Category: Weird

Pykrete

I read about this in the latest Fortean Times: During WWII, eccentric genius Geoffrey Pyke invented a form of ice that melted so slowly you could use it as a building material. It was as strong as concrete and floated, just like regular ice. So you could build a literally unsinkable ship out of it: a ship whose hull was made of a material that floated. And if you wanted you could make that ship with a forty foot thick hull that would just slowly chip away bit by bit even under the force of an artillery barrage, with no real damage to the ship. There were plans underway to build aircraft carriers out of Pykrete. A relatively small test ship was built on a Canadian lake. It took over a year to melt even after it was abandoned completely.

I was like, there has to be something about Pykrete on the internet!

And what do you know — this experimenter created and shot at some Pykrete, Amateur Scientist (of course!) has an article on it, and of course Metafilter got there before me, with a lame headline.

Pyke was a fascinating character. Grab the current issue of Fortean Times and read up on him.

UPDATE: some are skeptical of many of the details of the Pykrete stories.

9/11 conspiracy theories? That’s so 2002

The Arctic Beacon, of which I’d not heard before, publishes an article about a “former Bush team member” (meaning, apparently, a former chief economist in the Labor Department) who thinks that the Twin Towers were demolished from within.

“First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not,” said Reynolds. “These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

“On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia’s Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that ‘beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.’ Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC.”

The whole thing seems mindbogglingly implausible — it assumes a malice and perhaps more importantly a competence on the part of malign forces within the government that is pretty hard to credit. But if you’re interested in such things this is one of the less obviously nutty presentations thereof. Something to take your mind off Guantanamo and Extraordinary Rendition and all-out assaults on Social Security and permanently exempting the hyper-rich from taxation and extensions of the Patriot Act. Ah, for the good old days when who was responsible for people dying horribly in flaming skyscrapers was all we had to worry about. That was the life.

Linked to from several places of late, like metafilter and Fortean Times.

UPDATE: A big ol’ rambling retrospective blog entry on the whole thing, bristling with links.

Hocus Pocus Postmodernocus!

I can’t imagine who amongst the readers of this blog that I know of would be interested in this book, but I’m so geeked that my friend Pat has published this that I can’t not pimp it. Postmodern Magic: The Art of Magic in the Information Age is a book about magic, the supernatural kind, from the point of view of a postmodernist neo-Hellenic pagan and sometime chaos magician. Learn why magic circles are like parentheses, and how to make up magical symbols for fun and profit.

It’s written more in a personal, “this is what I’ve done, this is what I think, this is why” style than a kind of “here is the Secret Occult Truth from On High” style, though he doesn’t entirely evade that — he does teach college students, after all, so it’d be pretty hard to completely eradicate pontification from his communication. :) It’s a lot of fun to read. Buy it! Support my man Pat!

I’ll let y’all know if I decide to call postmodern spirits from the vasty deep. :)

‘Satanic orgies’ desecrated graveyard

Satanic orgies’ desecrated graveyard

via Fortean Times.

The thing that got to me is this sentence:

“And it’s obvious that orgies are taking place, as the area where they go is littered with used condoms.”

Cause you know, sure, they worship Lucifer, Beelzebub, Prince of Darkness, and conduct dark sacrifices, smashing headstones in a graveyard, but they don’t have sex without condoms! That would be irresponsible.