Being a dwarf in Manila can be a rough life. Many desk jobs have height restrictions, leaving an underclass of little people who find gigs singing, wrestling or stripping for tourist dollars. But one bold pioneer seeks to build a refuge for dwarves like himself, he wants to build a little people only colony…
Being free from this constant abuse, says Doron, is the reason why he and about 30 other dwarves are planning to establish a colony.
An investor has donated 16,000 sq m of land near Manila, though the fields still have to be cleared, the houses built, and the businesses started.
But money is tight, and Doron hopes that local politicians will help with funding and that the colony will one day become a tourist hotspot.
So-called dwarf towns have existed in the past – in Coney Island at the turn of the century and more recently in Kunming, China – but not everyone agrees that they help in the long run.
Doron imagines it to be tourist hot spot playing off the natural fascination many Filipinos have for dwarves. For now though, Doron must continue working his day job as a bartender at a popular dwarf bar The Hobbit House.
It is the dawning of the computer age and anything is possible. Computations are reduced to milliseconds, data which previously required warehouses and staffs for maintenance can now be stored and sorted with ease and in Santiago, Chile a few very ambitious fellows assumed that these breakthroughs could solve a larger problem.
They were going to take the Chilean economy out of the greedy hands of humans and the capitalist influences that corrupt them.
After Salvador Allende was elected as the first socialist president in the country’s history, he began to nationalize large chucks on the economy including local branches of out-of-state corporations. Many companies that were not nationalized, fled Chile leaving infrastructure (machinery, warehouse space, trucks, employees) behind for the government to take over.
The room you see above was HQ to Cybersyn, a project designed by British research scientist Stafford Beer where telex machines fed raw data into a custom designed program which would in turn create projections and issue guidance on further production and distribution to the newly nationalized factory. It was all controlled in the room pictured above. Boxy, plastic swivel chairs which one could easily picture a subordinate to Admiral Ackbar toiling away in dot the center while glowing panels displaying data ring the walls.
Problem was, by all accounts, it didn’t work. While some declare it to be a forgotten, neglected seed that could have flowered into an egalitarian “socialist internet,” most of the evidence states that not unlike the data display wall mounts (which were non-functioning stage props) the entire project never lived up to its lofty goals.
To put it in perspective, economist Alex Tabarrok points out that the IBM 360 units used in Cybersyn are considerably less powerful than an iPhone.
In this excellent 25-minute video essay about the Cybersyn, authors Jeremiah Axelrod and Greg Borenstein argue that the intentionally futuristic design of the control room was so effective at swaying Allende and his government into believing that the future was now and Cybersyn could be successful that it ultimately doomed the project.
When 1973 came and the military coup by Augusto Pinochet deposed Allende from office, Cybersyn was shuttered and the telex machines mothballed. As for those chairs, the world may never know.
Stephen Mabbutt was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), which is a rare condition where sounds inside the body become very loud. Aside from hearing his own eyeballs roll in his head, he could hear his own heart beating and chewing food was a deafening experience. Surgeons were able to repair the condition and the patient is doing fine.
“Eventually I could hear my heart beating and my eyes moving in their sockets. It was really distracting.”
Mr Mabbutt was referred to Martin Burton, a surgeon from the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital who helped establish the Cochrane Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders Group. A CT scan found perforations inside the semicircular canals inside Mr Mabbutt’s ear.
He was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), a rare condition discovered by American surgeon Lloyd B Minor in 1995, which is thought to only effect one in 500,000 a year in Britain.
The operation to cure the problem involved a 5cm (2in) incision behind the ear, making a channel through the bone to find the “balance organ” and using the patient’s own bone to create a seal around the defect, the BBC said.
To the uninitiated the Tardis is just a blue box with the warm, friendly, and official looking sign “Police Call Box” emblazoned, in lights, on all sides. To the fan, The Tardis is short for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space” and its way,way more than just a Blue Box. Today we will explore the most obvious and endearing quality of this most peculiar object.
The very first words uttered, muttered or mouthed by stupefied first time visitors to Dr Who’s box are, invariably, “Its bigger on the inside” to which the Doctor or a random Companion (assistant is no longer PC enough for the BBC) responds, invariably, “it’s dimensionally transcendental.”
Dimensionally Transcendental indeed. But what does that mean and is it possible? Do the laws of physics allow for that particular conceit. Well, Yes. The ridiculously Weird Science of Modern Physics allows even this far fetched premise. There are many ways to achieve this. We will explore but a few.
First, and easiest for our trusty Time Lord to achieve would be a simple, Space-Time projection. The Tardis’ interior might just be in a distant part of the universe and the doorway that connects the police box exterior might just be a straight forward, yet impossibly difficult to achieve, Einstein-Rosen Bridge, better known as a wormhole. This means that when the Tardis Materializes and dematerializes, in fact the only thing changing location, not necesarily moving, is the access point. This acces point in Space (and time) is the wormhole’s entrance in disguise as a Blue, circa 1954, Police Box. The interior of the Tardis is safely stowed away at that “undisclosed location” far, far away. The Physics of wormholes is well known and all that the Galifreyans need wrestle up is just a bit of exotic matter to keep the portal from collapsing. That should not be difficult even for the most daft of Rassilon’s brood.
Simone Allyne is the Weird Things eBook reviewer focusing on readily available, affordable Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you have a book you’d like reviewed, please email WeirdThingsMail@Gmail
Alpha Rising is a well-written story using very familiar science fiction themes that is worth your time if you’re a compulsive reader thanks to it’s can’t miss price of free.
“May 25th, 2020. Kennedy Space Center. The countdown clock’s bright yellow numerals flashed to T minus 4 hours and counting. AT 5:00 a.m., two astronauts aboard an experimental craft would lift off on the most critical and dangerous space mission ever undertaken.”
These three first sentences are incredibly telling of what is to come in Alpha Rising by G.L. Douglass.
I agree with other reviews of this book that it is well written and that the story line is very good. But if you are a hard-core Science Fiction fan you will find some of the themes very familiar. At times I found this a little frustrating, mainly because I was hoping for something new. As I was reading I recognized elements from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mission to Mars, and Star Trek. There was also a strong biblical undercurrent that pushed the story along.
The author brings good character development, so well in fact that I found one character particularly frustrating given her position at NASA. I did not like that one of the two female astronauts immediately broke down and turned into a sobbing blubbering mess. Given all the psychological testing, physical and mental training that astronauts under go, I found this to be highly unlikely behavior so soon into the story. I immediately wanted to shake her and tell her to pull herself together.
One other point of contention is with the very improbable time line this book is given. Alpha Rising was published in 2006 and the book takes place in 2020, making the space travel talked about improbable in the time frame of this book. But if you can get past that you will find the varying ideas of space travel discussed in Alpha Rising very intriguing.
Despite my issues with Alpha Rising I really enjoyed reading this book. The fast pace, good writing, believable characters, and underlying message made for a very quick enjoyable read. Just right for a summer vacation or a day at the pool.
An 80-year-old South African man was reported dead by his family and taken to the morgue where the undertaker checked his vitals and verified the death. The body was then locked up in a morgue fridge for 21 hours when he suddenly woke up and started banging on the fridge door screaming to be let out. The morgue owner and employees first thoughts were “ghost” – even though everybody knows ghosts can just ooze right through walls. So they called the cops and once the cops came with guns, they bravely entered the morgue and luckily did not kill the man again.
The real kicker is how the morgue owner, Ayanda Maqolo, reacted to the poor old man screaming to freed. Especially after his employees seemed so sure it was a ghost:
“I couldn’t believe it!” Maqolo said. “I was also scared. But they are my employees and I had to show them I wasn’t scared, so I called the police.”
After police arrived, the group entered the morgue together.
“I was glad they had their firearms, in case something wanted to fight with us,” Maqolo said.
Astronomers have discovered a reservoir containing 140 trillion times the amount of water in all the Earth’s oceans, making it the largest mass of water ever detected in the universe.
“The environment around this quasar is unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” Matt Bradford, a Caltech visiting associate and NASA scientist said in a press release. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
Thanks to Weird Things reader Jason for sending this in.
An Auckland, New Zealand railway tunnel project is on hold pending discussions that it will anger and destroy the home of Horotiu. When angered, these mythical creatures will attack humans, and in fact they are believed by some to be responsible for many road deaths.
But Horotiu, a mythical monster, put the NZ$2.6bn ($2.1bn) project in doubt after an indigenous Maori board protested that it will destroy grounds once patrolled by the taniwha (pronounced “tani-fa”).
Glenn Wilcox, a member of the Maori Statutory Board, which protects Maori interests, complained that the plan did not take into account the monster, which “was here first”.
Ranginui Walker, a respected Maori elder, said at the time: “You have to placate local demons, deities, taniwha.
Of course, the creature has now opened a Twitter account to make it easier to follow what is going on in his life.
The boys are joined by old friend Brett “The Amtrekker” Rounsaville as Justin schemes up the perfect murder plot which comes dangerously close to his interaction with one of his fellow panelists. Andrew dreams of a beautiful future where we all live on hollowed out space rocks and are delighted by it. Brian wields a razor with deadly accuracy, but will it put him on the wrong side of our new robot overlords?
Support the show by purchasing Andrew’s new book The Chronological Man: The Monster In The Mist for only 99¢ at Amazon.com by clicking the image below!
Another sinkhole has opened in Guatemala, right under a woman’s bed. While she was sleeping. The sound of a gateway to hell being opened under her bed is what woke her up.
About a million things are terrifying about this. A few feet to the side and poor Inocenta might have plunged into the sinkhole as she stepped out of bed. A few feet wider and it could have swallowed her whole bed. Or just the fact that in Guatemala, you could be walking down the street or eating at a nice restaurant one moment and find yourself devoured by the earth the next.
Wired has catalogued the worst diseases you can catch underground. They are, in no particular order:
Histoplasmosis – also known as Cave Disease or Spelunker’s Lung, is caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum and primarily affects the lungs. It is fatal if untreated, and hey, it grows in soil contaminated with bat droppings.
Rabies – Bats make up a quarter of the rabid animals reported to the CDC. Enough said.
Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever – Found in equatorial African caves, this cousin of Ebola incubates in fruit bats that live in caves and mines.
Leptospirosis – Also known as Rat Catcher’s Yellow, this is caused by infection with bacteria of the genus Leptospira which grows in water contaminated with the urine of bats and rats. Do not drink cave water.
Cave Fever – Also known as relapsing fever, this disease comes from getting bitten by infected ticks.
I think the real lesson here is that bats are filled with disease.
For a casual tourist, like the 500,000 annual visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, walking through a cave is essentially as safe as walking down the street. It is the sport cavers, those who crawl through muck and mud into little-explored crevices, that must protect themselves from things living on bats, rodents, ticks and other bugs, Igreja said.
Igreja surveys the classic and emerging cave-borne diseases in the June 10 Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. We’ve collected a gallery of the offending cave fauna, along with tips about how to keep sickness away next time you’re slithering among the stalagmites. Note: None of these diseases are exclusive to caves. Strange bugs can strike almost anywhere.
‘It’s like nothing we have ever seen, it almost looks pre-historic,’ he told the Sun.
Curled up by the foot of sand dunes was the 30ft-long body of the unidentified animal with head, tail and teeth all discernible.
Experts are now examining the pictures with one suggesting it could be the body of a whale.
A spokesman for the Natural History Museum said: ‘We have spoken to one of our mammals curators, and they have confirmed the animal is probably a long-finned pilot whale – Globicephala melas.
Scientists have announced the discovery of an entire new order of insects that has recently been excavated in South America dating from the Lower Cretaceous period, between 146 and 100 million years ago. Both adults and larval stages of the fossilized insects were found and they have been named Coxoplectoptera.
“They are believed to be a type of mayfly that is now extinct, but their appearance is perplexing as the adult wing shape is more like that of a dragonfly while the legs resemble those of a praying mantis.
Meanwhile, the larva looks like a freshwater shrimp with large antennae and multiple legs, and probably lived as ambush predators in river beds, partly buried in the mud.”
