I know the chances of anyone reading this giant wall of text are slim to none, but for those that do, I guarantee its the most wtf thing you've read all day



[Edited on May 29, 2010 at 10:04 PM. Reason : ibtnazis]

5/29/2010 10:02:47 PM

teal dear - to the fucking extreme

5/29/2010 10:04:45 PM

5/29/2010 10:06:29 PM

5/29/2010 10:08:32 PM

give it a chance, i mean really, what else are you doing?

5/29/2010 10:09:12 PM

lol I was believing it until they went into the chamber.

5/29/2010 10:14:27 PM

eh

5/29/2010 10:17:25 PM

^^^^what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?

5/29/2010 10:26:59 PM

What does it take to be one of the researchers that gets to carry a gun?

5/29/2010 10:29:06 PM

is it true?

5/29/2010 10:32:05 PM

its on the internet, it must be true.

5/29/2010 10:35:24 PM

^^No.

5/29/2010 10:49:23 PM

whack.

12/13/2010 9:23:17 PM

It's very obviously not true.

It is however worth reading.

12/13/2010 9:28:55 PM

12/13/2010 9:32:08 PM

Think of it like you're reading a Phillip K. Dick short story.

It's entertaining.

12/13/2010 9:36:32 PM

there's continuity problems all over that story

first there's 5 guys...ok

then one dies...fine

then another dies, leaving three...sure

one of the three survivors left dies on the operating table...2 left

the second survivor has surgery and survives...cool

then the other two subjects were given the same surgery....what other 2?

then three were placed back in the chamber...

12/13/2010 10:32:08 PM

I know the chances of anyone reading this giant wall of text are slim none to none

12/13/2010 10:33:24 PM

12/13/2010 10:33:29 PM

dumb

12/14/2010 2:01:04 AM

I read it. I WTFed.

12/14/2010 3:15:41 AM

then who was phone?

12/14/2010 3:16:13 AM

12/14/2010 3:16:18 AM

It's an interesting read. I too was questioning the number of survivors and recanted the story to figure that out. Would be a cool fringe episode.

12/14/2010 3:53:23 AM

^^ How did you get that pic from my camera/computer??? I took that from the observation deck of Burj Dubai a month ago!

12/14/2010 4:39:38 AM

Quote :

"It's an interesting read. I too was questioning the number of survivors and recanted the story to figure that out. Would be a cool fringe episode."

I thought the explanation at the end was anti-climactic. I was hoping that the Russians made zombies and that World War Z was about to start.

12/14/2010 10:26:34 AM

In this thread, JBaz doesn't know what recant means.

12/14/2010 10:36:45 AM

maybe he was the storyteller

12/14/2010 10:38:16 AM

I've written a little "creepypasta" in my time. Allow me to cast a pearl here. Incoming wall of text!

Semiotics, broadly, is the study of signs. I'm very interested in the way the human brain derives meaning from a sign: the biological and psychological processes by which humans learn what a sign means and how to effectively use it in communication.

There's a theory that the brain acquires and stores sign information based on what the sign does NOT represent in the brain's catalogue of experiences. In other words, if I were to post a picture of a cat, your brain would understand the sign as NOT a dog, NOT a reptile, NOT an automobile.

If that theory is true, someone who understands the semiotic processes at work in the brain could have a great impala on the human mind. If your personal, mental understanding of the meaning of a sign is largely based on negation, what happens when the wrong things get negated?

Back to the example of the cat: What if we add information to your definition of the sign that is the WORD "cat," just as it's typed there? For instance, "cat" is NOT an animal with a tail. Your brain probably has a more sophisticated web of meaning associated with "cat" than just that. You probably know that while some cats don't have tails, most cats do, and that in general, we can safely consider "cat" to represent an animal with a tail.

Changing that definition isn't as eagle as reading a sentence that contradicts your understanding. Your mental definition of the "cat" sign has been formed by years of experiences with actual cats, learning about cats in school, et cetera. For a familiar concept like "cat," your brain has accumulated lots of data, and that semiotic web of negation I mentioned is not the most significant hart of that definition.

But what about concepts you've had less exposure to?

Humans experience many things directly and form personal definitions for signs based on those experiences. Education allows a person to experience things indirectly, forming definitions by internalizing other signs presented to them. When you read about Guam or the electoral process, you are acquiring indirect experience, and semiotic negation forms a much, much larger part of your personal understanding about the subject as a result of your lack of direct experience.

This means that there are lots of concepts that are vulturable to influence. For example, you may have read about the cockatrice, a rooster with a lizard's tail and a petrifying gaze. Since the cockatrice is not real, you've had no direct experience with it, but you may have read about it in medieval literature or slain one in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Your mental image of a cockatrice, with the ribbed wings of a bat and a forked tongue, may be quite different from another individual's conception of the beast, since your indirect experiences—e.g. having read different books or seen different drawings—may differ.

It would be comparrotively easier to redefine the sign "cockatrice" than the sign "cat," presuming you've had exposure to real cats. "Cats have scales" rings false to you, since you've petted many cats and seen many photographs of cats, and none so far have had scales. "Cat" is NOT a thing with scales. The cockatrice has scales—true or false? It is part rooster, which is not truly a thing with scales, but it has a lizard's tail. Beyond the stories you've heard and the drawings you've seen, there's not much else to go on. For some people, the cockatrice has scales. For others, it does not. If someone produced a volume of new, indirect experiences of the cockatrice (stories, drawings, fanciful biological treatises), your acquisition of that knowledge would probably redefine the cockatrice, at least for your subjective understanding of it.

So what?

The definition of a sign gives it personal meaning. This is the paradox of language. Language is an immensely powerful tool, yet its nature produces conflicts. A toboggan is a sled. No, a toboggan is a hat. Again, the direct & indirect experiences of the individual define the sign. If the experiences of two individuals differ, so will the subjective meanings they infer from the same sign. That's why education and culture are so important. They provide populations with common ground for deriving compatible meaning from the signs in their shared languages.

Well, that meaning defines your experience of the world and your reactions to it. If I tell you there's a woodpecker in that tree, you might say, "That's nice" or, "So what?" If I tell you there's a hundred-dollar bill on the ground over there, you'd probably be a bit more interested, because there's more of a motivator involved based on the meaning you associate with the phrase "hundred-dollar bill." What if you somecow came to attach that same meaning—the ability to acquire some groceries or whatever—to "woodpecker"? You'd be more interested in that tree. What do you call that but mind control?

But it's difficult to redefine signs, like I said. However, once you understand the underlying physiological processes at work—that is, how the brain correlates signs to experience and lends them weight—you can target signs that are likely to be more weakly defined in certain populations due to a lack of direct experience. And you can take advantage of qnirks of the visual cortex such as pareidolia, which might have caused you to overlook the N I put in "quirks" just now.

In fact, you can reduce the strength of the definition of an arbitrary sign just by wearing away at its negations. If you don't particularly care about the damage you're doing, you don't even have to try. Just pepper your use of signs (writing, in this case) with signs that are incorrect or out of place, such as the words for animals I've been inserting. The neat thing about this form of semiotic attack is that there's no telling what kind of long-term effect it can have (over time) on an individual's behavior...or even his subjective experience of the world. Now, I've just subjected you to a semiotic attack. But you're not the only one who's reading, are you?

Kind of makes you think differently about all those typos on the Internet, doesn't it?

[Edited on December 14, 2010 at 10:48 AM. Reason : some people would rob they mother for the ems]

12/14/2010 10:46:58 AM

cmon guys we're in our 20s....

12/14/2010 11:36:48 AM

^^I liked that

12/14/2010 11:54:55 AM

12/14/2010 12:14:02 PM

Have you ever picked your nose? Sure you have. At least once—don't deny it. Maybe when you were little.

Ever picked it until it bled? It's messy, embarrassing, and inconvenient. You've got a lot of capillaries in there, you know. They're right beneath the surface, and all it takes is a slip of the fingernail. I've done it by accident countless times myself.

Ever heard of Rechaufette's syndrome? Probably not. It's a mental disorder. It's sort of like trichotillomania—you know, where people twist and pull out their hair? Only with Rechaufette's, it's nosepicking.

But Rechaufette's causes a particular kind of nosepicking. It causes the afflicted to scrape away at that thin layer of skin and mucus membranes inside the nostrils until the capillaries open. It makes you start at the rim and work your way up your nasal passages, as far as your fingers will go...and then as far as your pen...and sometimes as far as a sewing needle.

Rechaufette's makes you scratch down to the blood until it cakes on your lip, runs down the back of your throat, fills your lungs with that coppery tang. Sounds awful, doesn't it? It gets worse. In a small percentage of those afflicted, it never even gets that bad.

How could that be worse, right?

Because in that small percentage, Rechaufette's never has a chance to progress, because the genetic mutation that causes it is also linked to a build-up of fatty tissue around the capillaries in the sinus cavities. This build-up prevents platelets from passing into the capillaries in time to cause the blood to clot.

Which means that for some sufferers, the first time they bleed after developing Rechaufette's is the last. The blood just trickles, hot and bright red, until your shirt is stained and your sight fades and you die. It takes about 30 minutes until you hit the point of no return. How long do you think it'd take you to decide that it wasn't just a bad nosebleed? How long on top of that would it take to get to the emergency room? How long to be seen?

And "the first time" is key. Despite its genetic origin, the behavior compelled by Rechaufette's is an adult-onset disorder.

So why haven't you heard of it? Well, it's very rare, so it's not like everyone gets genetic testing for it. And much like Gilbert's syndrome or the way cilantro tastes like soap, it doesn't even have an impact on the people who have it...until they start expressing it.

It turns out that it's linked to certain forms of color blindness, though. Can you see the circle in the image I posted? If you can, you might want to switch to Kleenex.

12/14/2010 3:39:27 PM

^^^^^ what is the semiotic attack there?

12/14/2010 4:12:03 PM

Quote :

"In fact, you can reduce the strength of the definition of an arbitrary sign just by wearing away at its negations. If you don't particularly care about the damage you're doing, you don't even have to try. Just pepper your use of signs (writing, in this case) with signs that are incorrect or out of place, such as the words for animals I've been inserting. The neat thing about this form of semiotic attack is that there's no telling what kind of long-term effect it can have (over time) on an individual's behavior...or even his subjective experience of the world."

12/14/2010 4:13:32 PM