In legit bungee jumping operations it’s typical that the person is put into a body harness that’s not attached to the bungee cords. Then they get positioned at the jump spot, then the cord is attached to the harness, then they jump. If the “attach cord to harness” step gets skipped or botched, bad stuff happens almost instantly.
Ziplining is similar. The person is put into a harness they’ll wear for however many runs. At each run the harness is attached to the zipline and the person steps / jumps off the platform.
It’d be easy for a customer to not really understand the distinction between “I’m all strapped into this harness”, and “the harness is attached properly to whatever’s supposed to support me”. Especially when the geometry makes it hard for you to aim your face at the attachment points.
Back in the heyday of open cockpit airplanes there were similar screwups where somebody put on their parachute, hopped in, never put on seatbelt or shoulder harness amongst the profusion of unfamiliar strappage and later fell out during aerobatics. Oops.
Washington man in very serious condition due to blender explosion. He was in a backyard shed trying to mix black powder for homemade fireworks.
Despite the force of the explosion, officials said no one else was hurt, and nearby structures did not sustain major damage.
“We’re incredibly fortunate that nobody else was hurt or within close proximity of that shed when it exploded,” [Pierce County Sheriff’s Deputy Carly] Cappetto said.
The explosion caused structural damage to the detached shed, scattering explosive materials throughout the debris. The Pierce County bomb squad spent several hours carefully working the scene.
“It took several hours for the bomb squad to kind of sift through all the debris and locate all of the devices. I know they collected approximately 37 homemade [devices], almost looking like sticks of dynamite. Some had been empty, some were still full,” Cappetto said.
The case will be forwarded to prosecutors for review. Cappetto stressed that making homemade explosives or fireworks is illegal.
Here’s an idea: don’t do challenges that can get you banned!
A social media influencer has been banned for life from all Six Flags parks for eating chicken nuggets while riding a roller coaster at Cedar Point theme park in Ohio.
[Allen] Ferrell recorded the video of himself eating McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets and dipping them in Sweet 'N Sour Sauce aboard the ride on May 19. He shared the video that same day to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube which has racked up thousands of views. Tony Clark, regional manager of public relations at Six Flags, said that guests must follow all rules “for safe riding.”
“Safety is a cornerstone of our business, and we have zero tolerance for inappropriate and unsafe behavior,” Clark said in an email, adding that the company’s policy prohibits all loose articles on rides, including food because it could become a choking hazard.
“Guests who violate our Code of Conduct are not welcome in our parks, and this guest has been banned from all Six Flags parks for life,” Clark wrote.
Ferrell, who is 26 and is based just outside of Detroit, has been accepting challenges from viewers for six years, he told USA TODAY via Instagram on May 29.
He said he plans to continue doing challenges (hopefully without being banned anywhere else).
At least he was in a detached shed. Many, many years ago, I tried to get a pyrotechnics license. I did a short stint at a fireworks maker in Wake Forest. Each shed was at least fifty yards from its neighbor. I’d also never seen so few fingers among so many people.
Hang out with a bunch of farmer’s in the 1960s. In addition to missing fingers, I knew one man with a missing hand and another missing an arm. Interestingly, the one-armed guy was a decent golfer.
Which is how tigers are able to camouflage - orange seems very bright and like it would stand out in a green jungle, but most ungulates have shitty color vision so a broken up pattern with stripes makes tigers invisible to deer even if green and orange are very different colors.
That’s precisely the plot of Blindsight. The alien in that book is intelligent but not conscious, and quite terrifying as a result. It can respond to very complex situations but it lacks a real consciousness.
Yes, exactly, it’s a fascinating idea. When i read Blindsight many years ago, before LLMs, it didn’t make sense to me. How can you have an alien being that behaves intelligently while completely lacking an inner experience or a consciousness. - the lights are off upstairs but the being is acting indistinguishably from a conscious being drom the outside? How is this possible? It seems inherently contradictory.
But it isn’t- you can have a conversation with an AI but there isn’t a conscious being on the other end. It is possible after all.
Unless i misunderstood Dawkins, that’s exactly the point he was making? AI demonstrates apparently intelligent behavior without having these internal states.
Oh indeed yes! These common clay of the new dairyland couldn’t be bothered to turn off the PTO before unclogging the corn picker.
For those that don’t know, here is the business end of a corn picker. See those things that look like teeth in the inlet? They’re driven by the PTO and go round and round, up the inlet, and pull the corn stalks. They also pull shirts, fingers, arms, feet, small children.
I think my generation wised up. I don’t know anyone personally that is missing fingers. (but there are probably some out there that didn’t get the message)
Then again, Neil ^%&# Armstrong got a finger severed working on farm machinery (kept his wedding ring on, that got caught, OW! ensues). Of course being Neil ^%&# Armstrong he retrieved it, put it in ice and drove himself to the hospital to have it reattached.
The comedy that is the Fayette County (Lexington, KY) public schools keeps getting better.
The district’s superintendent, Demetrus Liggins announced his resignation amid serious financial irregularities in the district, then tried to rescind it in order to negotiate a golden parachute (the board put him on leave while figuring out what to do).
Then a state rep (also a school district employee) who’s been critical of Liggins says she got a copy of a faked email slipped under her office door, threatening legal action for “defamation”. There’s video of Liggins slipping a piece of paper under the employee’s door - he claims it wasn’t the faked e-mail, but that he sent notes of "encouragement (and) empathy” to district employees.
