story of the Red Pig is one of those automotive legends that deserves its own feature film, for those unfamiliar with the story it goes something like this:

In 1969 a small local automotive tuning company in Germany called “AMG” got their hands on a Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3 – a large sedan popular with non-benevolent middle eastern dictators. For reasons still unknown they decided to turn the car into a racer, the engine was enlarged to 6.8 litres and power at the rear wheels was boosted to 420.

The Red Pig was then entered into the 1971 24 Hours of Spa where it took a second place over all – stunning the field who had laughed the Mercedes out of Parc Ferme the day before. The torque produced by the engine was such that the team had to replace tires repeatedly during the race, as well as top up fuel which was being consumed at a rate slightly higher than 1mpg. In the years after its retirement from racing the Spa Red Pig was sold to French company Matra who used it to test jet fighter tires and landing gear.

This print by World Shut Your Mouth shows the best angle of the Red Pig, it measures 24″ x 18″ and it’s individually silkscreened by Kansas City’s La Cucaracha Press on a heavy French Paper stock. The run is limited to 50 distributed prints and each will be signed and numbered.

Grab yours here

[MIKA27]

Beartooth Radio Turns Your Smartphone Into A Walkie-Talkie

Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular amongst backcountry types, as a decent option for communication when the **** hits the fan. However, if you just want to chat to your partner a mile away, you still need a two-way radio — or at least you did.

That’s the problem Beartooth Radio is trying to solve with their snazzy smartphone case, which will use short-range radio frequencies to allow you to talk to another Beartooth user within about a two-mile range. In addition, you can also send encrypted texts (perfect for the log-cabin-dwelling NSA-hating survivalist type in your life), share your location, and send out a distress signal. It operates on the same FRS frequency as standard Walmart two-way radios, so you don’t need an operating licence like you would for more powerful radio sets, either.

Surprisingly at this stage for a tech startup, there’s no Kickstarter, but you can pre-order (no price yet) now for delivery sometime in 2015. Just don’t get lost on a mountain quite yet.

[MIKA27]

The Mysterious Unsolved Murders of Hinterkaifeck Farm

While it seems that in recent days the case of Jack the Ripper has had the spotlight shone on it, and has been slowly brought out into the light, there are still some murder mysteries that have stood the test of time, and have over the years gained a reputation for their bizarreness as much as for their gore. One such mystery comes from the majestic alpine forests of the German state of Bavaria. The idyllic mountain scenery and pristine nature here seem to be an unusual location for violent murder, yet in 1922 one quiet farmstead by the name of Hinterkaifeck was the setting for one of the most brutal, mysterious, and perplexing murders in German history.

Hinterkaifeck was a farm located within the woods outside Groebern, between the Bavarian towns of Ingolstadt and Schrobenhausen, about an hour’s drive from Munich. The farm was occupied by a family called the Gruebers, which consisted of the husband Andreas, his wife Cazilia, their middle aged, widowed daughter Viktoria, and their two grandchildren Cäzilia (7) and Josef (2). They lived in relative isolation, their farm being nestled away in a forest 1km away from the main town of Kaifeck.

The Hinterkaifeck farm

Despite the remoteness of their farm, the well-off family was fairly well known in the area, although not for the best of reasons. Andreas Grueber was known as an unfriendly loner who beat his wife on a regular basis and was not well liked by the town folk. It was also rumored that the youngest grandchild, little 2 year old Josef, was the result of an incestuous relationship between Adreas and his daughter Viktoria. Andreas was reportedly so obsessed and infatuated with Viktoria that he had actively forbidden her to marry again and kept her under his strict control. In addition to mistreating his wife, Andreas was also known to be severely abusive with his own children, of which Viktoria was the only survivor. In general, the family was sullen, reclusive, and mostly kept to themselves. The only one that had a relatively good reputation in the town was Viktoria, who had a remarkably beautiful voice and sang on the church choir.

The farm’s descent into true strangeness started when the maid suddenly quit her job and wished to leave immediately. When asked why she had so suddenly decided to abruptly leave, Maria explained that she had been hearing strange voices and other noises in and around the house, as well as the sound of disembodied footsteps emanating from the attic. The terror stricken maid had become convinced that the house was haunted and wished to stay there not a moment longer. She was reportedly white faced and emaciated when she said her final goodbyes. After her departure, the Gruebers chalked it up to the poor woman being simply mentally disturbed.

Six months later, things got more bizarre when in the middle of March, 1922, Andreas was surveying his property after a snowstorm and discovered odd footprints in the snow that originated in the thick surrounding forest and led right up to the house. Eerily, there were no footprints to be found that actually led back out to the woods. Andreas searched all around the property looking for any further sign of the mysterious tracks, but there were none. Alarmed that a potentially dangerous intruder could be hiding in his home, Andreas conducted a thorough search of the house, and even the barn and tool shed, but found no further footprints and no sign of an intruder.

That same night, Andreas was awoken by strange, inexplicable noises coming from the attic. Remembering what the maid had said about ghosts and the noises from the attic, he checked there too, but found nobody hiding there. With apparently nobody hiding on the property and no footprints leading back out into the woods, it seemed like the trespasser had simply vanished. Satisfied that no one was there yet still a bit unsettled, Andreas went to bed only to wake up the next morning to find a strange newspaper on his porch that no one in the family recognized. Not long after that, on March 30th, 1922, a set of keys to the house mysteriously disappeared and could not be found anywhere. In his search for the keys, Andreas came upon the disturbing discovery of scratches on the lock to the tool shed, as if someone had tried to pick it.

On May 31st, 1922, amid all of this high strangeness, and a day after the discovery of the lock scratches and the disappearance of the keys, a new maid by the name of Maria Baumgartner came to the house to replace the one that had fled in a panic six months earlier. Maria’s first day on the job would prove to be her last, and this would also be the last day anyone would see the Gruebers alive.

On April 4th, 1922, people in town became concerned about the Gruebers. No one had seen any of the family in days and the older grandchild, Cäzilia, had not been showing up for school. In addition, none of them had been to church and the Grubers’ unclaimed mail had been piling up at the post office. Viktoria in particular was never known to miss church due to her high standing as a member of the choir. A few of the townspeople decided to head out to their property and check up on them to see what was going on. Upon arriving at the farm, the search party’s calls went unanswered. A preliminary check of the outside of the farm turned up no sign of the family, and the whole place had an eerily quiet atmosphere.

They decided to inspect inside the barn, and upon opening the door were met with a gruesome sight. There lying in a pool of blood were the bodies of Andreas, his wife, his daughter Viktoria, and the elder granddaughter Cäzilia. Oddly, their bodies had been carefully stacked on top of each other and covered with hay. The horrified search party proceeded to frantically look for the other members of the family and found them in the farmhouse. The youngest grandchild, Josef was found dead in his cot in his mother’s bedroom, and the maid, Maria, was also found killed in her bed chamber. Both had also bled profusely and were found lying in pools of coagulated blood. In total six people, all five Gruber family members plus one maid, had been brutally killed in cold blood.

Gruesome discovery in the barn

The townspeople immediately called the police, and within hours investigators from the Munich Police Department had arrived at the scene. Preliminary autopsies done on the bodies showed that all of the victims had been killed with blows to the head inflicted by a pickaxe. Viktoria’s body also showed signs of strangulation as well but it was not thought to be the cause of death. The perpetrator was guessed to be very familiar with the use of a pickaxe, since all of the wounds had been precise and confidently delivered, with only a single, decisive blow to the head evident on each corpse and no such wounds to the bodies. All of victims except one were believed to have died instantly, all except Cäzilia, who showed evidence of having survived several hours after being grievously wounded, and tufts of hair had been torn from her head for unknown reasons. Most of the victims were dressed in bed clothes except Viktoria and Cäzilia, who were dressed in regular clothes. This plus the fact that Maria and Josef had been killed in bed suggested that the murders had happened in the evening, right around bed time.

An investigation of the crime scene led police to the conclusion that someone had lured Andreas Gruber, his wife, and his daughter Viktoria into the barn one by one to dispatch them with the pickaxe, after which the murderer had entered the farmhouse to finish off little Josef and the maid as they lay in their beds. It was believed that Viktoria and Cäzilia had likely been the first to arrive and be attacked since they had not been dressed for bed when they had gone out to investigate whatever had drawn them to the barn. One detail that police noticed was that all of the corpses had been covered somehow. The stacked bodies in the bar had been covered with hay, the maid’s body had been covered with bedsheets, and Josef’s body had been covered with one of his mother’s skirts.

A pickaxe, the Hinterkaifeck Killer’s weapon of choice

So far, so scary, but further analysis of the bodies turned up some very unusual findings. The date of death was determined to be Friday, March 31st, 1922, but after questioning the neighbors of the farm, this proved to be rather bizarre. It was found that witnesses near the farmhouse had seen smoke coming from the chimney over the entire weekend, suggesting someone had been home. The house also had evidence that someone had only recently eaten meals there, and one of the beds appeared to have been slept in not long before the bodies had been discovered. In addition, it was found that all of the cattle and livestock were well fed and had recently eaten, which was an odd finding seeing as everyone who typically cared for them had been dead for nearly a week. In fact, none of the animals on the farm had been harmed in any way. The dog, which was found barking in the barn, had been patiently tied up by whoever had killed the family and was shaken but otherwise healthy. This information left investigators rather puzzled, as it implied that whoever had killed the family had done their dark deed and then stayed around for several days feeding the cattle and making themselves at home before fleeing the scene. Why would anyone do that? Nobody knew.

The baffled police went about struggling to find a motive, but came up with more mysteries. At first it was presumed that the motive must have been pure and simple robbery. After all, the Grubers were a very wealthy family and it was not uncommon to find vagrants and thieves in the general area, however, although some paper money had been taken off of the corpses, a significant amount of gold coins and valuable jewelry had been untouched. Surely someone with robbery in mind who had stuck around the farm for days after the murders would have uncovered these valuables? Curiously, it was found that Viktoria had emptied her bank account a few weeks previously and left a 700 goldmark donation to her church for what she’d called “missionary work,” but the rest of her money was unaccounted for. It was not known if this had any connection to the murders, and so it remained merely an odd detail.

The maid’s room

Police then started to suspect that the murders had been a crime of passion. Suspicion fell on a man by the name of Lorenz Schlittenbauer who had been a suitor of Viktoria’s. Viktoria had always claimed to the end that Josef had been Schlittenbauer’s son, but since everyone in the village thought that Josef had been the result of an incestuous affair between Andreas Gruber and Viktoria, it was believed that Schlittenbauer could have lashed out in a jealous fit of rage. It also could have been to escape alimony payments, because it later came to light that Viktoria had been on the verge of suing Schlittenbauer for this right before the murders. Since he had been remarried and with another child at that point, who had sadly died at a young age, having to pay for alimony payments for a child he couldn’t even be certain was really his when his own had died may have been a trigger for the violence.

Other weird little details also seemed to point to Schlittenbauer’s involvement. First off, he just so happened to be one of the members of the original search party who had gone to the farm to look for the Gruber’s after they had gone missing. While he had been there, it was reported that the dog tied up in the barn had taken a particular dislike to Schlittenbauer, and had barked profusely at him the whole time he had been there. In addition, one witness said later that Schlittenbauer had seemed to be remarkably unperturbed by the sight of the bloodied bodies, and had been able to unstack the bodies in the barn without showing any sign of disgust. When he had been asked why he was disturbing the corpses before police arrived, he was reported to have said that he needed to find his boy.

Beyond such an amazing calmness in the face of such death and violence, Schlittenbauer also demonstrated a beyond normal familiarity with the farm, and was able to navigate his way round the property effortlessly, as if he had spent a lot of time there. All of this certainly raised eyebrows, and Schlittenbauer was questioned extensively by police, but in the end they simply did not have enough concrete evidence to link him to the crime and he was never arrested for it. In fact, to this day no one has ever been arrested for it.

Regardless of who actually committed the murders, there are many other unexplained features of the case. Why did the perpetrator hide out at the farm for so long before making their move? Surely the footprints and noises in the attic must have been those of the murderer, but these events were happening long before the murders took place. If the original maid who quit on the grounds of a haunting had in fact been hearing the murderer, then that would mean the culprit would have been hiding out undiscovered on the property for a full 6 months. In addition, why would the murderer stay nearly a week after the killings, have meals, and even feed the cattle? What purpose could that possibly fulfill? Nobody knows.

The Hinterkaifeck farmhouse

The bodies of the six victims were eventually buried in a graveyard in Waidhofen, without their heads since those had been sent to Munich for analysis and had never been returned. The skulls are thought to have been lost sometime during the chaos of WWII and no one is really sure what happened to them, which is a mystery in and of itself. The six headless bodies are buried alongside a memorial.

The investigation of the Hinterkaifeck murders would ultimately go on for years, with over 100 suspects questioned, without getting police any closer to solving the mystery, and the case has become one of Germany’s most enduring unsolved mysteries. To this day, not a single suspect has ever been apprehended for the crimes. Police got so desperate that at one point they even hired clairvoyants to handle the skulls of the murder victims, to know effect. Over the years, the mysterious murders have become fertile grounds for amateur sleuths to debate and pick apart the case in their search for answers, much like the Jack the Ripper case has stimulated similar ongoing analysis. Many theories from the rational to the fringe have been put forward to try and get a grip on the mystery.

One idea was that Viktoria’s ex-husband, Karl Gabriel, carried out the murders. Although Gabriel had supposedly been killed in the trenches of World War I, his body had never actually been found and had ever received a proper burial, so it was speculated that he may have come back for his wife. Upon hearing of Viktoria’s incestuous relationship with her father and of her involvement with Schlittenbauer, he could have snapped and murdered them all in a crime of passion. This theory was fueled by the reports of two people who came forward claiming to have met a Russian soldier after WWII who had claimed to be the “Hinterkaifeck Killer.” It has been speculated that he originally faked his death to be free of his wife, but had changed his mind and come back only to be less than pleased with what awaited him at home.

Others have pointed to the seemingly paranormal elements of the case, such as the ghosts reported by the original maid on the farm, as well as the strange noises heard by Gruber himself, the mysterious newspaper, and the inexplicable footprints in the snow. In light of these details, there are those who think the culprit was no man at all, but rather some kind of vengeful supernatural force that had set its sights on the family.

The puzzling case poses so many questions and unexplained mysteries, and to this day it is no closer to being solved than it was back in 1922. For its part, the Munich Police Department has on occasion reopened the case. It did so in both 1996 and again in 2007, but on both occasions ran into nothing but dead ends. The police have said that it is likely that the case will never be solved, since so many years have passed, the evidence is scarce or has been lost over the years, witnesses and suspects have died, and because the investigative techniques of those days were fairly primitive, resulting in incomplete records and evidence. That doesn’t stop amateurs from trying, and debate and discussion on the murders is likely to continue for many years to come.

In Germany, the case of the Hinterkaifeck murders has become legendary, and is the subject of several books and movies. The farm itself is long gone, having been demolished in 1923 by villagers unhappy with having such a monument to death and horror still standing in the vicinity. All that stands there now is a monument and the memories and ghosts of those events pervading the quiet trees amongst which a truly terrible crime unfolded all those years ago. It seems that it is a very real possibility that those trees will remain the only ones to know what really transpired here.

[MIKA27]

Should We Get Excited About a Space Taxi?

So NASA has picked Boeing and SpaceX to take astronauts to and from the International Space Station. This should make Boeing investors happy and PayPal founder/Tesla CEO/Space X CEO Elon Musk even richer. Not to mention Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, the company working with Boeing to develop a new American-built rocket engine. Good for them. Is there any reason the rest of us should get excited about a space taxi?

Elon Musk and his Dragon V2.

Yes, NASA was paying Russia $71 million per seat to send astronauts to the space station. The new “hotly contested” government contract (I believe using those four words together constitutes an oxymoron) is for $6.8 billion – and we know that government expenditures never go down. Yes, the situation in Ukraine and wherever else Vladimir Putin points his nose makes dealing with any Russian government organizations questionable. On the other hand, isn’t space the one place where we should be able to put aside our differences and work with Russia, China, India, Europe and any anyone else with a slingshot big enough to fling stuff into orbit?

The announcement by NASA administrator Charles Bolden sounds a little too jingoistic. USA! USA!

Today we are one step closer to launching our astronauts from US soil on American spacecraft and ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia by 2017.

Then there’s the spacecraft itself – the so-called “space taxi.” I’ve ridden in taxis in major cities around the world and that description, like riding in Earth-bound cabs, makes me nauseous. After 60-plus years in space, is this the best we can do? It’s not even close to the one in “The Fifth Element.”

Yes, I know there are plenty of other things we ought to be spending money on. There are also plenty of other things we SHOULDN’T be spending our money on. We love to speculate on what’s secretly happening at places like Area 51. How boring and depressing it will be if we find out it’s just more weaponry.

Space travel should be a quest, not a profit center. It belongs on the front page, the science page and the education page, not the business page.

Your thoughts?

[MIKA27]

Daring new search of ancient Antikythera wreck begins today

The Antikythera wreck in the Aegean Sea is a world-famous underwater archaeological site thrown into the spotlight in 1900 when researchers discovered an incredible mechanical device, now known as the Antikythera mechanism, which dates back more than 2,000 years.

The device consists of a complex combination of gears that took decades for scientists to decipher. Archaeologists suspect that there is much more to be found within the Antikythera wreck and today, a daring new mission is being launched to re-examine the wreck, which lies at an extreme diving depth of 120 metres.

The Antikythera mechanism is a metallic device which consists of at least 30 different types of gears, and on the mechanism’s door plates are about 2,000 letters that are considered to be something like a usage manual. One word stands out clearly: ΚΟΣΜΟΥ, meaning “cosmos”.

The amazing device is so complex that many consider it to be the first human-made analogue computer.

After decades of research, scientists were able to determine that it shows the positions of the sun, moon, and planets as they move through the zodiac, predicts solar and lunar eclipses, and even marked key events such as the Pan-Hellenic games. The discovery of this unique form of ancient technology has led researchers to wonder what else may lie within the shipwreck, which sits off the Greek island of Antikythera.

Left: The original Antikythera mechanism (Wikipedia). Right: A reconstruction of the mechanism

Over the decades, divers have attempted to investigate the ancient shipwreck, however, the dangerous conditions of the submerged vessel have so far prevented researchers exploring the site fully. The wreck is located at an extreme depth, resulting in the death of one diver and others being paralyzed from decompression sickness.

Subsequent attempts more recently have led to more discoveries, including finely carved bronze and marble statues, glassware, jewellery, and coins, but time constraints have prevented a thorough study of the wreck. However, thanks to advancements in technology, the search of the Antikythera wreck can now finally continue.

“Today an assembly of archaeologists and divers sets out with hungry hearts to finish the job,” writes the Daily Telegraph. “It won’t be an easy task. And they have only a month to do it in.”

Earlier this year, marine archaeologists with the American Museum of Natural History came up with an ingenious solution to the challenges posed by the depth of the wreck – they will use a high-tech exosuit developed by Nuytco research, which allows divers to descend to 300 metres for hours at a time without the need for decompressing upon returning to the surface.

The exosuit, which is made mostly of aluminium, works like a submarine. It has 1.6 horsepower thrusters, an oxygen replenishment system, LED lights, cameras, and is tethered to the surface with a fiber optic gigabit Ethernet that allows for two-way communications, a live video feed, and monitoring of the suit and its wearer.

The newly designed exosuit, which will be used to explore the Antikythera wreck

The new expedition will dig underneath the original wreck, as well as further explore the debris trail that extends up to 150 metres from the ship. Along with more of the mechanism, Dr James Hunter, a research fellow with the South Australian Maritime Museum, is hoping to find preserved traces of fabric and food. “The artefacts are important, but it’s what they tell us about the people who made and used them that matters most,” he said.

Brendan Foley, co-director of field operations at WHOI's Deep Submergence Laboratory, believes that the Antikythera shipwreck still holds many secrets and the suit will help find them. A preliminary survey last year showed artefacts scattered over an area 50 metres by 10 metres, and even revealed a previously unknown shipwreck alongside the first one.

"We have feet, arms and the crest of a warrior's helmet from statues recovered in 1900 – maybe we'll get lucky and find the rest of them," says Foley. "But for me, the mechanism is what sets this wreck apart. It's the questions it opens up about the history of science and technology that fire my imagination."

“Was it a treasure ship making a delivery to an expectant king or high priest? Was it a loot ship, carrying the spoils of a distant war? Or was it a salvage barge lugging away the discarded, unfashionable luxuries from a rich estate for recycling?” writes the Daily Telegraph in a special feature article on this incredible expedition.

Hopefully, in a little more than a month, we will know the answer.

[MIKA27]

The Lost Forest World of the World’s Largest Cave

In this technologically advanced age of Google Earth and ever expanding exploration of our planet, there are fewer and fewer places that remain hidden from the gaze of humankind. We are exploring the forests, mountains, and seas of the world at an ever growing pace, and the ancient places that once lied in pristine remoteness beyond our grasp are being uncovered for all to see. But what of under our feet? What of the lost realms of the deep places of the world? In the case on one massive cave in Vietnam, a lost, prehistoric world sat hidden for millions of years deep under the forest floor until pure happenstance started our first steps into a place that time forgot.

In 1991, a local farmer by the name of Ho Khanh was walking along a stretch of lush forest within the heart of the Phong Nha Ke Bang National Park in Quang Binh province, near the border between Laos and Vietnam. It was an area that he had passed many times before and he was not paying any particular attention to his surroundings when suddenly the jungle floor opened up beneath him and Mr. Khanh only barely managed to hold on as the ground crumbled beneath him. When he was able to get his bearings, he peered into the gaping chasm that had suddenly appeared out of the thick foliage and saw that there was now a steep drop where he had stood that descended down into darkness. By pure chance and blind luck, this man had discovered an entrance that had remained hidden from man for millions of years into what would turn out to be the largest cave in the world, a behemoth five times larger than the largest known cave at the time.

World’s largest cave.

For years the entrance remained unexplored. Locals were afraid to go near it, partly because of the dauntingly steep drop, and partly because of the strange roaring sounds that bellowed out from its depths, later found to be caused by a raging river far below. In addition, there was an eerie mist that seeped out of the cave, a phenomenon caused by the cooler air below meeting the hot jungle air above, which gave the area a surreal, unearthly atmosphere. All of these things conspired to deter the superstitious locals from entering, and so the cave mouth remained unexplored and untouched, just as it had been for countless millennia.

It was not until 2009 that members of the British Cave Research Association undertook an expedition to penetrate into the mysterious jungle cavern and explore the darkness below. By that time the man who originally had found it no longer even remembered exactly where it was, so the team had to ascertain its position from what he could recall and from other locals, who still feared it. It was to be the beginning of a breathtaking journey into an ancient, forgotten realm that no human being had ever set foot in.

Son Doong Cave

The expedition, led by Howard and Deb Limbert, began their descent in April of 2009. The first thing that became quickly apparent was the sheer, enormous scale of the place. Using ropes and harnesses, the team rappelled down a 260 foot vertical drop before they finally reached the bottom, where the thick, absolute silence of the place was said to be almost deafening. An investigation of the surroundings showed that the cave was largely formed of limestone, which had been eroded from under the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam between 2 to 5 million years ago. Upon reaching the bottom, the team did not get far before they came up against a 200 foot wall of muddy calcite, which they called “The Great Wall of Vietnam,” that prevented any further progress.

In 2010, the frustrated team was finally able to traverse the enormous wall and continue their journey. What they found within thoroughly amazed all present; an alien world the likes of which none of the experienced cavers had ever seen. The cave, now known as Son Doong Cave, or “the cave of the mountain river” was far larger than anyone had ever imagined. The largest cavern stretched for over 5 km (about 3 miles), was 650 feet wide, and had walls that soared upwards over 200 m (656 feet), high enough to comfortably fit a modern day skyscraper.

Son Doong Cave. That little speck with the light is a person.

Jutting from this immense cavern were stalagmites and stalactites that were up to 80 meters (265 ft) long, some of the largest in the world. Along the Great Wall of Vietnam were scattered abnormally huge “cave pearls” as big as baseballs, which are formed when dripping water forms layers of calcite around grains of sand over hundreds of years. There were also various rimstone pools dotting the cavern and even a lake. Throughout this mystical landscape meandered a river that ran the length of the cavern and disappeared into the unknown darkness of other caves that branched off from the main one. In all, it was found that the main cavern branched out into a network of over 150 individual, interconnected caves.

The biggest surprise to be found here was a massive forest growing undisturbed deep in the heart of the cavern among the stalagmites and stalactites, a feature not normally associated with the subterranean recesses of caves. Sections of the cavern’s ceiling had eroded away over millennia and collapsed, becoming gigantic windows that allowed columns of sunlight to penetrate into the darkness, illuminating a huge section of the cave and allowing ancient trees up to 30 m high (100 feet) to thrive here. This lush vegetation that blanketed the cave floor thrummed with life, hosting a plethora of wildlife from the outside world, including insects, rare birds such as the chestnut-necklaced partridge and the short-tailed scimitar babbler, snakes, lizards, monkeys, bats, flying foxes, and numerous species of butterfly, as well as an unknown number of as yet undiscovered new species.

Approaching the jungle of Son Doong cave. Again, those little red specks along the bottom are people.

Currently, Son Doong cave is recognized as being the world’s largest cave by far, much larger than the previous title holder, Malaysia’s Deer Cave. The main cavern is so large that it has its own climate, and clouds have even been known to form within it. It is massive enough to house an entire city block, high enough to hold 40 story high skyscrapers, and those who have been here describe being truly humbled by the sheer scale of this place.

The lost world of Son Doong cave still has its mysteries, and much of the cave system remains unexplored. Perhaps one of the most exciting areas of further exploration lies in the prospect of finding new species of plants and animals here. The animals of the cave can generally be categorized into two types; those that live in the forested area and those that dwell in the inky black recesses of the enclosed areas. Already several new species have been discovered here, including several species of plant and insect, as well as a new type of gecko, a tree frog, and a striped hare. Since only a very few expeditions have attempted to catalog species within the cave, there are undoubtedly more to be found. There have been several species that have been spotted that have not been identified as of yet, including a possibly new type of monkey, and mysterious creatures have been seen skittering through cave passages and even swimming through the river and lake here. One of the only scientists to have studied the dark interior passages of the cave, German biologist Anette Becher, described spotting a myriad of as yet unknown fish, insects, and millipedes within the gloom, many of them albino and sightless. It seems that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of the biodiversity that may lie here waiting to be discovered.

Part of Son Doong’s forest

Other mysteries of Son Doong cave include the source of the underground river that runs through the cave and an only recently discovered side cave that is full of rare and undescribed fossils, many of them very large and some of them dated as being around 300 million years old. The original team to explore Son Doong has plans to launch another extensive expedition in order to further investigate the many mysteries of the caves.

In 2013, the first steps towards opening the lost world of Son Doong began when the tour company Oxalis began offering adventurous souls the chance to spend several days camping and exploring within the cave’s massive interior. The first expeditions are pilot tours, with the company planning to expand the tours in the future. The excursions are not for the faint of heart. In order to reach the cave, one must trek through remote jungle wilderness to the entrance of the cave, upon which a several hundred foot sheer vertical drop awaits. Only after after rappelling down the perilous face of the cliff will one finally be able to look upon this vast, mysterious world. Those who have seen the cave say that the sheer scale of the it is hard to comprehend without seeing it in person, and that it is difficult to describe in words how humbling and awe inspiring the experience is.

Rappelling into Son Doong

With tours such as this underway and yet more to be planned, it seems that just as with other lost and hidden places of the world, the caves of Son Doong too will have there mysteries slowly peeled away for all to see. For now, though, it is still a place of wonder and awe, and is still largely unexplored. What lies here awaiting to be discovered in the gargantuan cave’s many dark passages and within the ancient trees of its misty, sun pierced subterranean forests? There is much left to learn about this vast, lost cave world, and much exploration left to do before we even begin to fully understand this fascinating natural wonder. Son Doong has not given up all of its mysteries just yet.

The discovery of Son Doong also poses another question. What other lost places remain out there for us to find? It is exciting to think that right here on our own planet there may be whole new vast, alien realms, even new ecosystems, hidden away from us, waiting to be discovered. Or perhaps maybe they will never be discovered, and will remain untouched by human hands as they have for millions of years and will for millions more. Whatever the case may be, even as the modern world seems to become ever smaller, it appears that there are still surprises locked away within this planet of ours.

[MIKA27]

That Fireball Over The US Was Just A Russian Spy Satellite

Relax, guys. That fireball from a few weeks ago? You know, the “rocks with glowing red and orange streaks” that everyone noticed one night? Experts agree it was just a Russian spy satellite breaking up over the Rockies. Everything’s fine, nothing to see here.

The fireball was seen the night of September 2, according to dozens of reports from around Colorado, New Mexico, and Montana, seen on this American Meteorological Society and Spaceflight101 map. Today, the AP published a report from a number of experts who all say it was part of a Russian satellite designed to shoot images and send them back to Earth. The AP helpfully lays out this news in a question/answer format, starting with Wait, Russia is still spying on us?!, to which experts answered “duh:”

Yes. They’re basically spying on the same things they kept an eye on during the Cold War, said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. “Deployed hardware, aeroplanes, ships, tanks, factories, new intelligence facilities, all that stuff,” he said. The satellites are looking for targets for their nuclear weapons, Pike said. “They’re looking for the same things that our spy satellites are looking for.”

That’s really no huge surprise, in reality. We have hundreds of satellites, Russia has also has hundreds, and the rest of the world is launching more every day. According to Russian news and Spaceflight101, this particular satellite was called Kosmos 2495, and was similar in design to this craft:

But the news is especially interesting in light of growing tensions between Russia and the US right now. In fact, Russia even commented on the explosion — giving possibly the sassiest response possible to a Russian news agency:

One can only guess about the condition representatives of the so-called American Meteor Society were in when they identified a luminescent phenomenon high up in the sky as a Russian military satellite.

In other words, Russia just told America to go home — you’re drunk.

[MIKA27]

The Brilliant Plan To Build A Gondola From Williamsburg To Manhattan

Williamsburg has a problem. The neighbourhood’s become so popular so quickly that some fear local infrastructure will buckle under the exploding population. Anybody who’s ridden the L train lately knows this problem all too well. But that’s nothing a few crazy people and a gondola can’t solve.

The East River Skyway is a plan to connect Williamsburg and the Lower East Side with a gondola system that could shuttle over 5,000 people in either direction per hour. The trip would take just four minutes and would create zero emissions. Eventually, the plan calls for additional phases to add skyways between Midtown, through Queens and down to Williamsburg as well as a line that would stretch from Brooklyn Navy Yard, through Dumbo and over to the South Street Sea Port. Just imagine the views!

This gondola idea’s starting to sound pretty good, huh? Well, here’s the real kicker: It’s super cheap, at least compared to expanding the train system. It can cost a city about $US400 million per mile to run a subway line underground, according to Michael McDaniel, who’s helping to design a gondola plan for Austin. By contrast, the aerial ropeways needed to run a gondola cost as little as $US3 million to install per mile. Apartments in Williamsburg cost more than that these days.

Urban gondolas are actually becoming a bit of a trend. Austin is looking at installing a 35-mile-long gondola system called “The Wire” to connect its downtown. Portland, Oregon already built one back in 2007 to connect its downtown with a nearby university. Gondolas are also all the rage in Latin America, with an ever-expanding system in La Paz, Bolivia, systems in Caracas and Rio de Janeiro, a couple in Colombia, and one more planned for Santiago, Chile.

Oh and guess what? New York City already has a gondola. The plan for an East River Skyway is actually built on the success of the Roosevelt Island Tram, which the city renovated in 2010. Demand for that skyway will only increase as Cornell finishes building its satellite campus on Roosevelt Island in a few years.

It’s unclear how far along the East River Skyway plan is, but it’s important to highlight that it is just a plan. The project designers are currently building support from locals and surely enjoying some exposure in the press. Of course, this is a long game for them, as they’re eying the Domino Sugar Factory project as an impetus to build the skyway. That project is decades away from completion.

By that point in time, scrambling for the L train will have certainly reached Snowpiercer levels of fierceness. Anyone who’s waited for more than three overstuffed trains to pass by, unable to hold any more passengers, during their morning commute will tell you that this is not a pleasant problem. A skyway sounds like a delightful solution. Plus, what could be hipper than taking a gondola to work?

[MIKA27]

Why Military Tech (Sometimes) Doesn't Evolve

Consider the SR-71 Blackbird. It was meant to be used as a high altitude, high velocity recon aircraft. It was, and still is, one of the USAir Force’s greatest accomplishments, technologically speaking.

Military technology, like any other technology, becomes outdated when newer systems improve upon them greatly, either in capability or in resource requirements to use and equip, or are rendered irrelevant by other technologies and techniques.

The Blackbird was really expensive though and had its limitations. Many of these were solved by the U2.

The U2 provided many of the same capabilities and filled the role of the SR-71 without quite as a heavy cost. Though it was technologically inferior in many ways to the SR-71, it was a much more efficient way to get the same job done. Particularly interesting, though, was the fact that the U2 was older than the Sr-71, but improvements in the Blackbird’s also ended up improving the U2′s performance to the point that it actually became the superior plane for the job, economically speaking.

Of course, now aeroplanes are being replaced altogether for many recon missions.

This is the RQ-4A Global Hawk. It is one of the best UAV reconnaissance vehicles in the world, and it outperforms the U2 in many ways. More than offering minimal risk for the pilot, it can stay in the air far longer than any human piloted plane could ever hope to.

Now, the Global Hawk is improving on the U2 for a better strategic fit in the area of aerial reconnaissance. Of course, there are now fewer and fewer improvements being made in piloting mechanisms, and because those technologies aren’t being improved, they’re instead becoming obsolete.

Of course, there is no reason that a weapon system has to be shelved. Some very old systems are still in use today.

This is the M2 Browning .50 calibre machine gun. It’s a monster, and to be perfectly honest, wildly fun to shoot.

Especially considering it is an almost unchanged weapons system since first being built in 1933. In other words, what you see above is practically the same weapon — almost identical in operation.

The key feature about the weapon is that it still fulfils its role of being a heavy weapon used for taking down mechanised units, vehicles, and fortified locations. None of those basic defenses have advanced to a point that the weapon doesn’t still work against it. The weapon is relatively cheap compared to other newer versions that might replace it. It’s also pretty easy to use, so long as you remember headspace and timing; that could be better, but besides that, the weapon hasn’t need a change since your Great Grandfather used it back in Germany.

You would think that it would be better by now, but honestly, it was a great system to start off with, and there is very little that could economically do a better job. At least for now.

Then there are those technologies that never truly reached the height of their potential, so to speak. Instead, they were simply rendered strategically unfit by technologies in other areas.

The Zeppelin was a beautiful machine. As a wartime weapon it was cutting edge at its time. It wasn’t that it was really worse at its job than other alternatives. It’s just that as soon as rocketry and attack aeroplanes became prevalent, the zeppelin was done for. Technologies not really related to them made them irrelevant in warfare because they simply couldn’t defend themselves. Want another example?

For thousands of years castles made perfect sense. Then some guys found out that you could stick some powder in an iron tube, stuff some more iron in there, toss in a bit of fire, and boom (literally) — those, walls which have evolved over the course of thousands of years, have just been outdated by a non-competing technology that fundamentally changed the landscape of warfare.

To answer the question simply: The number of years since a technology has been replaced doesn’t matter. The questions that do matter are:

• Is the mission/role of the weapon still relevant?
• Does it outperform other competitors?
• All things equal, is option A more or less logistically practical than option B?

At the point where a new technology either outperforms an older one completely, or that other technologies make the weapons system completely useless, then that tech is considered outdated.

[MIKA27]

30 Minutes Of Bloodborne Gameplay Footage

As an unabashed fan of From Software and the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne is probably my most anticipated game of 2015. This 30 minute gameplay demo has done nothing to quench the ratcheting hype flowing through my veins. Goddammit. 2015 can’t come soon enough.

Interestingly enough, Bloodborne does seem to make some interesting shifts from the Dark Souls formula. Despite being a massive fan of Dark Souls, it’s these deviations that interest me most. There appears to a little less focus on the idea of defending yourself with some sort of shield and more focus on movement. The game appears to move with a little more speed and there’s more emphasis on flow. I’m interested to see how this affects Bloodborne. From Software games tend to have a very distinct feel. It looks like that feel has been retained here but it’s definitely been tweaked.

And that atmosphere. More than any other developer, From Software really know how to combine sound and an incredible eye for detail, resulting in some of the most densely atmospheric games ever made.

[MIKA27]

Chile police arrest three over Santiago subway bomb

Officials in Chile say they have arrested three people thought to be behind a bomb attack in the capital Santiago.

The bombing, earlier this month, targeted a shopping centre connected to a subway station and injured 14 people.

Interior and Security Minister Rodrigo Penailillo said police had arrested two men and a woman.

The attack is one of the worst since democracy was restored in 1990.

There have been around 200 bomb attacks in Santiago in the past decade, with anarchist groups claiming responsibility for many of them.

No one admitted carrying out the latest attack.

Police said the homemade explosive device went off on 8 September at lunchtime in an underground shopping area at the Escuela Militar station.

Officials said about 150,000 people pass through the station daily.

Chilean President Michelle Bachele called the attack a "terrorist act, one of the most cowardly we have seen".

The police operation that led to the arrests in the La Pintana neighbourhood of the capital comes as two days of celebrations get under way for Chile's independence day.

[MIKA27]

BREITLING COCKPIT B50 WATCH

Fighting gravity to fly through the air is serious business. Thus most pilots demand a serious timepiece. One like the Breitling Cockpit B50 Watch. Powered by an analog and digital-display SuperQuartz movement developed specifically for aviation, this watch not only tracks the time, but offers an electronic tachometer, dual LCD screens, a titanium 46mm case, a perpetual calendar, a bidirectional, compass scale bezel, a rechargeable battery, and a "chrono flight" mode that records flight times while memorizing departure and arrival times, along with the date. It's almost like wearing a black box on your wrist.

[MIKA27]

Where the Birds Go to Die

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly mysterious or significant about the village of Jatinga, India. Indeed the locale is beautiful, with lush forests and scenic mountain views, and Jatinga itself is a fairly small, rural town of about 2,500 people that is for the most part just the same as any other village in the area. Yet once a year, this rural hamlet becomes the setting of a bizarre mass death of birds that has for the most part gone largely unexplained.

The phenomenon occurs every year just after monsoon season in the months of September and October. During this time, just after sunset and typically on dark, moonless nights between the hours of 6:30 and 10 o’clock, flocks of birds representing numerous different species mysteriously congregate here in large numbers and plummet to their deaths. The birds circle spasmodically and violently crash into the ground, trees, and buildings, littering the ground with hundreds of smashed, broken bodies in a frenzy of flapping wings and death. Some of the dazed birds who survive crashing will get back up and promptly dash themselves against something again. Mostly the birds seem to fixate and hone in on light sources, such as house lights and torches, before crashing to their doom. Interestingly, the birds always come swooping in from the North, and only to a very well defined small strip of land that measures a mere 1.5 km (0.9 miles) long and 200 meters (656 feet) wide.

Dead bird at Jatinga

In total, around 44 species of bird, both migratory and local species, join in the mass death. In addition to the sheer amount of species joining in on the confusion and carnage, there is also the puzzling fact that many of the species present are known to be diurnal, meaning that they should not even be active at the times these deaths occur at. Puzzled scientists who have looked into the phenomenon have said that the incident is not really suicide in that it does not appear that the birds are doing this intentionally, but are rather disoriented due to factors that are still not totally understood.

The mass bird death of Jatinga was first observed in the early 1900s by the Zeme Nagas, a tribe native to the area. The tribe was badly frightened by the phenomenon, and believing it to be the work of angry gods, sold their land in 1905. Many villagers since then have often blamed evil spirits for plucking the birds from the sky and hurling them to their deaths. Many of the villagers believed that the birds themselves were the evil spirits, and took to hunting the birds down to mercilessly beat them to death with bamboo poles.

Evil spirits or not, it probably doesn’t hurt that many of the species that die are considered to be local delicacies. To this day the disoriented birds that do not immediately die or get up to smack into something again are actively slaughtered by stick wielding villagers. Many villagers even set up bright lights in an effort to lure the birds in so they can be captured and eaten.

For years the mass bird deaths at Jatinga have baffled both villagers and ornithologists alike, and a variety of theories have been put forth in an effort to try and figure out what is going on here. One idea is that monsoon fog, combined with high altitudes and strong winds, disorients the birds and leads them to hone in on light sources in an effort to stabilize their flight, causing them to crash into various obstacles in the process. Another theory is that weather changes during the season are having some effect on the magnetic fields of the area, making the birds’ instinctive navigational abilities go haywire. In addition, at least for the migratory species represented among the dead, it has been shown that these birds often lose their habitats due to monsoon flooding and then make a mad beeline past Jatinga in their efforts to escape.

These are all perfectly rational and valid theories, but many mysteries remain. For instance, it is not really known why so many species, including non-migratory local ones, amass here simultaneously at that particular time of day and at that particular time of year. No one really knows why the birds should so maniacally focus on lights the way they do to such a deadly extent during the event either. It is also a mystery as to why the birds only ever descend upon the same small strip of land, and nowhere else, every single time. Lights placed in areas outside of this delineated zone of death have failed to attract the birds, even at the height of the phenomenon. In addition, ornithologists are puzzled as to why diurnal birds should suddenly appear here at night to join in the mass killing. The eminent Indian ornithologist, the late Salim Ali, once said:

The most puzzling thing to me about this phenomenon is that so many species of diurnal resident birds should be on the move when, by definition, they should be fast asleep. The problem deserves a deeper scientific study from various angles

The mass bird deaths do have some positive effects. The influx of wildlife enthusiasts, ornithologists, and just plain curious visitors coming to witness the phenomenon for themselves during the monsoon season has been great for tourism in the area. In 2010, the village even started a festival to coincide with the bird deaths called the Jatinga Festival, and there have been various hotel projects undertaken in the area to cater to the guests. The villagers themselves are also always eager to get some fresh, delicious birds for dinner.

What lies at the heart of this mystery? If anyone is so inclined to visit and see for themselves, be warned that the nearest airport is 350 km away from the village, after which one must undergo a perilous, albeit gorgeous, trek through dense jungles and hills via unkept roads and rickety bridges that are sometimes over a century old. For many willing to make the journey, it is worth it to gaze upon and ponder this macabre modern mystery.

[Habana Mike]

It's the avian Bermuda Triangle!

[Maplepie]

It's the avian Bermuda Triangle!

give them Polkamusik and i'd call it Thanksgiving!

[CanuckSARTech]

Mika and others....

Been a while since I've been through this thread. Some great info and interesting articles!!!!

Question though....

Looking to get rid of the laptop moving to and from work and home, and moving instead back to the desktop computer at home, and then an iPad for e-mail / web browsing when on the go up at work. I'm set on getting an iPad - other suggestions aren't necessary on that front, as I'm not looking at a Windows Surface or Android tablet.

But I'm wondering...

Get the iPad Air now, or wait for the expected revamp in the iPad Air 2 which is looking to drop at the end of October? My wife and I both have iPhones (both 4, but we're looking to get those updated this week to the 5S - do not like the new 6 / 6+ at ALL!), and my wife's had an IPad Air since this past March or so.

For my use, it'd be lots of Netflix, e-mail, web browsing (Tapatalk / FOH, and BlogSpot, eBay, CBC News, etc.). Lots of contact and e-mail syncing between the desktop computer (running Microsoft Office 2010, as I much prefer Outlook for my e-mail/contacts/calendar client). Would set it all up to sync and update back and forth to the desktop computer at home when I'm back in that wifi hub.

[Optic101]

Mika and others....

Been a while since I've been through this thread. Some great info and interesting articles!!!!

Question though....

Looking to get rid of the laptop moving to and from work and home, and moving instead back to the desktop computer at home, and then an iPad for e-mail / web browsing when on the go up at work. I'm set on getting an iPad - other suggestions aren't necessary on that front, as I'm not looking at a Windows Surface or Android tablet.

But I'm wondering...

Get the iPad Air now, or wait for the expected revamp in the iPad Air 2 which is looking to drop at the end of October. My wife and I both have iPhones (both 4, but we're looking to get those updated this week to the 5S), and my wife's had an IPad Air since this past March or so.

For my use, it'd be lots of Netflix, e-mail, web browsing (Tapatalk / FOH, and BlogSpot, eBay, CBC News, etc.). Lots of contact and e-mail syncing between the desktop computer (running Microsoft Office 2010, as I much prefer Outlook for my e-mail/contacts/calendar client). Would set it all up to sync and update back and forth to the desktop computer at home when I'm back in that wifi hub.

If an update/upgrade is available I would always go for the latest model.

iPad and iPhone.

Here there is not much difference in price and I try to skip 2-3 versions, therefore always the newest one.

[MIKA27]

Mika and others....

Been a while since I've been through this thread. Some great info and interesting articles!!!!

Question though....

Looking to get rid of the laptop moving to and from work and home, and moving instead back to the desktop computer at home, and then an iPad for e-mail / web browsing when on the go up at work. I'm set on getting an iPad - other suggestions aren't necessary on that front, as I'm not looking at a Windows Surface or Android tablet.

But I'm wondering...

Get the iPad Air now, or wait for the expected revamp in the iPad Air 2 which is looking to drop at the end of October? My wife and I both have iPhones (both 4, but we're looking to get those updated this week to the 5S - do not like the new 6 / 6+ at ALL!), and my wife's had an IPad Air since this past March or so.

For my use, it'd be lots of Netflix, e-mail, web browsing (Tapatalk / FOH, and BlogSpot, eBay, CBC News, etc.). Lots of contact and e-mail syncing between the desktop computer (running Microsoft Office 2010, as I much prefer Outlook for my e-mail/contacts/calendar client). Would set it all up to sync and update back and forth to the desktop computer at home when I'm back in that wifi hub.

Hi Keith - Always great to see and hear from you mate.

If I were you, I'd go with the Air now. Whilst I don't have the Air, my wife does and it is a brilliant device. Seeing the newer version is on its way, you may get a better deal on the current model.

The iPhone 4 IMO was the best iPhone released EVER.

Mate, do yourself a favour and grab a bigger screen if you can. I went from the iPhone 4S to an Android (I know you don't like them) and I would never go back to a standard sized screen. You should probably take a closer look at the new iPhone 6 and see how it is in your hand. Otherwise, yes, 5S is a good mobile phone.

A lot of people are ditching their PC's over mobile devices these days, I still keep my laptop but do tend to use the tablets and mobiles more often.