Hypothetical murder/suicide conundrum

By Cory Doctorow at 10:13 am Tuesday, Apr 24 • Comments • Share

The story of Ronald Opus started out life as a hypothetical problem raised in a dinner speech at a meeting the American Academy of Forensic Sciences by its then-president President Don Harper Mills. However, the (amazing) resurfaced on the Internet seven years later as an urban legend, and became a particularly virulent example of the form. The Ronald Opus story is now a feature in some law-schools, in which students are asked to evaluate the culpability of the various parties. Below is the whole story, collected by Snopes from a 1996 email (split for length). I'd love to see your thoughts on liability and culpability in the comments.

For those of you who were unable to attend the awards dinner during the annual [American Academy of Forensic Sciences] meeting in San Diego, you missed a tall tale on complex forensics presented by AAFS President Don Harper Mills in his opening remarks. The following is a recount of Dr. Mills' story:

On March 23 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a gunshot wound of the head caused by a shotgun. Investigation to that point had revealed that the decedent had jumped from the top of a ten story building with the intent to commit suicide. (He left a note indicating his despondency.) As he passed the 9th floor on the way down, his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, killing him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been erected at the 8th floor level to protect some window washers, and that the decedent would not have been able to complete his intent to commit suicide because of this.

Ordinarily, a person who starts into motion the events with a suicide intent ultimately commits suicide even though the mechanism might be not what he intended. That he was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not change his mode of death from suicide to homicide, but the fact that his suicide intent would not have been achieved under any circumstance caused the medical examiner to feel that he had homicide on his hands.

Further investigation led to the discovery that the room on the 9th floor from whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. He was threatening her with the shotgun because of an interspousal spat and became so upset that he could not hold the shotgun straight. Therefore, when he pulled the trigger, he completely missed his wife, and the pellets went through the window, striking the decedent.

Read the rest

A new tradition in China: honoring the dead with paper iPads, iPhones

By Xeni Jardin at 9:58 am Tuesday, Apr 3 • Comments • Share

Paper replicas of iPads and iPhones with other gadgets for sale for the Chinese Qingming festival at a prayer supplies shop near Kuala Lumpur. Chinese people go to cemeteries during the festival to honor the dead with prayers, food, tea, wine and paper replicas of flashy cars, Louis Vuitton bags, and other bling for the ancestors to enjoy in the afterlife. Reuters/2011.

April 4 in China marks Tomb Sweeping Day (Qingming Festival), an ancient cultural tradition in which families honor their ancestors by visiting their tombs and leaving offerings of food. Not unlike Día de Los Muertos, really.

Brian Ashcraft writes at Kotaku:

Paper replicas depict items that can be used in the afterlife, such as clothing, money, and cars, are burned. Over the years, this tradition has evolved with the times as evident by a recent must-have paper replica: the iPad.

Read the rest

Memorial reefs: cast your loved ones' cremains into concrete marine habitats

By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 pm Tuesday, Mar 27 • Comments • Share

Eternal Reefs is a company that will turn your cremains into concrete artificial coral reef and marine habitat. Families are allowed to attend the casting of the reef-component, put their handprints in it, view the finished item, and accompany the reef to the drop-site.

Mariner Memorial Reef
(large) 4' high by 6' wide
3800 - 4000 lbs.
$6,995
The largest of our reefs, the Mariner Memorial Reef stands out as a pinnacle of the reef and attracts the larger species of sea life. The Mariner can accommodate up to four sets of remains and is frequently used for spouses or partners to be together.

Prices include:
* The handling of the cremated remains once we receive them
* The incorporation of the remains into the concrete
* The casting of the Memorial Reef
* The transportation of the Memorial Reef to the project site
* The final placement and dedication
* A GPS survey to record the specific longitude and latitude of the Memorial Reef
* Bronze Plaque with inscription
* Two Memorial Certificates
Please note: When more than one set of remains is included in an individual Memorial Reef there is an additional charge of $250 for each set of remains other than the first set.

Eternal Reefs, A Cremation Memorial Option (via Super Punch)

Turning artificial joints into scrap metal at the crematorium

By Cory Doctorow at 6:17 am Tuesday, Feb 21 • Comments • Share

Combine the spike in commodity metal prices with advances in geriatric medicine and the increased trend to cremation and what do you get? A thriving trade in artificial joint harvesting and recycling. A Dutch company called OrthoMetals recycles 250 tons of scrap from cremated bodies -- cofounder Ruud Verberne notes that it takes five hips to make one kilo of metal, which fetches €12 on the scrap market.

Clark Boyd and Rob Hugh-Jones from PRI write on the BBC:

The company works by collecting the metal implants for nothing, sorting them and then selling them - taking care to see that they are melted down, rather than reused.

After deducting costs, 70-75% of the proceeds are returned to the crematoria, for spending on charitable projects.

"In the UK for example," he says. "We ask for letters from charities that have received money from the organisation we work with in the UK and we see that the amount we transferred to them has been given to charity. This is a kind of controlling system that we have..."

...Mr Verberne has no metal implants himself, but he points out his business partner's wife, who is helping sort out bits of metal at the recycling plant. "She has two titanium hips", he says. "And she was once asked: "Isn't it strange that you know that one day your hips will run along this conveyor belt?'"

"She said, 'No, it's just a part of life. You're going to die, and I know that reusing metals is a very good thing, so it is no problem at all.'" She added "'My mother's hip was on here too!'"

Melting down hips and knees: The afterlife of implants

Kim Jong-Il is dead

By Dean Putney at 8:03 pm Sunday, Dec 18 • Comments • Share

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has died, CNN reports. And with him dies a great novelty Tumblog.

I think I just heard every venture capital firm fire up their private jets.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il dead, state TV reports - CNN

Watch starfish flee an icy finger of death

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:19 pm Wednesday, Nov 23 • Comments • Share

This clip from the BBC's Frozen Planet is one of the most amazing things you will ever see.

"Brinicle" is a clever portmanteau for an icy finger of death that forms naturally in the very cold seawater one finds around Earth's poles. A crust of sea ice can form on top of this water, and that's the first step to making a brinicle. Here's how polar oceanographer Mark Brandon explained the process in an article on the BBC website:

In winter, the air temperature above the sea ice can be below -20C, whereas the sea water is only about -1.9C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The salt in this newly formed ice is concentrated and pushed into the brine channels. And because it is very cold and salty, it is denser than the water beneath.

The result is the brine sinks in a descending plume. But as this extremely cold brine leaves the sea ice, it freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. This forms a fragile tube of ice around the descending plume, which grows into what has been called a brinicle.

Check out that BBC website link for more information on how the Frozen Planet videographers captured this footage. That's also where you should go to watch the video when this YouTube version is inevitably taken down.

Thank you, Brittany. Truly freaking amazing.

Video Link

Beautiful short film about decomposition of a whale carcass

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 7:08 am Friday, Oct 14 • Comments • Share

When an animal as big as a whale dies, its body becomes a whole new ecosystem. One whale carcass can support other forms of life for 50-to-75 years—basically as long as the whale itself lived.

This gorgeous video (I am not kidding. You will not need a unicorn chaser.) illustrates how that cycle works, using paper cutouts and simple puppetry. It's mesmerizing and enlightening.

The video was made for a Radiolab episode about whale falls, and was put together by Sharon Shattuck and Flora Lichtman. Amazing work!

Video Link

Thanks to Ferris Jabr

How do you want to be remembered?

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 7:17 am Thursday, Oct 6 • Comments • Share

I know we're all thinking of a different death today, but I'd like to go back for just a moment to Ralph Steinman. Steinman is the man Xeni told you about earlier this week, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine but died (of pancreatic cancer*) before the award could be made public.

Only living people can win a Nobel Prize. That rule is why neither Gandhi, nor Rosalind Franklin, is a Nobel award winner. But Steinman is going to be the exception. Technically, he won the Nobel before his untimely death, and the Committee has decided that he gets to keep it. So Ralph Steinman will be the first person to receive a Nobel Prize posthumously. (EDIT: I got this wrong, as a couple of commenters have pointed out. Rules are that you must be alive when decision is announced, but can die between then and the ceremony and still get the award. That's happened to several people. What's different with Steinman is that he was dead before the announcement, but because he died so suddenly the Nobel Committee didn't realize it until after they'd proclaimed him a winner. So Steinman is getting in under what commenter Warren_Terra calls a Schrodinger's cat clause: The Nobel Committee has decided that Steinman wasn't dead until somebody checked.)

Now, Gandhi and Franklin are the famous examples, but death has knocked a lot of people out of the Nobel running over the years. My friend David Isenberg grew up with the children of Stephen Kuffler, a neuroscientist who probably would have won, along with his colleagues, the 1981 Nobel for medicine, had he not died in 1980. On the occasion of Ralph Steinman's posthumous win, David got a really nice email from Kuffler's son, about what awards do and don't tell you about a person, and what you really want people to remember about you after you die:

... prizes are an honor and a delight to win, but of greater importance is having put forth good and constructive efforts and having done so with integrity. Since it is all too easy to strive for honor without integrity and in so doing to win awards, relying only on being awarded prizes to be considered “good” is most unfortunate.

Those of us had the good fortune of growing up around individuals who did good science, are even more fortunate in having had the greater pleasure of knowing some of those people were both good scientists and good persons. What greater honor can there be than being considered a good person, of having integrity, and having one’s efforts be considered to have been constructive. In fact, those very individuals are themselves most fortunate and honored by having been supported in their attempts to fulfill their own passions. What could be a greater privilege?

Although by their very existence, prizes preclude most people from winning them, many people in addition to awardees are worthy of being awarded aspects of an awarded prizes. After all, it is only as a consequence of the minor and major contributors of all others working in our field of expertise that our own work can rise to be seen in the context of the broad fabric of our research field. Since no research is performed in a vacuum, the honor of any prize really goes to all those who participated in, supported and allowed exceptional work to be performed, and many of these individuals are not even scientists. In the end we can hope that we each one who contributes is a winner in our own domain.

Ancient Egyptians: They're just like us!

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 2:27 pm Thursday, Aug 18 • Comments • Share

Egyptian mummies were coiffed for the afterlife with the help of animal fat-based hair gel. Bonus moment of cultural weirdness: The article linked here seems to ignore the fact that styling the hair of the dead isn't just some odd thing the ancient Egyptians did. In fact, it's a common facet of modern Western burial practices. (Via Rowan Hooper)

The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses

By Xeni Jardin at 12:20 pm Friday, Aug 12 • Comments • Share

I'm really digging the look of Dr. Paul Koudounaris' new book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses.

Don't yet have a copy in my hands (it's not out 'til October), but I've pre-Amazonned one for myself. The book is packed with hundreds of gorgeous color photographs of these sites throughout the world, many of which are usually inaccessible to outsiders.

Here's the project website, and here's the publisher's feature page. The first show and signing takes place at La Luz de Jesus gallery in Los Angeles on Sept. 24.

Here is the author/artist's statement, and here is a collection of related essays by Dr. Koudounaris.

Advance order here for $31.50. View more photos and a sneak peek inside the book, below...

Read the rest

Poignant short film about the death of a dragonfly

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 9:39 am Thursday, Aug 11 • Comments • Share

When filmmaker Paul Kroeker found a dragonfly dying on his deck, he turned the animal's final moments into a beautiful and haunting short movie. Who says insects can't be charismatic fauna?

(Via John Pavlus)

Plant eats bird

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:23 am Tuesday, Aug 9 • Comments • Share

This is a photo of bird being eaten by a plant.

According to a story from the BBC, it's not unusual for a carnivorous pitcher plant, such as this one, to get its "hands" on a frog, a mouse, or even a rat. But poultry is a rare dish.

The plants kill by tricking prey into investigating the pitcher, usually by offering sweet nectar. Once part of the way into the pitcher, the prey finds it impossible to climb back out. Then it drowns. And then the plant slowly dissolves it—Saarlac-like—over a long period of time.

Bioartist training fungi to devour her when she dies

By Cory Doctorow at 12:53 pm Wednesday, Jul 27 • Comments • Share

Bioartist Jae Rhim Lee is systematically training fungi to feast on her "body tissue and excretions–skin, hair, nails, blood, bone, fat, tears, urine, feces, and sweat." When she dies, she wants the mushrooms to devour her and remediate the industrial toxins in the soil where she's buried. She wears a fungus suit covered in her lee-phaghic buddies so that they can be close to her. It's all about death; Lee calls it "decompiculture."

The first prototype of the Infinity Burial Suit is a body suit embroidered with thread infused with mushroom spores. The embroidery pattern resembles the dendritic growth of mushroom mycelium. The Suit is accompanied by an Alternative Embalming Fluid, a liquid spore slurry, and Decompiculture Makeup, a two-part makeup consisting of a mixture of dry mineral makeup and dried mushroom spores and a separate liquid culture medium. Combining the two parts and applying them to the body activates the mushroom spores to develop and grow.

Infinity Mushroom (via Kottke)