Bizarre – Page 14 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Guest Blogger

FROM MUGGING TO MATH GENIUS!

Now, this isn’t the story of a man who was a serial mugger that left his horrible ways behind to delve into the wild world of math. This is the story of a nice young man who couldn’t have cared less about solving equations, and was way more interested in working out, that is, until he was mugged for his fancy leather jacket and left with a concussion that changed his life, and brain, forever.

Yahoo News writes:

Jason Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, or a Masters degree. In fact, he dropped out of college and works at a futon store, but he is a mathematical genius and has been since being brutally attacked and kicked in the head by muggers a decade ago.

The 41-year-old from Tacoma, Washington used to mostly be interested in working out and partying when muggers beat him outside a karaoke club for his $99 leather jacket. Now he sees complex formulas everywhere and turns them into diagrams.

“All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the ground and I thought, ‘I’m going to get killed,” he told ABC.

Doctors initially thought it was a concussion, but then Padgett started becoming obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams. He couldn’t draw before and at first had no idea what the diagrams were of.

The diagrams turned out to be fractals, small portions of a visual representation for Pi that are similar to the whole image. Everywhere he looks, he sees formulas such as the Pythagorean Theorem.

Because of the damage, his brain is forced to overcompensate in areas most people can’t access.

“Savant syndrome is the development of a particular skill, that can be mathematical, spatial, or autistic, that develop to an extreme degree that sort of makes a person super human,” said Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center of Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, to ABC.

GIANT CRAB IS GIGANTIC, AND STILL GROWING!

"Claude the Crab" here, weighs in at an astounding 15lbs!

Three very lucky Tasmanian King Crabs were plucked from the pot this weekend in Australia, for when a worker of the Sealife aquariums spotted the ginormous beauties at a market, she had to save them!

Claude, shown above, and 2 other of his friends will get to live the rest of their days out in a nice relaxing, and what could even be called luxurious, environment that the Sealife crew take great lengths to ensure, for all their aquatic creatures.

The Sun writes:

The Tasmanian King Crab was snapped up alongside two others for £3,000 by a SeaLife worker during a trip to Australia.

The one pictured was named Claude and is 15in wide while weighing 15lbs.

He will grow to 30lbs and could produce up to 20lbs worth of meat — or 325 crabsticks.

He and the other crustaceans — a delicacy Down Under — are being quarantined before going on display.

One will go to Weymouth, another to Birmingham, while a third will be sent to Berlin, Germany.

Rob Hicks, SeaLife’s head marine biologist, said: “They are such impressive creatures we thought that it was worth the cost and effort of flying them half-way round the world to so they can flourish in an aquarium display.

“They had a stopover in Hong Kong and arrived with us a week ago.

“It took them a few days to get over the jet-lag but now they’re feeding happily and don’t seem any the worse for their trip.”

MAN PICKS WRONG DENTIST FOR TOOTHACHE, LOOSES ALL HIS TEETH

Well here’s a story that, hopefully, no one can relate to.

A man in Poland seems to have made the biggest mistake of his life, when he scheduled to have a toothache looked at by his recently, dumped by him, ex-girlfriend and did indeed end up leaving with that one tooth pulled out, along with every-single other tooth in his mouth!

Huffington Post writes:

Breaking up is never easy — having 32 teeth ripped out is even worse.

A scorned dentist is facing jail time after surgically removing all of her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her, authorities in London said.

Marek Olszewski, 45, made the mistake of scheduling an appointment this week with his ex — 34-year-old Anna Mackowiak — for a toothache, according to the Daily Mail.

So Mackowiak allegedly did what any burned lover with a set of pliers and some anesthetic would do: she doped him up, pulled out all his teeth, and wrapped his head with bandages so he wouldn’t notice until he left her office.

“I tried to be professional and detach myself from my emotions,” she told the news site. “But when I saw him lying there I just thought, ‘What a b—–d.”

GRANDMOTHER AWAKES FROM THE DEAD, 9 DAYS LATER!

Well, at least one person is thankful for the current strike in Africa against the removal of fuel subsidy, and she’s alive because of it too!

67-year old mother of three, Mama Victoria Gbemisola Babatunde, was pronounced dead on January 7th of this year, due to a long battle with an illness. Fortunantly for her, the burial ceremony that would’ve normally been set just a day after, was delayed while travel was prohibited due to the ongoing fuel strike in mid-west Africa.

All of a sudden, on the 9th day after her official death was announced, she sneezed herself to life and awoke from what was said to be a deep coma, scaring the mortuary attendant so much she ran out of the room!

Vanguard writes:

A 67-year old mother of three resurrected 12 days after being pronounced clinically dead! Stranger than fiction you might say.

But this is the story of Mama Victoria Gbemisola Babatunde (née Bolarinwa) who was certified dead on January 7, this year but is now back to life, hale and hearty.

She would have been buried almost immediately she was certified dead.

But something delayed the burial: The nationwide strike against the removal of fuel subsidy made it impossible for the children to gather to arrange her burial.

A date was eventually fixed and the children were on their way for the burial when they learnt that she had resurrected!

LAWYER CLAIMS TO HAVE TRAVELED BACK IN TIME, FOR THE GOVERNMENT

Did the Attorney from Seattle really time travel?

An attorney based out of Seattle, Andrew Basiago, has come forward with some very interesting information. Is it about one of his clients? Maybe, about a unique case he was privy to? Nope, it’s all bout his time working for the government as a child time-traveler!

Watch the video of Andrew telling his story below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p7lflso7mT0

The Huffington Post writes:

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?

Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in “Project Pegasus,” a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids,” Basiago told The Huffington Post. “Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future.”

Skeptical? You’re not alone. Hong Kong physicist Shengwang Du issued a paper last year saying time travel is impossible, because nothing moves faster than the speed of light, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Nevertheless, Basiago’s claim gets support from Alfred Webre, a lawyer specializing in “exopolitics,” or the political implications surrounding an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Webre said teleportation and time travel have been around for 40 years, but are hoarded by the Defense Department instead of being used to transfer goods and services faraway distances.

MAN FINDS METEORITES FROM GIANT FIREBALL OVER CALIFORNIA

Robert Ward holds up two pieces of a meteorite he found in Lotus, California.

A man in California has made an amazing find after a huge fireball was seen hurling in through the sky from Sacremento, CA to Las Vegas, NV.

Robert Ward of Prescott, Arizona, who’s been hunting down meteorites for over 20 years now as he travels around the world, decided he was going to find out exactly where the mysterious object that blazed through the night sky went to and amazingly enough, he actually did!

The Telegraph writes:

The rocks each weighed about 10 grams, or the weight of two nickels, said John T Wasson, a longtime professor and expert in meteorites at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Experts say the flaming meteor, dating to the early formation of the solar system 4 to 5 billion years ago, was probably about the size of a minivan when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere with a loud boom early Sunday. It was seen from Sacramento, California, to Las Vegas and parts of northern Nevada.

An event of that size might happen once a year around the world, said Don Yeomans of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, he said.

“Getting to see one is something special,” he said. He added, “Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand, and their trail lasts all of a second or two.”

The meteor probably weighed about 70,000 kilograms, said Bill Cooke, a specialist in meteors at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. At the time of disintegration, he said, it probably released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.

SHARK FOUND WITH A REAL LASER ATTACHED TO IT, SERIOUSLY!

You’re always told not to believe what you hear, only what you see but, what if both are equally as absurd as the other?

That’s what happened when folks in the Bahamas saw a “shark in the water with a real-life laser attached to it’s body”, spread the word, watched it go viral and then got back the ensuing “Yeah, right!” from the world.

Well, unfortunately for us all, they were right!

The Herald Sun writes:

SHARKS with frickin’ lasers on their heads? Oh god, it’s real.

News just in confirms that last weekend, a shark in the Bahamas was seen with a frickin’ laser attached.

The shark was a ferocious lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris), measuring more than two metres in length.

The laser was, well, a little disappointing to be honest – a “low end of potential energy output” model from George Lucas-bothering laser manufacturers Wicked Lasers.

BUT IT WAS ATTACHED TO A SHARK NONETHELESS, proving it could be done.

The frightening experiment was conducted by Wicked Lasers after it posted a Facebook statement last week saying if 2000 people Like their post by May 27, they’ll attach a real laser to a real shark.

That was Friday. By Monday, the laser was searing parts of the Bahamas sea floor and blinding clownfish.

FOUND: LOST PAGES FROM EGYPTS’ ANCIENT BOOK OF THE DEAD

The mummy of Hunefer, shown supported by the god Anubis (or a priest wearing a jackal mask). Hunefer's wife mourns, and two priests perform rituals.

An unexpected find by Egyptologist, John Taylor, has made a remarkable impact on the piecing together of the entire, original manuscript of the ancient Egyptian tome, the Book Of The Dead.

Wikipedia says about the book:

The Book of the Dead is made up of a number of individual texts and their accompanying illustrations. Most sub-texts begin with the word ro, which can mean mouth, speech, a chapter of a book, spell, utterance, or incantation. This ambiguity reflects the similarity in Egyptian thought between ritual speech and magical power. In the context of the Book of the Dead, it is typically translated as either “chapter” or “spell”. In this article, the word “spell” is used.

At present, some 192 spells are known,though no single manuscript contains them all. They served a range of purposes. Some are intended to give the deceased mystical knowledge in the afterlife, or perhaps to identify them with the gods: for instance, Spell 17, an obscure and lengthy description of the god Atum. Others are incantations to ensure the different elements of the dead person’s being were preserved and reunited, and to give the deceased control over the world around him. Still others protect the deceased from various hostile forces, or guide him through the underworld past various obstacles. Famously, two spells also deal with the judgement of the deceased in the Weighing of the Heart ritual.

CBC News writes:

Papyrus fragments from an Egyptian funerary text known as a Book of the Dead have been discovered in the archives of the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

“We are incredibly surprised that we had such a significant object in our collection,” museum CEO Ian Galloway told Australian press.

The discovery was made recently during a visit to the museum by British Museum Egyptologist John Taylor.

While on a tour of the Australian venue’s Egyptian collection ahead of its new exhibit Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb (which opened Thursday), Taylor noticed a familiar name — Amenhotep, a well-known ancient Egyptian head of builders — on a fragile piece of papyrus long ago conserved by Queensland Museum curators.

Upon further examination of the collection, he confirmed that the ancient scraps were from The Book of the Dead of Amenhotep, an ancient Egyptian official from approximately 1420 B.C.

NASA CAPTURES PHOTO OF UFO SAILING AROUND THE SUN

Did NASA capture a ufo on film near the Sun?

NASA cameras have caught something very interesting hanging out near the sun recently.

The photo above shows a white streak in the bottom left hand corner which, in the time-lapse style the photo was taken in, represents a large, moving object, oddly close to the sun. In fact, they’ve never seen anything like it before!

Whatever it is, we can be sure it’s big, it’s floating around in space, it can withstand the heat of the sun, and it moves of its’ own accord and, that alone is fascinating!

Daily Mail writes:

A strange object flying close to the sun looks unnervingly like a huge, metallic ‘mothership’ familiar from Hollywood blockbusters.

The picture was released by Nasa’s sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO – and has become an immediate cult hit on the internet.

UFO fan site Gather News said: ‘An unusually shaped, gigantic UFO was spotted on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and posted in a video on YouTube.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star.

DOES SWEDEN HAVE ITS’ VERY OWN STONEHENGE?

A little fishing village in Sweden is used to getting a bit of attention for its’ unusual set of monolithic stones that were placed in the outline of a ship on it’s beautiful, bright green coast 1,ooo years ago. Some recent investigations on the other-hand, have discovered the stones may actually date back quite a bit older than originally thought, from 1,000 years old to 2,500 years old.

Live Science writes:

Ancient Scandinavians dragged 59 boulders to a seaside cliff near what is now the Swedish fishing village of Kåseberga. They carefully arranged the massive stones — each weighing up to 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) — in the outline of a 220-foot-long (67-meter) ship overlooking the Baltic Sea.

Archaeologists generally agree this megalithic structure, known as Ales Stenar (“Ale’s Stones”), was assembled about 1,000 years ago, near the end of the Iron Age, as a burial monument. But a team of researchers now argues it’s really 2,500 years old, dating from the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and was built as an astronomical calendar with the same underlying geometry as England’s Stonehenge.