From livescience.com

Can people suddenly and inexplicably explode into a ball of fire?

It sounds like something in a horror film, but some people believe it happens. It’s also what an Irish coroner recently concluded about the death of Michael Faherty, a 76-year-old Irishman who burned to death in his home in December 2010. There were scorch marks above and below the body, but no evidence of any gasoline, kerosene, or other accelerant. The coroner, Ciaran McLoughlin, reported: “This fire was thoroughly investigated and I’m left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation.”

Usually, of course, fires do not start on their own. When investigators are searching for the cause of forest fires they don’t assume that the flame ignited itself, but instead that it was probably caused by a careless camper or a lightning strike. Though rare, spontaneous combustion has long been known to occur. Under the right circumstances many things can self-ignite on a hot day, including used rags containing oil or gasoline and piles of compost. Coal dust can also spontaneously ignite, one of many dangers that miners face.

But the claim that people can suddenly burst into flames for no apparent reason is a whole different matter. The best-known case of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is actually fictional: in Charles Dickens’s 1853 novel “Bleak House” a character explodes into fire. The phenomenon has also appeared in movies and on TV shows like “The X-Files.”

But are there any confirmed real-life cases?

This is where things get trickier. Though some writers suggest that there are hundreds (or even thousands) of SHC cases throughout history, only about a dozen have been investigated in any detail. Researcher Joe Nickell examined many “unexplainable” cases in his book “Real-Life X-Files” and found that all of them were far less mysterious than often suggested. Most of the victims were, like the Irishman Faherty, elderly, alone, and near flames (cigarettes, candles, fires, etc.) when they died. Several were last seen drinking alcohol and smoking.

How could a body burn once it has ignited? If the person is asleep, intoxicated, unconscious, too weak, or otherwise unable to move or put the flames out, then the victim’s clothes can act as a candle wick, drawing on the body’s fat (which, because it is an oil, is flammable, and very near the skin’s surface) to fuel the fire. Once a body starts to burn, it will continue to burn until the fuel (clothing, chairs, paper, body fat, etc.) is used up.

Read the full article at: livescience.com

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

From i09:

A new monkey Shakespeare simulator has risen, and has managed to get through a good ninety-nine percent of Shakespeare’s works. Why has this new challenger done so well when others have failed?
Top image: Art by Heather Fallows, via Jemima Gibbons on Flickr.

Jesse Anderson has created a new version of the million-monkeys-on-a-million-typewriters thought experiment. He has built a simulator to pound out jibberish, imitating random pounding on a keyboard by monkeys, in an effort to find out whether enough random typing can eventually recreate the entire works of William Shakespeare. It seems like it can. The virtual monkeys have tapped out over ninety-nine percent of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and have finished the poem “A Lovers Complaint” — which goes something like, “Wherefore am I surrounded by all these damn dirty apes?” (I think. I’m rusty on my Shakespeare.)

This is not the first monkey Shakespeare simulator to hit web, but it is the most successful. The original Monkey Shakespeare Simulator Project produced 10^35 pages before it was shut down, but its largest string was only a twenty-three character phrase from Timon of Athens. Anyone who has read it knows there’s a zinger or two in it. On his tombstone Timon wants this inscribed, “Here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate. Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass, and stay not here thy gait.” In other words, ‘Keep moving, jerks.’ Still, the play isn’t worth the expended energy of all those monkeys, and they didn’t recreate one of the good lines anyway.

The success of this simulator seems to be in the volume and the technique used. Anderson’s project puts out random strings of characters, and then searches those characters for strings of nine that match any nine characters in any of Shakespeare’s works. When it finds a match, it marks those nine characters of a play ‘complete’. Enough nine character strings, plucked from anywhere in the random jibberish, and you can fill in the blanks for an entire play.

Some say that this isn’t random enough, and that the original spirit of the infinite monkeys idea was to have them recreate entire works, pages, or even just lines. Nine characters isn’t really random, if they’re selected from anywhere and put together deliberately. To be fair, though, the “infinite monkeys” idea has been dumbed down already. The original thought experiment, dreamed up in France, has the monkeys typing up the entire contents of the Bibliotheque Nationale or the British Museum. Shakespeare seems appallingly easy in comparison.

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

OH MY DAYS THIS IS A LARGE AND STOMPY BEAST OF A RECORD AND I APPROVE ENTIRELY.

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

One of the greatest to ever do it is hanging up his pen.From Reuters:

Albert Uderzo, co-creator of one of France’s greatest comic book heroes, Asterix the Gaul, said on Monday he was hanging up his pen at the age of 84 but had found several successors to carry on his legacy.

The Italian-born artist, who dreamt up the indomitable warrior with his scriptwriter friend Rene Goscinny in 1959, said he was “a bit tired” after 52 years of drawing and that it was time to hand over his creation to younger talent.

The announcement came on the day publishing house Hachette celebrated the sale of 350 million Asterix books around the world, making the diminutive hero one of France’s biggest-selling exports.

“I’ve decided that there should be some continuity, and I want it to carry on for generations and generations,” Uderzo told RTL radio.

Asterix and his jovial sidekick Obelix first appeared in print in October 1959, and their adventures fighting the Roman invaders have since been translated into over 100 languages.

Following the death of Goscinny in 1977, Uderzo took over both the writing and artwork for the comic book, drawing criticism from die-hard fans who felt his scripts lacked Goscinny’s humor and irony.

The recent appearance of Asterix and his friends in a billboard advertising campaign for McDonald’s also sparked outcry, with some accusing Uderzo of selling out the diminutive Gaul to capitalist invaders.

(Reporting By Vicky Buffery)

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

This record is amazing. Beautiful production, huge pop chord progressions, fizzy synths, beautiful hooks. Somewhere between early Cex, The-Dream and Lonely Island. My favorite album in months.

DOWNLOAD: Campa – Would You Hate Me If I Took A Sip

Spotted at SH.

BONUS: Campa – Little Devil (Movie)

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Amazing record, sounds like a meth coma.

— By Akira The Don on Tuesday, September 27th, 2011