Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of Blackbirds Fall From Sky Dead
Dan East writes "In a fashion worthy of a King or Hitchcock novel, blackbirds began to fall from the sky dead in Arkansas yesterday. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 birds rained down on the small town of Beeb, Arkansas, with no visible trauma. Officials are making wild guesses as to what happened — lightning strike, high-altitude hail, or perhaps trauma from the sound of New Year's fireworks killed them."
My friend descended from a Siberian tribe. His grandmother died in Siberia because she happened to go out wearing just two or three layers less than you "should". See, it's cold enough over there in my friend's ancestral village that the windows are plastic. Glass would shatter. And despite this, sometimes you want convenience. Like if you're American and you want to get milk, you're tempted to use the SUV to drive two blocks away and save five minutes of walking. Well, she saved five minutes changing out of two or three layers of clothing and suffered from it, due to a tragic weather event. OVer there, the Siberians get these tiny tornadoes that only last a few seconds. They're invisible. But inside of them, the temperature isn't just eighteen below zero, it's like thirty-eight below zero. And the wind is reintroducing that temperature of air at a rate of sometimes around a hundred miles an hour, but confined in a very tight vortex of only three or four feet across due to the nature of convecting currents and their abilities to maintain micro systems, something not very well understood. Being in that tiny cold whirlwind for even a few seconds can cause really horrible physical traumas. She was struck dead by hypothermia by an invisible weather phenomenon, struck dead by a tornado as big around as her sucking down temperatures from the upper atmosphere that were cold enough to lower her core temperature down below dead in only seconds. This sort of thing is a reality, and we can assume that there is plenty under the sun that science doesn't quite comprehend. If this doesn't turn out to be a low-pressure or mega-updraft incident of some kind, then I think we can all safely assume it is a pathogenic or local effect. A bacteria or virus. A radioactive or electromagnetic pulse. At any rate it's anomalous and anybody studying it with interest is probably more intelligent than the average scientists who, based largely on risk assessed values of research grant award futures versus college loan payment rates, side squarely with what is pre-established and therefore never learn anything new and fail to ever address the slightest anomaly whether it challenges their worldview or not.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
GP sounds like a nice troll. Unless you replace air with 1000-fold more dense material it is impossible to cool a person to hypothermia in few seconds, no matter what is temperature and wind speed are. A human can spend comfortably tens of minutes at temperatures well below 200K even naked (or swimsuit) and this is used to heal pains in rheumatoid arthritis. And as one who lives in north, I can imagine the amount of snow taken air with wind over 30 m/s. Invisible in your dreams.