Interesting Wikipedia articles for killing time and expanding your mind!! - Page 163 - Other Topics Forum - Discuss Pop Culture, Arts and Entertainment

Yeah I fell like wiki is kinda white-washed on this. The first time I read the wiki article I believe that Lord Fusselbottom or w/e probably acted as a typical Brit dumbass adventurer of the day, with ostensibly noble aspirations of converting the savages to civilized life or something.

Now I know the dude was a straight up pervert who probably murdered the old couple and did god-knows-what with the kids. Awful.

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11-24-2018 , 11:48 PM

#4053

suzzer99

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Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 99,984

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayTeeMe

I still think it's weird that there's a group of people that has a carte blanche to just murder peaceful travelers or whatever.

JFC even for you this is terrible. They live on a tiny island and something horrible happens to them every time a visitor shows up. What would you expect?

Last edited by suzzer99; 11-24-2018 at 11:58 PM.

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11-24-2018 , 11:49 PM

#4054

suzzer99

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World

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Quote:

Originally Posted by JudgeHoldem

I think it’s an odd mix of stand your ground law plus defending themselves from disease

Plus the outside world has been killing them for 1000s of years and they seem to have this weird self-preservation instinct to not want to be killed.

The nearby Jarawas weren't lucky enough to live on an island. When a road was built through their dense jungle, they were almost wiped out by disease, and reduced to begging from motorists and entertaining tourists.

Last edited by suzzer99; 11-24-2018 at 11:57 PM.

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11-24-2018 , 11:53 PM

#4055

suzzer99

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Quote:

Originally Posted by daveT

Did you know that North America is the only continent, besides Antarctica, that doesn't have locusts?

The mystery of the Rocky Mountain Locust:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust

Sightings often placed their swarms in numbers far larger than any other locust species, with one famous sighting in 1875 estimated at 198,000 square miles (510,000 km2) in size (greater than the area of California), weighing 27.5 million tons and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects, the greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed, according to Guinness World Records.

And they were extinct 30 years later. There are some theories, but no one knows what happened for certain.

I saw a highway in CA turned yellow by the unlucky ones in swarms of these things that were everywhere. I guess they were grasshoppers or something, but I immediately assumed they were locusts.

Apparently these were mislabeled. Plague of Locusts Hits California Town

Quote:

Brian and Deborah Campbell's backyard has been hit by a plague straight out of the Bible. Locusts, thousands of them, are eating through their commercial garden, destroying crops and leaving the once-thriving area nearly completely barren.

"We don't know what to do," Deborah Campbell told local station KCRA. "We don't know how to stop it. We're just breeding them now."

The locusts have also infested the garden of Brad Lucchese. They have decimated his produce, eating everything but the tomatoes. Lucchese told KCRA that his chickens are having a field day feasting upon the locusts. However, there aren't nearly enough chickens to stop the thousands of bugs.

As of today, the problem is confined to a relatively small area in the town of Herald, Calif., known as "the grove," but locals fear that it will grow and spread, infesting more gardens and threatening vineyards in the area.

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11-25-2018 , 02:30 AM

#4056

JayTeeMe

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Quote:

Originally Posted by suzzer99

JFC even for you this is terrible. They live on a tiny island and something horrible happens to them every time a visitor shows up. What would you expect?

geez what did i ever do?

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11-25-2018 , 02:36 AM

#4057

suzzer99

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Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 99,984

It's completely reasonable for the govt to say "Don't go there, this is a hunter-gatherer tribe with a tortured history who has no concept of our countries or laws" and then punish people who go there or help those who go there, rather than the tribe who feels they have a right to defend their territory.

What you did was pretty much ignore all historical context and come up with some idea of how you think things should work from first principles or something.

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11-25-2018 , 02:45 AM

#4058

JayTeeMe

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Biosphere 2

While not quite as cool as the Pauly Shore movie, biosphere itself is pretty neat. It is basically completely sealed off from the rest of earth, originally in an effort to simulate conditions for space travel. The experiments where they tried locking people in there for 2 years went kinda poorly as everyone went Lord of the Flies , but the biosphere itself is still rocking self contained rainforest, savanna, and ocean 27 years later.

This youtube is better than wiki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yAcD3wuY2Q

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11-25-2018 , 02:46 AM

#4059

JayTeeMe

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Quote:

Originally Posted by suzzer99

nah i just said i thought it was weird

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11-25-2018 , 02:49 AM

#4060

suzzer99

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Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 99,984

It's not weird. It's trying to preserve literally the last isolated tribe in the world and letting them do their own thing.

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11-25-2018 , 01:30 PM

#4061

GooseHinson

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Let me guess, the people in that article had an organic farm that doesn't use the proper pesticides? Basically the anti-vaxxers of farmers who wonder why bugs eat their crops..

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11-25-2018 , 09:50 PM

#4062

jjshabado

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Quote:

Originally Posted by suzzer99

It's not weird. It's trying to preserve literally the last isolated tribe in the world and letting them do their own thing.

It’s also not weird because I bet basically every country in the world claims the right to use lethal force if necessary against someone entering their territory against their will.

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11-25-2018 , 11:06 PM

#4063

jjshabado

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Quote:

Originally Posted by JayTeeMe

The appearance of Steve Bannon in the wiki article was a surprise to me.

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11-25-2018 , 11:10 PM

#4064

Bluegrassplayer

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Video on the Mesoamerican ball game. Even though I'm subscribed to this guy's channel I can't help but feel that youtube is spying on me when this pops up.

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11-25-2018 , 11:30 PM

#4065

daveT

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I was watching Joe Rogan discussing the North Sentinel Island situation. They pulled up the island on Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/No....2335066?hl=en

You can see it had 3,141 with an average of 4 1/2 stars. There were a bunch of written reviews, but it appears Google took them down.

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11-25-2018 , 11:38 PM

#4066

suzzer99

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Join Date: Nov 2005 Posts: 99,984

Quote:

Originally Posted by JayTeeMe

I've been on a tour there - really cool. The round room which had a giant rubber "lung" as a ceiling was really freaky. This is the giant wave generator:

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11-25-2018 , 11:40 PM

#4067

suzzer99

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Quote:

Originally Posted by daveT

That might be for all of the Andaman islands - some of them are popular dive spots/tourist destinations.

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11-26-2018 , 12:21 AM

#4068

chillrob

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Quote:

Originally Posted by jjshabado

It’s also not weird because I bet basically every country in the world claims the right to use lethal force if necessary against someone entering their territory against their will.

The weird part is they have the right to do that, but they're not a country.

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11-26-2018 , 12:42 AM

#4069

daveT

S.A.G.E. Master

Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 23,955

Quote:

Originally Posted by suzzer99

That might be for all of the Andaman islands - some of them are popular dive spots/tourist destinations.

We are talking about "the internet..."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/t...e-reviews.html

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11-26-2018 , 08:18 AM

#4070

kokiri

ffermwr moch

Join Date: Feb 2006 Posts: 52,228

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colo...er?wprov=sfla1

Colony collapse disorder, all the bees are dying and no one knows why. (Interesting to see that it's not completely unprecedented)

I couldn't find a good Wikipage for it, but the us beekeeping industry that keeps bees on lorries and ships them around the country to pollenate different crops at different times of the year is nuts.

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11-26-2018 , 08:35 AM

#4071

jjshabado

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Quote:

Originally Posted by chillrob

The weird part is they have the right to do that, but they're not a country.

Whether they’re a country by our standards is a meaningless difference here. The point being they believe it’s their territory (with good reason: they occupy it, they govern it, they’re left alone) and they defended it. Trying them with murder would be similar to trying a soldier in war or protecting their borders with murder and that would be weird (regardless of any moral judgement).

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11-26-2018 , 09:38 AM

#4072

JudgeHoldem

banned

Join Date: May 2012 Posts: 8,197

how was the (very awesome) book/movie "Day of the Locust" set in L.A., but there's no locusts in North America then?!?!

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11-26-2018 , 10:56 AM

#4073

Cardfish1

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Join Date: Apr 2009 Posts: 2,018

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjshabado

It’s also not weird because I bet basically every country in the world claims the right to use lethal force if necessary against someone entering their territory against their will.

I'll take that bet

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11-26-2018 , 11:00 AM

#4074

jjshabado

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Cardfish1

I'll take that bet

I'm legitimately curious, which countries don't?

Note that I'm not talking about countries that just have their own laws and policies against enforcing or practicing that policy. A country saying they won't do something is very different than a country saying they don't have the right to do it.