A “super pack” of wolves, said to be 400 hundred strong, has been terrifying the Russian town of Verkhoyansk and has left more than 30 horses dead in just four days. The authorities have put together twenty four teams of hunters to try and get rid of the wolves using traps, snowmobiles, and helicopters.
“The massive group is believed to be made from hundreds of packs and has left animal experts baffled. Dr Valerius Geist, a wildlife behaviour expert, said the harsh Siberian winter – where temperatures plummet to minus 49C – had killed off the animal’s usual prey.
He said: ‘It is unusual for wolves to gather in such numbers of hunt large animal like horses. ‘However, the population of their usual prey, rabbits, has decreased this year due to lack of food, so wolves have had to change their habits.”
A: You must be a good swimmer, and should not feel uncomfortable having your face in the water from time to time. You should not have a fear of heights. You should be in good health and physical condition. You should have no history of any heart conditions and flying is not advised for women who are pregnant. You must also have good vision and be able to understand the instructor.
On September 13th, 2005, an update to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft online game introducing the Zul’Gurub dungeon helped unleash a series of events that led to a catastrophic plague that spread out of control. In a fascinating example of cascading failures in a complex system, all hell broke loose. For an entire week the Blizzard team fought to end the plague and restore order. As one witness to the event stated:
“There are three things you can do: infect people, die, and watch other people do the first two. There’s no way to rush for a cure; there’s no way to stop the plagued idiots from coming in, there’s no quest, no change, no nothing.”
The case has been made that games like World of Warcraft are complex systems because they share the following attributes: “they consist of a large number of interacting agents, they exhibit emergence; that is, a self organizing collective difficult to anticipate from the knowledge of the agents behavior, and their emergent behavior does not result from the existence of a central controller.” Such complex systems require careful testing and strong controls. An independent security consultant who played World of Warcraft at the time noted:
“Giving it the ability to propagate at all beyond a limited environment definitely reminds us that self-propagating code is likely to bite us in the ass without careful consideration and planning.”
As the plague spread from the dungeon across the world on as many as three different servers, the players panicked and the game became unplayable in its normal fashion. Cities became death traps and eventually abandoned as players either stopped playing or hid in the wilderness. In an interesting parallel to real world plagues the Corrupted Blood plague exhibited the following traits:
“it originated in a remote, uninhabited region and was carried by travelers to urban centers; hosts were both human and animal, such as with avian flu; it was spread by close spatial contact; and there were asymptomatic individuals – in this case, invulnerable NPCs.”
Here is a video taken during the height of the plague.
Cascading Failures: What Happened?
The end boss of Zul’Gurub was Hakkar the Soulflayer, Blood God of the Gurubashi trolls, and if he was attacked the players received a gift called Corrupted Blood, which is basically a curse that steals health and is highly transmittable from one player to another. It was originally designed to only affect the players while they were still within the dungeon, but a combination of bugs introduced into the system and player actions combined to set the plague loose into the world. The damage done by Corrupted Blood was so massive that it killed most lower level characters instantly, but allowed more powerful characters enough time to keep moving and spread the disease even further. Corrupted Blood was designed as a short-term annoyance for very high level players and was never meant or imagined to exist outside the specific dungeon for which it was created. A series of small failures combined and cascaded to become a world event.
Players had at least two ways of transferring Corrupted Blood beyond the walls of Zul’Gurub. The first way was to simply teleport from the dungeon back to a populated area. Secondly, it was possible for in-game pets to get the disease as well, but they would not lose it when they left the dungeon.
Corrupted Blood also exhibited asymptomatic characteristics as the game controlled characters were not affected by the plague, but they could be carriers of it. All of the non player characters (NPC) essentially acted very much like a World of Warcraft Typhoid Mary.
Players, much like humans in real life, ignored the authorities. A voluntary quarantine was issued by Blizzard, but it was ignored by many players or simply not take seriously.
The final factor that played heavily into the plague was the fact that many players willfully and intentionally operated to spread Corrupted Blood throughout the lands. These players have been called the terrorists of World of Warcraft by Robert Lemos of Security Focus.
“For a week, the efforts of malicious players left behind massive casualties, made cities nearly uninhabitable, and became a reminder of the uncontrollability of self-propagating code.”
These four basic issues combined together to create a scenario that quickly became an out of control plague. In the end, Blizzard forced a hard reset of the servers and rolled a new version of code out that addressed issues 1 and 2 listed above. Unfortunately, issues 3 and 4 are outside the ability to be repaired and will probably show up again in the future. In more recent years, the incident has been used several times in epidemiological studies and it has even been used as a model for exploring how terrorist cells form and operate.
While robots continue to take jobs from hard working humans, they still show a surprising lack of judgement in choosing which jobs to steal. Sign Dancer Pro is an outfit specializing in mechanical advertising, replacing those colorful human billboards on the side of the road. I, for one, am going to miss the dancing Mario Brother on the corner.
In the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, a woman has burned up her apartment in an attempt to bring her dead sister’s mummified corpse back to life. Her sister died a year ago, but instead of reporting the death, she had been preserving the body IN GASOLINE. She had been attempting to reanimate the corpse this whole time, but her latest attempt involved sticking wires from the main electrical circuits of the apartment to the gasoline soaked corpse of her sister.
“Despite what Frankenstein movies suggest, the electric current did not revive the body, instead setting it on fire.”
Brian is bent on forcing your digital remains to dance for eternity as the gang descend into a very curious cave. Justin travels back in time and attempts to hoodwink George Carlin into coming along for mad cap silliness. Andrew sets the trio on a course with a dreaded Nazi who prowls the coasts of Florida.
In his 2009 column entitled Ghost In The Machine: Batman & Midnight Society Tackle TV’s Toughest Demonic Electronics, Matt explored how popular culture interpretations of the fear of addictive escapism through video games were portrayed by Batman: The Animated Series and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Spoiler alert: Batman gets it right, of course. In his intro to the column, he makes the following statement:
“Every major technological trend or development is always addressed by pop culture with a movie or show that illustrates the breakthrough’s potential for wild mass homicide. What if a VHS tape… were haunted? What if your cell phone… were haunted? What if the Internet… were haunted?”
Today, we are going to explore another question that people ask themselves a surprisingly large amount of the time. What if a video game… were haunted? Here are five times that question has been asked.
1. The Haunted Ms. Pac Man Machine – This particular Ms. Pac Man machine apparently came with one extra ghost. It was first spotted on Craigslist in Boston where it was being offered for free. When the owner was contacted and asked why it was being given away, he responded saying:
“Three-year old daughter started talking about the “man in the video machine”, didn’t think much of it, then my wife saw a dark figure move across the basement and into the machine. She ran out of the house, would not return until the machine was out of the house.”
Haunted video game or clever ruse to rid the house of Ms. Pac Man?
2. Pokeman Black – A bootleg version of Pokemon found in a flea market that was a modified version of Pokemon Red. The game starts out with an extra Pokemon simply called “GHOST” that had an attack called Curse. When used in battle, GHOST would slaughter any other Pokemon and when the end of the game was reached, the gamer was faced with “GHOST wants to fight!”. The battle always ended in death for the gamer and the game being erased.
3. Majora’s Haunted Mask – This legend has a really involved back story, but the basic premise is that a video game was purchased at a garage sale that belonged to a boy named Ben who had died, most likely from drowning. Check out these videos from the affected game. They are definitely creepy if nothing else.
4. Polybius, The Haunted Arcade Game – The legend of Polybius originated in Portland in the 1980s and involved a strange game that showed up at various Portland arcades mysteriously. The few gamers that actually got a chance and played the game supposedly became addicted and started acting strangely.
“Some say they experienced an extreme form of vertigo and vivid hallucinations long after they had finished playing while others claim they suffered amnesia, in some cases forgetting their own name. And most horrifying of all, it’s said that some players were haunted by horrific nightmares and eventually driven to insanity and suicide after coming under the game’s influence. “
Just as quickly and mysteriously as the game had appeared, it disappeared leaving few clues as to where it came from. Conspiracy theories range from government experiments, to ghosts, to Atari recalls. This legend is quite detailed and much more information can be found in the article and on Wikipedia.
5. Minecraft and the Legend of Herobrine – This is my favorite legend that we are covering today and it could easily be an entire post by itself. There is a lot of detail and information if you are willing to digaround the internet for it. The basic premise for the legend is that while playing in single player mode gamers started reporting structures and tunnels they did not build. They would also occasionally spot a user identified as Herobrine, who it was later discovered was the dead brother of Notch, the developer of Minecraft.
One of the most interesting parts of this legend to me is the hilarious and sometimes vitriolic interaction between the believers, the scammers, and those people who are clearly irritated with the whole idea. I also love the growing library of videos that have appeared on YouTube chronicling Herobrine encounters. I have embedded some of my favorite ones below.
This one is long, you only need to watch like the last minute if you want.
It should be noted that four of the five stories involve haunted hardware, perhaps because it is easier to attribute something intangible, like a ghost, to a tangible object you can touch. Minecraft is a shared experience; however, Herobrine is only reported in the single player version of the game, which is not shared. Even so, as the legend of Herobrine has grown, the Minecraft community as a whole has shared the experience. This has been but a small sampling of the good ghost shenanigans in video games that are out there today. Anybody know any additional stories?
You wake up one morning and your Upstate New York house is covered in a thick yellow goo. What’s more? The same has happened to your neighbors.
Intitial theories pinned the blame on a passing aircraft discharging the foul spread all over the unsuspecting property below. However, FAA officials rule that possibility out after checking flight patterns.
The new theory, now backed up by the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell? Birds got into some discarded McDonald’s fries and nature took care of the rest.
‘We received a call this morning from a woman who owns a house on the same street, Washington Highway. She gave us her explanation because it happened to her last year,’ Lisa Kistner, a spokesman for the Amherst Town Supervisor’s Office, told ABC.
‘She said it’s actually because the seagulls eat fast food at McDonald’s, which upsets their digestive tract,’ Ms Kistner explained.
The seagulls were eating leftover French fries out of paper bags discarded in the parking lots, the woman apparently claimed.
And, Ms Kistner said, as soon as the woman convinced fast food restaurants to clean up the rubbish in their parking lots, she no longer had that problem.
The Cornell lab confirms it’s likely bird droppings but pin the blame on a migrating species entitled the European Starling.
A Silverback gorilla called Ambam loves to walk around on his hind legs. Among other uses, he apparently uses this trick to be able to carry more food.
In 2007, an illusion designer from the UK put up for auction what appeared to be the remains of a dead fairy. The winged creature was said to have been inspected by X-Ray and proved a biological organism. Although the bone structure seemed to be that of a child, the bones themselves were said to be hollow.
“The 8in remains, complete with wings, skin, teeth and flowing red hair, have been examined by anthropologists and forensic experts who can confirm the body is genuine.”
The exact day of the posting should have been a tip off, so skeptics found it as no surprise when the April Fools Day hoax was revealed to be nothing but a model. However, even after it was revealed as a fake, the curiosity still sold for £280 to a private art collector.
Messages still poured in after the confession, with many upset that the seller listed the location where the fairy was found.
A new research paper out of Cornell explains the symphony of algorithms behind identifying some random Johnson while adjusting for varying light, skin tone and image composition. For example, in a video demonstrating the program a picture of a couple lying together topless on a screen without exposing any naughty bits did not trigger as low of a rating a weirdo lifting their shirt to grip their tallywhacker for the cam. It also recognized low light and static images.
Pretty amazing stuff and a clever solution to a har… err… difficult problem.
While it might not be as interesting as a skeleton melting out of an iceberg, a single wood block floating on top of an iceberg within the no compass region around the magnetic south pole has people scratching their heads.
This lonely piece of timber was spotted on the top of a small berg at 66 degrees south, just north of Commonwealth Bay.
Wildlife watchers near Aurora Australis’ bridge first thought it was a relaxing seal but it was soon apparent it was rectangular in shape.
A new alvarezsauroid dinosaur (Linhenykus monodactylus) with a single finger has been discovered in Mongolia in about 80 million-year-old rock and was recently described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The earliest carnivorous dinosaurs had five fingers, although only four were actually functional. Many later meat-eaters had only three, and evolution left the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex with only two. Now researchers have unearthed the first known dinosaur with only one finger.
The research team has suggested that these finger arms could have been used for digging. Read the entire article here.
Officials in Mishima City, Japan have reported that a terrorist monkey, known as “Lucky”, has escaped during a cage cleaning and has left the government-run nature park where it was being held. Lucky is most widely known for biting nearly 120 people during a two month terror spree of the resort towns in central Japan last year.
“The city published an emergency notice urging residents to lock their doors, though no new attacks have been reported.”
