Real-Life Weirdness

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

A 3D-printed ear with included radio receiver. Intended use is to couple the receiver with artificial tympani, to permit people with damaged/missing nerves to hear - but it wouldn't take that much more design to include the ability to hear specific radio frequencies, as well...

For a torture device you tune it to the Justin Bieber channel 24/7.

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

For a torture device you tune it to the Justin Bieber channel 24/7.

I'm pretty sure that's a violation of the Geneva Conventions...

[Johnny1A.2]

The exactly level of weirdness is hard to quantify, but it's worthy of mention, and I don't recall it coming up upthread:

CARHENGE

CARHENGE IMAGES

[quarkstomper]

This probably isn't bizarre enough to count as Weird, but it's a peculiar piece of forgotten history I came across and wanted to share. It's how a guy who graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point and assigned to a post at the backside of nowhere had a brilliant idea to revolutionize warfare.

Bicycles.

Black Soldiers: The Bicycle Corps

[Anaraxes]

In the 1950s, it was clear to the US military that terrestrial communications were all too easily intercepted or blocked. Space could provide an answer to the long-distance communication problem, as it was out of the reach of enemies. But, relay satellites weren't yet available, with both rocketry and electronics still relatively primitive.

Instead, they came up with Project West Ford, aka Project Needles, which orbited 480 million tiny copper wires, 75 pounds of copper, tiny wires about the length of a fingertip, to form an artificial ring around the earth. These were designed to be dipoles to reflect an 8 GHz microwave signal -- a kind of artificial ionosphere that could reflect ground-based signals.

http://www.damninteresting.com/earth...ect-west-ford/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford

Although the ultimate design would have been for permanent rings of needles about the Earth, the initial test was designed to be temporary, at lower altitude, so that the ring would decay. In fact, the needles were so small and light that they wouldn't burn up on reentry, but would drift down to the Earth's surface. Estimates of the density of these surviving needles in some places, such as the Arctic, was as high as 5 per square kilometer. There were some proposals for expeditions, never carried out, to retrieve these needles to study the effects of radiation and the space environment. (Maybe there's a Westford needle in your back yard.)

--

If space radiation can create the Fantastic Four, it's good enough for a supers campaign premise. Many supers backgrounds like to equate the rise in popularity of comics in real life to the numbers of supers appearing in the game setting, ramping from a few relatively normal pulp heroes in the 20s or 30s to full-fledged supers in later decades. With Project Westford, nearly invisible needles drift down from SPACE, randomly striking a few people and injecting them with mutant powers.

You might also use this project as an excuse for a post-apoc setting, striking down most of society with a Hoyle-Wickramsinghe-style space plague unknown to medical science.

[dcarson]

The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe American troops, French vip prisoners with wives and mistresses, and Wehrmacht troops vs the SS.

[rust]

Originally Posted by dcarson

The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe American troops, French vip prisoners with wives and mistresses, and Wehrmacht troops vs the SS.

This reminds me of a story from Friedberg, a small town near where I grew
up.There an SS unit prepared to defend the town against the advancing US
troops. They had already blown up the bridges over the Paar and were buil-
ding a line of tank obstacles at the medieval town's gate when the women
of Friedberg appeared, chased the SS troopers away and removed the tank
obstacles.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by rust

This reminds me of a story from Friedberg, a small town near where I grew
up.There an SS unit prepared to defend the town against the advancing US
troops. They had already blown up the bridges over the Paar and were buil-
ding a line of tank obstacles at the medieval town's gate when the women
of Friedberg appeared, chased the SS troopers away and removed the tank
obstacles.

I'm sure there were many incidents like that showing how most Nazis were still human beings prone to acting in human fashions rather than "soulless" murder machines.
I think it's important to remember those events to illustrate how their cruelty was an insidious human thing and not some kind of distant evil committed by creatures not like the rest of us.

[Daigoro]

From The Daily Show with Jon Stewart this week;

Nanjing Mystery Ooze

[Daigoro]

Giant, fluorescent pink slugs found living atop a mountain in Australia

There's a scenario or monster idea in there somewhere.

Actually, I found these guys more compelling-
According to Murphy, the forest there is also home to several cannibal snails, battling it out in slow-motion to see who can eat the other first.

"We've actually got three species of cannibal snail on Mount Kaputar, and they're voracious little fellas," says Murphy. "They hunt around on the forest floor to pick up the slime trail of another snail, then hunt it down and gobble it up."