The Weird, Random, and Interesting things that Fit Nowhere Else Thread

[Rosbjerg]

Old thread here.

 

 

 

SpaceX Makes It Three In A Row - Lands First Stage On Droneship.

 

 

 

Animation set to an old Rod Sterling interview...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ywWdT6IL3o&feature=youtu.be

[Agiel]

The former Govenator and his animatronic double in Terminator 2:

 

[Hiro Protagonist]

TV reporter arrested for defecating on homeowner’s lawn

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/wtf/tv-reporter-arrested-for-defecating-on-homeowners-lawn/news-story/9acbdac5d260818196d5af33f88c1124

[Bartimaeus]

"An average of 35% of coral was now dead or dying in the northern and central sections [of Australia's Great Barrier Reef]."

 

That'll surely help with the "dying oceans" problem...

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/30/most-coral-dead-in-central-section-of-great-barrier-reef-surveys-reveal

[Meshugger]

This was weird: http://theturkishsun.com/the-mysterious-case-of-the-invisible-qatar-airways-plane-in-gaziantep-19653/

[Gfted1]

King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite.

[Leferd]

King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite.

Dawn?? King Tut was the Sword of the Morning!?!

[Rosbjerg]

So a Danish travel agency did a really cool commercial that has been spreading virally..

 

 

Almost makes me wish this was mandetory for anyone voting for a party on the extreme right or left.

[Gfted1]

In a move that shocks nobody, Why are the French on strike ... again?

 

If they follow suit of the previous annual strikes, the French will teach the French a lesson by causing as much economic damage as possible to the French.

[Gfted1]

Bionic Leaf Makes Fuel from Sunlight, Water and Air.

[Raithe]

Just to give your brains a little ache...

 

[Malcador]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1046165765/licki-brush-lick-your-cat

[rjshae]

King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite.

 

Clearly we need to heavily protect that weapon. In the event of a mass demonic summoning during the end times, it may be our only hope.

[Raithe]

Here's one that Bruce might like to weigh in on...

 

With the latest student athlete rapist story in the US news ...

 

 

[Raithe]

Heh.

 

 

Adult/child interaction concepts is borrowed from "Games People Play" - a good read, but which will make you suddenly extremely intolerant of the bull**** you see people trying to pull around you. (And yes, being passive aggressive is one of those games)

 

If you have a problem with someone, you can deal with it in 3 ways: as a child (who doesn't generally differentiate their reaction to who they're dealing with), as an adult to a child, or as... adult to adult.

 

As a child: you throw a temper tantrum because "you're not happy" about whatever, without bothering with valid points to support why you're right in your assessment or to explain why they should be making a change.

 

As an adult to a child: you carefully and gently explain that what they're doing isn't a good idea, and attempt to help them through the logic chain to understanding that their behavior is irrational and unreasonable and should change. This often comes across as condescending if you're not actually talking to a child.

 

As an adult to an adult: you state that you have a problem, describe what it is, and explain why it's a problem. You expect that they will hear your statement, acknowledge parts that they agree with (and if appropriate apologize), and offer counter-points to anything they disagree with. You then have a rational back and forth discussion that usually ends in a compromise if neither person convinces the other they're completely in the right.

If someone comes to you with a problem, you have the option to react in the same three ways.

 

If you want to know why someone is always treating you like a child, consider the possibility that it's because every time they treat you like an adult, you respond with a temper tantrum like a child, but every time they start with the adult-to-child model, you respond to it. Congratulations, you've literally trained them that you'd rather be treated like a child.

 

You don't get to have it both ways.

 

Edited June 7, 2016 by Raithe

[Raithe]

Oh Parenting...

 

[Raithe]

A cunningly made treehouse...

 

[Agiel]

 

FBI gets an unexpected lesson in interrogation from a former Nazi

by Del Quentin Wilber

 

When the FBI went looking for the best way to pry information from terrorists, they discovered it in the most unlikely of places: an almost-forgotten interrogator for Nazi Germany.

 

Hanns Scharff was a master manipulator, but not in the stereotypical Gestapo-like ways that usually come to mind. His tools were kindness, respect, empathy and guile.

 

He told meandering stories, took detainees on long strolls in the countryside and left them alone in his office to read the U.S. military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. He provided hard-to-find cigarettes and even let one captured U.S. pilot take a short flight in a German fighter plane.

 

But all the while, without them even knowing, he was swiping their secrets.

 

In recent years, Scharff’s technique has become the intense focus of research funded by the U.S. government through the FBI-led High-Value Interrogation Group, a task force of agents, analysts and intelligence community officers who question suspected terrorists and other key detainees.

 

Since being established by President Obama in 2009 after the furor over the U.S. government’s use of torture and “enhanced interrogation” techniques on alleged terrorists, the unit has spent at least $10 million researching the most effective ways to elicit information from tough-to-crack suspects, injecting science into the art of interrogation.

 

The work has verified what Scharff, an art student who never planned to be a soldier, discovered more than seven decades ago: building a rapport with your subjects and challenging their preconceived notions gets you more reliable information than torture or handling them roughly.

 

“Scharff happened upon some of the strategies that are really effective, and we are beginning to understand why they are effective and how effective they can be,” said Christian Meissner, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who spent the past five years conducting and managing research for the interrogation group. “He really hit on strategies and techniques that work, and we now know why they work. There is a bit of an irony, I know, that we are learning this from an interrogator for the Nazis.”

 

That Scharff became one of the world’s most successful interrogators came about somewhat by accident.

 

Raised to take over his well-to-do family’s textile business, Scharff was working in South Africa in the 1930s as a director of a German manufacturing conglomerate. When World War II broke out in 1939, he and his wife and children were vacationing in Germany, and he was pressed into military service. A fluent English speaker, he was assigned to work as an interpreter, and then interrogator, for the German air force, the Luftwaffe.

 

Early in his service, Scharff told a biographer, he witnessed a particularly brutal interrogation in which a German officer “drove a totally frightened POW into the corner of the the room by his mad roaring.” After that, Scharff said, he knew how he would do the job.

 

“You have one overwhelming impression: should you ever come into the position where you would interview a POW yourself, you should do it in a calm and friendly way. Not to bully, threaten or shout,” he told Raymond F. Toliver, who was a U.S. army pilot in World War II and wrote Scharff’s biography, “The Interrogator.”

 

The softer approach turned out to be very effective. During his tenure, he interviewed more than 500 U.S. and allied pilots, most of them fighter jockeys, all trained to give up nothing beyond their name, rank and serial number. The German later wrote that he successfully elicited useful information from all but about 20 of them.

 

After the war, in a sign of the respect U.S. military officials had for Scharff’s methods, the interrogator was invited to give lectures at the Pentagon and helped develop survival techniques for U.S. Air Force pilots.

 

He eventually immigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles where he became a commercially successful artist specializing in mosaic work. He crafted fountain mosaics for the Los Angeles Civic Center and the floor of the state Capitol in Sacramento.

 

He died in 1992, well before the U.S. war on terror commenced. But his methods began getting a second look amid the fierce national debate over the harsh interrogation tactics used by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks. President Obama and others have condemned some of those methods as torture.

 

Former CIA officials have defended the rough techniques as useful, but a 2014 Senate report found that the agency’s use of torture failed to stop any imminent plots.

 

Sometimes, it even backfired, the report concluded. At least one suspect “sang like a tweetie bird,” according to a CIA official quoted in the report, before he was tortured. But after being subjected to harsh interrogation, he provided no other useful information, according to the report.

 

Amid the debate, the FBI-led interrogation unit began funding research to scientifically analyze various interrogation practices. It plans to soon release a report detailing best practices.

Though Scharff’s techniques had been long known to U.S. officials, the research confirmed for the first time that it actually works better. 

 

Par Anders Granhag, a professor of psychology at the University of Gothenburg who is considered the leading authority on Scharff, says the interrogator’s method is based on doing extensive homework and then manipulating captives’ assumptions, circumventing their counter-interrogation training.

 

For example, Scharff built extensive dossiers of U.S. aviators’ lives and units, using U.S. newspaper clippings, previous interrogations and radio logs. He discovered that hidden in pilots’ clothing were markings that could identify their fighter and bomber groups, Scharff wrote in a 1950 Argosy magazine essay titled “Without Torture.”

 

Those scraps of information enabled Scharff to spin convincing yarns about a captured pilot’s commanders, their wives, base high jinks and fellow fliers. Scharff made it appear that he already knew intimate details about their unit even when they had refused to talk.

 

As Scharff smiled and plied his prisoners with tea and coffee – surprising pilots who had expected to be tortured or seduced by female spies – he subtly injected leading questions or made outlandish statements that compelled his American captives to correct him.

 

For example, Scharff wrote, German commanders at one point wanted to know why some American pilots used tracer rounds with a distinctive white flash while others were red. Scharff suggested to a pilot that it appeared American industry must have run out of the chemicals necessary for the red tracer bullets. 

 

No, the pilot responded, refuting any suggestion of a shortage. The white tracers simply signaled that planes were running out of ammo, Scharff told Toliver, a piece of information that would prove very helpful to German fighter pilots.

 

Even after getting a critical detail, Scharff kept chatting with prisoners, swapping stories that pilots constantly sought to one-up. The information went right into his files, he wrote, providing him loads of context to help him interrogate the next flier.

 

“He was very thoughtful,” said Granhag, “and he knew that the prisoners were trying to figure out what he was after. He realized they would likely talk more if they thought they were giving him information he already had. He played off their expectations.”

 

In his lab, Granhag determined that such techniques were far more effective in eliciting truthful information from subjects than a more direct and confrontational approach.

 

In one of his experiments, lab participants were given details about a fictional plot to bomb a shopping center. They were told that they would be paid based on how well they were able to appear to cooperate with their make-believe interrogators without providing too much information, just as if they were terrorists trying to provide just enough information to con the police.

 

The researcher determined that interviewers wielding Scharff’s techniques elicited more information from participants than those using the other approach. In addition to providing more information than those subjected to the direct and more confrontational method, those interviewed using Scharff’s technique wrongly believed they had revealed far less information than they actually had. 

 

For obvious ethical reasons, Granhag and other researchers have not been able to test whether Scharff’s method works better than actual torture, but they say research suggests it does. 

 

“Take your moral compass and heart out of it, and just look at the results,” said Steven Kleinman, a former military intelligence officer who was a founding member of a committee that advises the interrogation group on its research. “The closer you adhere to the most exacting standards of human rights and treatment of prisoners -- what Scharff did -- you will be more effective. Here is a guy who was caught up in a horrible situation he couldn’t walk away from, and his moral standards still allowed him to be successful, perhaps among the most successful interrogators in history.”

[Raithe]

For the oddly quirky one that people might be entertained by..
 
See What Happens when your face fantasy writers play Patherfinder
 
 

Ever wondered what it might be like to sit in on a tabletop roleplaying game session with some of your favorite fantasy authors? You’re in luck! Our friends at Tor Books and Paizo Inc. have recorded a four-part Pathfinder Fantasy Roleplaying Game session featuring Max Gladstone, Elizabeth Bear, Wesley Chu, Scott Lynch and Django Wexler. The best part is that they’re not playing Elves, Dwarves, Halflings or any of the standard fantasy good guys: Nope! They’re playing goblins. Needless to say, this kind of set-up provides a lot of opportunities for mischief, none of which you’ll want to miss.
 
When you’re done watching all the fun, be sure to check out the latest Pathfinder Tales novel: Liar’s Bargain by Tim Pratt, and learn all more about the Pathfinder Tales series here.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpt4_GpXWwE

 

 

[Raithe]

[Agiel]

[Raithe]

Because we still need the occasional upbeat moment in the midst of all the bleaker news..

 

[Raithe]

A few people I know are talking about signing up for Gishwhes this year...   "Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen"

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF0kpulllV8

[ShadySands]

[Guard Dog]

I love this headline: "Self learning robot escapes testing area"

 

Well, it's true, that did actually happen. But the truth is less exciting than the image it conjures. I read that and heard music from The Terminator in my head and thought "It begins... at last!"

 

Well... not so much: https://www.rt.com/viral/346747-russian-robot-runaway-havoc/