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His species only lives for a minute, but he has a long bucket list. (via the Presurfer)
"Till
death do us part" does not apply to this tragic love story from Thailand,
where a man decided to marry his bride, who died in a car accident just
days before their planned wedding.
Oddity Central has the story of the real life corpse bride:
Merely days before the wedding, Sarinya was involved in a car crash, leaving her severely injured. She still could have been saved with timely medical attention. However, the doctors made her wait for 6 hours due to an overcrowded ICU instead of transferring her to another hospital. During this time, she succumbed to her injuries and passed away.
Deffy and Sarinya had been together for 10 years, before they finally decided to settle down. They had postponed the wedding several times, due to busy schedules and the fact that Deffy wanted to complete his education before he got married. However, after Sarinya’s untimely death, he couldn’t let her go without fulfilling her deepest desire. So, he decided to marry her anyway. On the 4th of January, in Buddhist ceremony, Deffy married the corpse of his girlfriend. The event took place in Surin, a city in northern Thailand. During the ceremony, he expressed his devotion and deep love for Sarinya.
by Mike Dubik, MD
Brian Wood, MD
For hundreds, if not thousands, of years it has been accepted as an axiom that inanimate objects, such as nails, are dead. This self-evident truth has been expressed in the phrase: “dead as a doornail.” Thus, someone who is unequivocally dead is said to be “dead as a doornail.”
Advanced life support technology now allows us to maintain the heart and lung’s functionality in patients who no longer have any brain function. This ability has created legal, moral and religious conundrums. Until a generation ago, these problems were solely the domain of a few ethicists who entertained them as theoretical exercises.
However, now most states have laws concerning brain death. The American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the American Neurological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics came together and formed a Special Task Force1,2,3,4 and have endorsed the following as a definition of death: Irreversible cessation of all function of the entire brain, including the brain stem.
If the definition of death as expressed by the AMA et al has validity, it should be possible to compare this recent criteria against the widely accepted and time-tested “doornail” standard. We did just that.
We subjected a large doornail (see Figure 1) that was forged in 1986 to thorough examination, prolonged close observation, and an electroencephalogram (EEG).
Our Findings
The doornail was repeatedly examined and closely observed over a 24 hour period.
1. The nail did not exhibit any vocalizations of volitional activity.
2. The nail evidenced no spontaneous eye movements; neither could respiratory movements be detected.
3. There was no evidence of postural activity (decerebrate or decorticate).
4. The nail made no spontaneous or induced movements whatsoever. Thus, the nail met the “physical examination” criteria of death.3.4
A well-executed and reliably read electroencephalogram is a useful adjunct in the diagnosis of brain death. We performed a 30-minute EEG to document electrocerebral silence (see Figure 2). As is of ten the case with small children, it was not possible to meet the standard requirement for 10 cm electrode separation. Instead, the inter-electrode distance was decreased proportionally to the size of the nail’s head. The EEG was isoelectric, i.e. flat. Further, there was no electrical response to rousing stimuli. When we subjected the doornail to rousing stimuli, there was no response.
We conclude that the criteria for death as described in modem medical literature 1,2,3.4 is valid and may be used with confidence by clinicians.
References
1. “Determination of brain death,” Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death (The Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA), Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 110, January, 1987, pp. 15-19.
2. “Guidelines for the determination of death,” President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Washington, DC, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 246, 1981, p. 2184.
3. Report of a Special Task Force: Guidelines for the Determination of Brain Death in Children,” Pediatrics, 1987, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 298-300.
4. “Guidelines for the Determination of Brain Death in Children,” Task Force for the Determination of Brain Death in Children, Neurology, vol. 37, June, 1987, pp. 1077-8.
5. You should see the door it came from.
6. The patient was seven years old at the time of the study.
(Title image credit: Flickr user topher76)
__________________________
This article is republished with permission from the November-December 1995 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Before the development of photography, and even for some time afterward, one of the customs right after the death of someone important was to cast a death mask, to ensure there was a lasting representation of what that person looked like. After all, statues would be commissioned someday! Napoleon Bonapart’s death mask was (and still is) particularly popular.
Following Napoleon’s death, demand for his uncommonly life-like, and, dare we say, rather handsome, deathly visage was high. Reproductions of the cast made by his attending doctors were copied, and copied again. As a result, there are many questions about the authenticity of the masks, up to and including controversy over whether it is even the face of the emperor at all.Today Napoleon’s death mask can bee seen in museums from North Carolina to Liverpool, Paris to Havana, Cuba.
Read more about death masks at Atlas Obscura blog. Link
About two miles (three kilometers) per hour. That’s the conclusion of a group of researchers at the University of Sidney, who found that the walking speed of adults correlated inversely with their risk of death.
The Grim Reaper’s preferred walking speed is 0.82 m/s (2 miles (about 3 km) per hour) under working conditions. As none of the men in the study with walking speeds of 1.36 m/s (3 miles (about 5 km) per hour) or greater had contact with Death, this seems to be the Grim Reaper’s most likely maximum speed; for those wishing to avoid their allotted fate, this would be the advised walking speed.
Details of the methodology and analysis of the results are published in the British Medical Journal. The authors note also that “the preferred walking speed of the Grim Reaper while collecting souls is relatively constant irrespective of people’s geographical location, sex, or ethnic background.”
Link. Image credit Belle Mellor.
Burial in the United States is increasingly expensive, so some people have made their final plans with thrift in mind. That’s where Minnesota woodworker Randy Schnobrich steps in. He teaches traditional coffin building over a three-day, $700 course. Many of the participants are building coffins for themselves:
“A lot of people cringe at the idea of building their own casket,” Schnobrich says. “They see it as morbid. They think, ‘Boy, that must be kind of weird.’ But for some folks, they want to have a hand in, an intimate connection with the end of their life. Instead of just being a bystander, you can be involved in at least this aspect of your death.”
Marilyn Bader’s friends have seen her casket in her bedroom and said, “Isn’t that a little weird, having your casket in your bedroom?” But Bader, a widow who makes her living as a health care researcher, shrugs off such talk. “It’s something I made,” she says. “I’m proud of it.”
What I find fascinating about this story is that some of Schnobrich’s students begin the project when they’re dying. The act of building their coffins helps them emotionally process their mortality:
A retired teacher in her mid-60s named Carla made her coffin shortly before she died of cancer. Carla was undergoing chemotherapy before the coffin-making class. Schnobrich said she was so fatigued that he set up a futon in the workshop so Carla could nap when she needed to. At times, she had so little strength that Schnobrich had to help her push screws into the casket with a cordless drill.
“She was extremely motivated and wanted to do as much as she could,” Schnobrich recalls.
Link | Photo: Jon Kalish
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m still uncertain about whether or not I would want my body to be buried or cremated after I die. That being said, I certainly would love to be a part of any of these unique and cool cemeteries located around the world.
The dance of death (usually represented by a skeleton) has been a recurring theme in art and literature for centuries -at least! BibliOddysey has a sampling of such illustrations from the Heinrich Hein University of Düsseldorf collection, ranging from 1736 to the 20th century. Link
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
In the New York Times Magazine, 72-year-old fitness guru Jerome I. Rodale had declared proudly sand defiantly: “I’m going to live to be 100, unless I get run down by a sugar-crazed taxi driver.”
The very next day, the confident health guru made an appearance on the then-popular TV talk show The Dick Cavett Show. The date was June 5, 1971 and I repeat (with apologies) “health fitness guru” Jerome Rodale was chatting amiably in front of a studio audience with the always clever host, Dick Cavett.
If a comedy writer was writing a sketch for a sitcom, and he or she wanted to write about the funniest, most ironic person who could possibly die in the middle of a talk show, what profession would they write the character in as? Hmmm …a health expert?
The gods, merciless as they apparently are, must indeed have a sense of humor. Obviously, no man’s death is funny or amusing, but “Tragedy plus time equals humor.” (I once politely argued with Tim Conway over whose quote that was: I said it was Steve Allen’s, but Tim said it was Carole Burnett’s. Whoever.)
Rodale was a slight man, he looked like Leon Trotsky with a goatee. He was extremely friendly with host Dick Cavett for a half-hour, chatting about health foods, and soon he offered Cavett some of his special asparagus, which he said was “boiled in urine.”
Cavett, always a ready wit, remembers asking, “Anybody’s we know?” Cavett enjoyed the interview and made a mental note to invite Rodale back. The next guest came out: Pete Hamill, a columnist for The New York Post. It was during the interview with Hamill that Rodale suddenly made a snoring sound, which got a laugh from the audience. (Comics sometimes make this sound sarcastically, as if the other person talking is dull or tedious.)
more …
From a hook being left on a door handle by a crazed serial killer to a gang that will shoot you if you flash your bright lights at them, Halloween is a ripe time for horrific urban legends to be spread around. While most of these are fiction, the reality is that some of these stories originate from real news stories and sometimes things that start out as urban legends eventually become real horror stories. Here are five terrifying tales with some scary truths behind them.
This one involves someone checking into a hotel room and noticing that something smells rotten. Eventually, they realize it’s coming from under the bed. So they move the mattress and discover a dead body. This story has been going around forever and has even been featured in movies like Four Rooms. It seems like this story is pretty unlikely, particularly given that you’d at least think a hotel maid would notice the smell of a rotting body before a hotel guest enters the room, but if you believe that, you’re giving hotel staff too much credit. In fact, the most disturbing thing about this story is how often it actually happens.
In 1982, a few auto thieves killed an accomplice and left him under the bed of their hotel in New Jersey. Four days later, someone discovered the corpse, but the room had been rented three different times in the meanwhile and no one noticed they were sleeping above a dead body. In 1987, a drug user overdosed and his high friend stuffed him under the bed and then ran away. Three days later, a family reported a nasty odor in their room, prompting the hotel staff to discover the body.
In New York 1988, a murderer was clever enough to actually put the body inside the box spring. Even so, the smell still gave away the body’s hiding place only a few days later. This time, at least two guests slept on top of the mattress, not knowing what was below.
There are tons more stories like this. Apparently hotel workers often shrug off these types of odors and go on with their business until a guest complains or even refuses to stay in the room thanks to the smell. If there’s anything to be learned here, it’s that you should never stay in a hotel room with a funky smell. And, if you do notice something off, check under your bed or mattress…or you might not want to, that is, if you’d rather not know what’s below.
Source: Snopes
Image Via neekatnite [Flickr]
Gordon and Norma Yeager, aged 94 and 90 respectively, were married for 72 years. They were inseparable and deeply in love with each other during those seven decades. They died an hour apart last week in a hospital. There was some confusion when Gordon left because his heart monitor continued to pulse — but that was because he was holding hands with Norma. Her heartbeat could be felt through his body:
“It was really strange, they were holding hands, and dad stopped breathing but I couldn’t figure out what was going on because the heart monitor was still going,” said Dennis Yeager. “But we were like, he isn’t breathing. How does he still have a heart beat? The nurse checked and said that’s because they were holding hands and it’s going through them. Her heart was beating through him and picking it up.”
“They were still getting her heartbeat through him,” said Donna Sheets.
At 4:38 p.m., exactly one hour after Gordon died, Norma passed too.
Link -via Kottke | Photo: Yeager Family
It’s that time of year, when we look to graveyards for tales that scare the Dickens out of us. You’ve read about 9 Creepy Places to Visit for a Good Scare and you’ve seen lists of haunted houses. Now how about cemeteries? These six stories don’t all contain ghosts -some are about vampires, poltergeists, and unidentified flying objects! Shown here is Chesnut Hill Cemetery in Rhode Island, the site of a vampire exhumation in 1892.
Chesnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island is reported to be haunted by a vampire named Mercy Lena Brown. She was preceded in death by her mother and sister, victims of tuberculosis, and Mercy would often visit their graves. In January 1892, 19-year-old Mercy herself fell to tuberculosis and was interred with her family members. Mercy’s father George claimed she haunted him every night, complaining of hunger. His son Edwin fell sick, also with tuberculosis, but as he experienced visits from Mercy, the family and townspeople considered the cause of his illness to be the restless dead. George Brown, with the help of others, dug up the graves of his wife and two daughters on March 17, 1892. Only Mercy, who died in January, was free of decomposition. This led George to believe she was a vampire.
Read what happened then, and other tales, at mental_floss. Link
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Atlas Obscura continues with their 31 Days of Halloween, featuring a new and gruesome post every day about the world’s ghosts, goblins, legends, and death rituals. This post deals with the widespread fear of being buried alive, whether by mistake or by evil intent. That fear has a long history.
Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without it’s basis in reality.
One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe.
Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.
And then folks dreamed up many ways to avoid this horrific fate, which you can read about. Link
(Image credit: Illustrator Harry Clarke)
If you’re the kind of person who finds commercial haunted houses boring and instead loves traveling to macabre places, then you’d better start booking your tickets because we’ve compiled some of the creepiest and scariest places on earth. Of course, if you’re squeamish and don’t like to read about death or look at pictures of long-dead bodies, then you should probably skip ahead because this article just isn’t for you.
At first glance, the Aokigahara Forest near Mount Fuji is an ideal nature destination, filled with stunning trees growing on hard volcanic rock, and icy, rocky caverns. But the forest has a much darker side, one that was popularized with the 1960 novel Nami no T?, where the main characters end up committing suicide in the area. While Aokigahara was always a destination for the forlorn to end their lives, Nami no T? made the idea much more popular and since the book was released, an average of 30 people kill themselves in the area every year, with a record-setting body count of 108 deaths in 2004.
The government has put out a number of signs in both Japanese and English urging people to reconsider their decision and seek psychiatric help. Once a year, a group of volunteers patrols the forest looking for bodies. These body hunters mark off the areas they are exploring with plastic tape that is never removed. Thus, even if you never see a dead body or ghost roaming the forest, you are still bound to see signs of the forest’s secrets wherever you happen to go.
Image Via Al Kaiser [Flickr]
Unless you already have a doll phobia, the idea of an island filled with dolls doesn’t sound all that creepy at first. It’s once you learn that the dolls are mutilated and left hung in trees while they rot away, all in honor of a drowned little girl that you start to realize just how creepy this macabre tourist destination really is.
It all started over fifty years ago, when the island’s only resident, Don Julian Santana found the body of a dead little girl in the canal where the island sits. He was haunted by her memory and soon started hanging dolls in the trees to appease the girl’s spirits and to ward off evil spirits from entering the island. Doll heads, arms, legs, etc. are sprawled out across the island in a strange sacrifice to prevent further evil. Strangely though, in 2001, Don Julian suffered the same fate as the little girl, drowning in the canal beside his home. Some people believe this was the work of the dolls who have since become inhabited by evil spirits. These days, the dolls remain the sole occupants of one of Mexico’s darkest tourist attractions.
Image Via SkilliShots [Flickr]
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo started when the local monastery outgrew its original cemetery, so the monks decided to mummify one of their recently deceased brothers before placing him in their newly opened catacombs. The process seemed to work well, so the monks began mummifying all of their fallen comrades and placing them in the catacombs. After a few centuries, word spread about the monk’s unique burial methods and it soon began to be a status symbol for rich people to be entombed in the catacombs buried in their finest clothing. Some people even left wills requesting that their clothing be changed by their family members at regular intervals.
The last friar was buried in the catacombs in 1871, but famous people from the area continued to be interred up until the 1920s. There are now about 8000 mummies lining the walls of the many hallways, which have been organized into categories: men, women, virgins, children, priests, monks and professionals. Some of the bodies are even set in poses, including the bodies of two children who sit together in a rocking chair.
Last week, I told you about 10 Things You Can Do With Your Ashes, but if you want to read about some really creepy postmortem activities, be sure to check out Mental Floss’ great article about 10 Things Your Body Can Do After You Die, including getting married and standing trial.
The only certain things in life are death and taxes, and since taxes will never be fun, you might as well try to make your death into something a little entertaining. While most people are laid to rest in a coffin, buried in an urn, or scattered somewhere memorable, there are plenty of other options for your remains. Here are a few of the most unique things you can choose to do with your ashes.
A true hunter shouldn’t let death stop them from killing more animals. Fortunately, a new company named Holy Smoke is making efforts to ensure the last remnants of your physical remains can still be used to hunt down your favorite prey by incorporating your ashes into hollow-point bullets or shotgun shells. While it’s not among the suggested uses, you could also hire a hitman to use these bullets to take out your most-hated enemy, ensuring even death can’t stop you from exacting your revenge.
Image Via celest343 [Flickr]
For those people who live and breathe music, there’s no better way to be remembered than to actually become part of their favorite album. And Vinyl will allow you to press your ashes into any record you want, including your own original album. They’ll even write a song for you for an additional fee. As a bonus, you can also have your ashes incorporated into a painting that will be used as the album cover. Now that’s a rocking way to go.
You probably know that Socrates was forced to die by drinking poison, but did you know that he was made to drink hemlock, which essentially shuts down the body and allows the mind to continue functioning until death finally sets in?
For more interesting information about poisons and the people who used them, enjoy this great Mental Floss article by Miss C.
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If you are a supervisor in your workplace and you die at work, there is a 10% chance that it was murder. If you’re not in management, the chances of your case being a murder drops to 7%. Gizmodo crunched the statistics on the 4,547 American workplace deaths in 2010 and found some other interesting tidbits:
Overall, “Transportation and material moving occupations”—people who work operating vehicles—dominated the death list, with 1,115 killed on the job. Only seven percent of them were murdered.
The 45-54 year-old bracket made up the plurality of deaths, with a full quarter. 16% of them plummeted to their demises.
The deadliest state to work in? Texas, with 456 fatalities. The safest? New Hampshire, with only 5. West Virginia won the explosion death contest, with 34—likely from all that coal mining, which is extremely dangerous and explosion-prone.
Happy Labor Day! Link -via the Presurfer
Did you know that Matthew Broderick once killed someone while driving? While the circumstances of the car accident were never made completely clear, he was definitely not drunk at the time. In the end, he just had to pay a $175 fine for “careless driving.”
He’s not the only celebrity responsible for someone else’s death. BuzzFeed has an interesting list of people who have killed someone.
A
lot of people go to Vegas for bachelor parties, but death party? Now that's
unusual:
A British marine killed in Afghanistan left an unusual bequest in his will: money for his friends to go to Las Vegas for a party. [...]
Like many soldiers assigned to a war zone, Hart had taken out a life insurance policy.
After his death, his family found Hart had designated 50,000 British pounds for a charity that helps wounded service personnel -- and 100,000 pounds (about $163,000) for his military and civilian buddies and their girlfriends to go to Las Vegas.
In the French animation Mortys, death is a working mother. Business is disrupted when her child schemes to get more of her time. Mortys is a graduation short film co-directed by Gaelle Lebegue, Mathieu Vidal, Aurelien Ronceray-Peslin et Nicolas Villeneuve, and produced by the ESMA. -via I Am Bored
Before Alice Taylor of Wonderland blog quit her day job to work on a startup, she worked for Britain's Channel 4 Education to create public service games with social lessons. This one above deserves a particular note: The End is a Flash game about death, belief and science.
The game about death & philosophy I commissioned from lovely Preloaded, to have a look at death and all the things around it. It's something as a society we report on a lot, and fetishise/agonise over, but we never really talk about how to handle it when it happens.
Kids (in the UK) are predominantly atheist or agnostic these days (large numbers of adults, too), and religion usually has quite a lot of ritual and support ideas around death, but the secular world, not so much. Us atheists are on our own, a bit. This game was commissioned around wanting to help out with that, a bit.
It's a platformer, and a quiz, and a 2-player card game, and a bunch of thought-provoking, open ended questions. Oh, and collectibles. Dig in.
Link | Alice's blog post about The End - via Boing Boing
In 1959, ten people went on a skiing expedition to a Russian mountain named Kholat Syakhl, camping along the way there. One turned back due to illness, and the other nine were later found dead.
Caught in a snowstorm, the trekkers veered off course and decided to set up camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl – at 5pm on February 2, judging from their photos and diary entries. They went to sleep. Then something horrific occurred, the nature of which we can but guess at. Some have suggested that it was an avalanche, but others aren’t satisfied with this explanation. Only one thing is known for sure. Whatever it was, it was serious enough to make the skiers leap up in the middle of the night and escape from their tent by cutting it open from the inside. Some didn’t even bother to put on clothes or boots as they ventured outside into the bitter cold.
When the bodies were finally recovered, some had unexplained wounds, and the tongue of one woman was missing. Read about the investigation and the various theories about what happened to the campers, at Environmental Graffiti. Link
Apparently Two and A Half Men will soon be killing off Charlie Sheen’s character in order to make room for Ashton Kutcher. In honor of the characters demise, Mental floss has a great article reflecting on 11 other shows who killed off characters in memorable manners. My personal favorite was Susan’s death in Seinfeld. While I knew the story line, the article still has other great bits about the episode that I didn’t know -like the fact that the show was temporarily pulled from syndication after the anthrax attacks of 2001.
Abandoned places can be creepy. Morgues are always creepy to most people. Put them together, and you’ve got some really creepy places -and even more so when you know their history. Environmental Graffiti has a photo collection of abandoned morgues in hospitals, asylums, municipalities, military bases, and even this one from Ellis Island. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Vilseskogen)
Ancient Arab swords. Note that some designs were more commonly used for decapitation, and other designs less so. Drawing: The Book of the Sword, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Chatto and Windus, London, 1884.
The following is reprinted from The Annals of Improbable Research. Click to enlarge images.
by Simcha Lev-Yadun, Department of Science Education—Biology, Faculty of Science and Science Education University of Haifa, Oranim, Tivon, Israel.
with instructive illustrations and historical documentation selected by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
The global energy crisis and other global changes have been studied from endless points of view. Here, I wish to discuss these matters, and also global ecology, from the point of view of the changing methods of executions, a point of view that has never been studied before.
Ancient Hebrews and Arab Innovations
The ancient Hebrews, living in the barren hill country of Judea and Samaria, executed people by stoning. The rocky, almost tree-less environment explains the use of this execution method. Arabs in the nearby sandy deserts of Saudi Arabia could not stone condemned people to death with sand particles, and instead used to decapitate them with a sword.
At least one form of impalement by stake is thought to be a Turkish innovation. Details here are from The Eastern Question: Its Facts and Fallacies, Malcolm MacColl, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1877.
Ancient Turkish and Asian Tropical Innovations
In the Near East, gravity, which comes free of charge, was also used for traditional execution. The Turks, for instance, used to execute by impaling people on a metal spear, a vivid practice known as “Chazuk.” A botanical parallel was in use in tropical regions of Asia, where instead of putting the bound condemned person on top of a spear, he was tied on top of a young palm or a bamboo. The plant shoot, in its search for light, grew quickly (a very relative term for the impaled one) through the condemned person. Such good plant growth was possible in the tropics, but not in the much more arid Near East. We see that when it was possible, biology was used, but when impossible, physics also served the purpose.
Impalement by bamboo growth originated in regions of Asia that could take advantage of the rapid growth of certain varieties of the bamboo plant. Details shown here are from Two Happy Years in Ceylon, Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming, Chatto and Windus, London, 1893. Be sure to read footnote 1 in this image. (below)
Ancient Roman Innovations
Still in the semi-arid Mediterranean, the Romans, who suffered from the consequences of severe deforestation, conserved good quality timber by the practice of crucifixion. They used wooden crosses repeatedly, and even forced the condemned people to carry the horizontal beam. An alternative tree-based method that saved the trees used in execution was to bend two trees till they were close and tie them with ropes so the ropes prevented them from straightening up. The condemned person was tied to the trees (an arm and a leg to each tree), the ropes holding the trees were cut. The end was quick, and again, there was no waste of timber. medieval European Innovations In then-wooded Medieval Europe, people were executed for centuries by the auto-de-fe, i.e., burnt alive on the stake. This spectacular procedure was carried on till the increasing depletion of the forests was recognized. Thus, in the 18th century, a new method, much friendlier to the environment, emerged: the guillotine. Taking into account the large number of people executed using the guillotine during the French Revolution, the continued use of auto-de-fe would probably have depleted the remaining forests of Western Europe.
The guillotine proved to be an environmentally friendly innovation in France. Drawing: History of the Guillotine, John Wilson Croker, John Murray, London, 1853.
North American Innovations
In a different wooded ecosystem, in North America, before the forests were cut down, condemned people were hanged on trees. Following the forest decline in many parts of the U.S., the electric chair, based on electricity produced from fossil oil or coal, was invented and used. Being industrialized, this method of execution suited the U.S. However, following the energy crisis of the 1970s, among the various measures to save energy, many of the U.S. states decided to use lethal injections.
“The end was quick,
and again, there was
no waste of timber.”
Conclusion: Execution and Conservation
We can therefore see that both regional ecology and environmental changes influenced the methods of execution in various countries and ecologies. In any case, a global trend of environmental conservation along with the exploitation of specific local resources is obvious in this colorful aspect of human culture.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
The snail shells above are simply gorgeous, as are the jewelry made from them. The only problem? The snails are being driven to extinction just so people can makes earrings and necklaces from them. That’s not the only idiotic reason humans have been driving certain creatures to extinction, read the rest over at Cracked. Warning: some of the language is NSFW.
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The Nederland, Colorado, Chamber of Commerce has been staging the Frozen Dead Guy Days annually for ten years. The name comes from the corpse of Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989 and has been stored in dry ice in the area since 1993. The festival, which attracted 15,000 people this year, includes a coffin race, a parade of hearses, and more typical events as well.
Interim chamber president Blue Hessner says the chamber wants to sell rights to the event and concentrate on business development.
According to the Boulder Daily Camera, the event has become too expensive and the chamber believes an event company could do a better job.
Anyone interested in purchasing the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival should contact the Chamber of Commerce. Link -via Fortean Times
(Image credit: Frozen Dead Guy Days)
Inventing is a great way to leave your mark on the world, but in some unfortunate circumstances, inventions have been known to leave the mark of death on their inventors. A few years ago, we wrote a post about five inventors who were killed by their own inventions, but that is not the full extent of these poor creators. Here are five more people whose own inventions resulted in their untimely demise.
Perhaps the most influential inventor on this list is Maria Sklodowska-Curie. Maria co-discovered both radium and polonium and revolutionized modern chemistry when she discovered a method to isolate radioactive isotopes. She was so well-respected that she became the first female professor at the University of Paris. If that weren’t impressive enough, she was not only the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, she was also the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes. Even the word “radioactive” was her creation.
Unfortunately, being one of the first researchers to work with radioactive particles, she did not understand the dangers they presented to the human body. Most of her work was carried out in a shed without any protective measures whatsoever. Eventually, she died from aplastic anemia caused by extensive exposure to ionized radiation that emanated from her research materials.
Her shed has now been converted to a museum, but her paperwork, even her cookbook, is so radioactive that they are too dangerous to handle without protective gear and are stored in lead-lined boxes.
Horace had a number of careers, serving as a legislator, a lawyer and a confederate marine engineer in his short 40 years, but it was his role as a marine engineer that he will be best remembered for. Horace was the inventor of the first combat submarine. His creation, the H.L. Hunley, was known to be dangerous after five out of nine crew members died on the device’s first run in an attempt to attack the Union blockade in the Charleston Harbor, but that didn’t stop the inventor or the confederacy from investing more time and manpower into the device.
Like any good inventor, Horace knew he couldn’t quit. He kept working on the sub and was so willing to stand by his work that he served on the second run to attack the blockade. Again the sub sank, this time killing all eight crew members, including Horace.
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Larry Marten wanted to build a coffin for his father as one last gift. Making the finely-crafted coffin, complete with parts saved from his father’s life, was easy compared to negotiating the bureaucracy involved in burying the dead.
He was required to get a permit from the county to transport his father. The woman at the county office said that they don’t issue permits to individuals but to businesses licensed to do this work. She refused to issue the permit but Larry refused to leave without one. He thinks that he just finally wore her down and he got the permit.
At every point, he met resistance as though it was the craziest thing they’d ever heard of. Only professionals are allowed to do it, he was told, and there are all kinds of regulations. He was determined, however, and in the end, everyone at the hospital and county turned around and became helpful and came to respect his decision.
But that was not the end of the red tape Larry had to cut through. Read the rest of the story at Make magazine. Link -via Boing Boing
