You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Part 12

What you should worry about: the New Madrid Fault Line The New Madrid Seismic Zone stretches from Illinois to Alabama and doesn't care how unimpressive its IMDb page is. See, it's not in the business of destroying recognizable landmarks. It drinks terror p.i.s.s and eats nightmares, and it wants to make sure America's always stocked with both.

And it can do it too.

Being underneath fly-over country makes its job easier, and not just because Alabama's sewage system was built with balsa wood and slave labor. Its landlocked location means the New Madrid can wreck your s.h.i.+t from five states away. Coastal towns like Los Angeles are actually better off better off in an earthquake, since a good portion of the fury gets dissipated out to sea. No such luck for anyone living in the New Madrid's million-square-mile seismic zone. in an earthquake, since a good portion of the fury gets dissipated out to sea. No such luck for anyone living in the New Madrid's million-square-mile seismic zone.

In 1968, it wrecked the civic building in Henderson, Kentucky, and made buildings sway in Boston and twenty-three other freaking states. That's pretty terrifying when you realize that the quake's epicenter was in Illinois. And that was just a blip compared to the New Madrid sequence, a series of 1811- 12 quakes that registered over an 8.0 on the Richter scale (multiple times), cracked sidewalks from Missouri to Baltimore, and permanently altered the course of the Mississippi River. The few unlucky b.a.s.t.a.r.ds already living in the Midwest at the time saw waves rus.h.i.+ng up rivers rus.h.i.+ng up rivers and something called "sand volcanoes." Not content with claiming mere human casualties, the New Madrid took down the entire town of Little Prairie, Missouri, when it liquidated the ground it was built on. We're not exaggerating. The entire town was just swallowed by the ground. It no longer exists. Try to imagine the ground you're standing on suddenly going from solid to liquid, as though the earth, like you, was p.i.s.sing itself uncontrollably. Now think about the fact that some moron took the land over the New Madrid Seismic Zone and built a large portion of America on top of it. Consider yourself warned. and something called "sand volcanoes." Not content with claiming mere human casualties, the New Madrid took down the entire town of Little Prairie, Missouri, when it liquidated the ground it was built on. We're not exaggerating. The entire town was just swallowed by the ground. It no longer exists. Try to imagine the ground you're standing on suddenly going from solid to liquid, as though the earth, like you, was p.i.s.sing itself uncontrollably. Now think about the fact that some moron took the land over the New Madrid Seismic Zone and built a large portion of America on top of it. Consider yourself warned.

3. DISASTER AT SEA!.

What they told you to worry about: rogue tsunami!

In The Day After Tomorrow The Day After Tomorrow, New York City residents are blind-sided when the Statue of Liberty disappears into a gray-green mist of surging seawater. The Poseidon Adventure The Poseidon Adventure opened with a rogue wave flipping a cruise s.h.i.+p like a bathtub toy. The actual tsunami in 2004 seemed to come out of nowhere, wiping out entire swaths of Thailand. While the causes of the real and fictional waves were all different, one thing that seems to be clear is that tsunamis can rise out of the sea without warning and ruin your s.h.i.+t. Hey, at least there's no sense in worrying about something we can't see coming, right? Right? opened with a rogue wave flipping a cruise s.h.i.+p like a bathtub toy. The actual tsunami in 2004 seemed to come out of nowhere, wiping out entire swaths of Thailand. While the causes of the real and fictional waves were all different, one thing that seems to be clear is that tsunamis can rise out of the sea without warning and ruin your s.h.i.+t. Hey, at least there's no sense in worrying about something we can't see coming, right? Right?

What you should worry about: the collapse of c.u.mbre Vieja If a volcanic ridge in the Canary Islands falls into the Atlantic Ocean and no one is around, does it make a noise? Well, not at first. The surge of furious seawater still has to rush across the pitch black ocean floor at the speed of a fighter jet. About six hours later, however, East Coast residents would begin to hear something like a thousand freight trains rus.h.i.+ng up out of the ocean, followed by all 110 million of their uniquely ridiculous accents merging as one to scream, "Oh s.h.i.+t!"

After that, not much sound.

c.u.mbre Vieja is a cantankerous little volcano that's erupted seven times in the last five hundred years. A group of British scientists predict that a future eruption may crack the volcano in two, sending an avalanche of rock "the size of the Isle of Man" (translated into American: Chicago) hurtling into the ocean. The resulting shockwave would reach speeds of eight hundred kilometers per hour and submerge the East Coast under fifty-meter waves (five hundred miles per hour and, "Holy s.h.i.+t, run!" respectively).

So Hollywood got a few details right: the Statue of Liberty being blinked out behind a surging wall of green-gray water, for instance. But it won't be some one-in-a-million rogue wave or fixable environmental selfishness. Just physics.

In everyday terms, the entire East Coast is sitting next to a pool telling the kids in the shallow end to watch their d.a.m.ned splas.h.i.+ng while a giant fat guy bounces up and down on the diving board, screaming, "Cannonball!" at the top of his lungs.

2 AND 1. DISASTER FROM s.p.a.cE!.

What they told you to worry about: asteroids and comets!

When discussing asteroids, comets, and other celestial debris that pa.s.s close to our planet, scientists use the bland, awkward term near-earth objects near-earth objects. In early 2009, NASA published a fourteen-page doc.u.ment detailing how it would stop an incoming earth smasher. The paper reads like stereo instructions, but the big points get across: we'd have plenty of warning time to pull the object away or deflect it, just like in Armageddon Armageddon. This is the rare case where Hollywood actually proposed a reasonable solution. Probably because the really terrifying s.h.i.+t wouldn't make such a good movie since there's absolutely d.i.c.k that we could do to stop it.

What you should be worried about: solar ejections!

Take for example, the solar ejection. It could be poor self-image, or heavy s.p.a.ce drinking, but every once in a while the sun starts projectile vomiting. Instead of chunks of HotPockets and Jello shots, though, the sun spews radiation, often giving off the equivalent of a few million atom bombs in an hour or two. Usually, by the time the radiation reaches the earth, all that's left is a harmless light show. But in 1859, a huge solar ejection disrupted all the high technology of the day. Luckily, it was 1859, so the damage was limited to telegraph lines and countless monocles dropped in surprise. If they'd been so foolish as to build a fancy global economy that required information technology to function, power lines would have been fried, satellites destroyed, and cell phones rendered useless. It would have frozen civilization and cost trillions of dollars.

Thankfully, people in the past weren't complete complete idiots. idiots.

Oh, also: deadly gamma rays from s.p.a.ce When our farty little sun dies in about 5 billion years, it will expand into a sickly red dwarf that will engulf the earth in a fiery apocalypse. But there are many stars fifty to one hundred times larger than our sun that will go hypernova when they kick the bucket, spewing deadly gamma rays across the galaxy. If we're lucky, the exact right amount will hit the earth, transforming everyone into giant green-skinned monsters with anger issues.

If we're less lucky, and the wrong star explodes, it would end life as we know it. (See how unlucky that is?) Ten seconds of gamma rays could deplete half the ozone layer, allowing our sun to sneak in and fry us all to a crispy golden brown. The most likely candidate for this sunburned apocalypse is Eta Carinae-it's a scant 7,500 light-years away and scientists predict it will go boom very soon. That's less helpful than you think-on a galactic scale "very soon" could be a million years from now or tomorrow. The only thing that we really know is that when it arrives, even if every scientific community from around the globe combines forces with Bruce Willis and the worst power ballad ever written by Aerosmith, ain't s.h.i.+t we can do to stop it.

FIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS THAT PROVE HUMANITY IS DOOMED.

YOU have to be careful when you go poking around the human mind, because you can't be sure what you'll find there. A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions, not about the occasional psychopath, but about you. have to be careful when you go poking around the human mind, because you can't be sure what you'll find there. A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions, not about the occasional psychopath, but about you.

5. THE GOOD SAMARITAN EXPERIMENT (1973).

The setup Naming their study after the biblical story in which a Samaritan helps an enemy in need, psychologists John Darley and C. Daniel Batson wanted to test if religion has any effect on helpful behavior. So they gathered a group of seminary students and asked half of them to deliver a sermon about the Good Samaritan in another building. The other half were told to give a speech about job opportunities, and members of both groups were given varying amounts of time to prepare and get across campus to deliver their sermons, ensuring some students were in more of a hurry when heading to deliver the good news.

On the way to give their speech, the subjects would pa.s.s a person slumped in an alleyway, who looked to be in need of help.

The result The people who had been studying the Good Samaritan story did not stop any more often than the ones preparing a speech on job opportunities. The only factor that made a difference was how much of a hurry the students were in.

If pressed for time, only 10 percent would stop to give any aid, even when they were on their way to give a sermon about how awesome it is to stop and give aid.

What this says about you As much as we like to make fun of anti-gay congressmen who get caught gaying it up in a men's bathroom, the truth is that we're just as likely to be hypocrites. After all, it's much easier to talk to a room full of people about helping strangers than, say, to actually touch a bleeding homeless man.

And in case you thought these results were restricted to seminary students, in 2004 a BBC article reported on some disturbing footage captured by the camera of a parked public bus. In the tape, an injured twenty-five-year-old woman lies bleeding profusely in a London road, while dozens of pa.s.sing motorists swerve to avoid her, without stopping.

To be fair, the report doesn't mention if there was anything good on TV that night, so they might have had somewhere really important to be.

4. THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT (1971).

The setup You may have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which psychologist Philip Zimbardo transformed the Stanford Psychology Department's bas.e.m.e.nt into a mock prison. But you probably didn't know just how ashamed it should make you to be a human being.

Seventy young men responded to a newspaper ad soliciting volunteers for an experiment. Zimbardo then gave each volunteer a test to evaluate their health and mental stability, and divided the most stable men arbitrarily into twelve guards and twelve prisoners.

Zimbardo wanted to test how captivity affects subjects put in positions of authority and submission. The simulation was planned to run for two weeks.

The result It took less than one day for every subject to go crazier than a s.h.i.+t-house rat. On day two, prisoners staged a riot and barricaded their cells with their beds. The guards saw this as a pretty good excuse to start squirting fire extinguishers at the insurgents because, hey, why not?

The Stanford prison continued to ricochet around in h.e.l.l for a while. Guards began forcing inmates to sleep naked on the concrete, restricting bathroom use, making prisoners do humiliating exercises and clean toilets with their bare hands. Incredibly, it never occurred to partic.i.p.ants to simply ask to be let out of the d.a.m.ned experiment, even though they had absolutely no legal reason to be imprisoned.

Over fifty outsiders stopped to observe the simulation, but the morality of the trial was never questioned until Zimbardo's girlfriend, Christina Maslach, strongly objected. After six days, Zimbardo put a halt to the experiment.

What this says about you Ever been hara.s.sed by a cop who acted like a complete douchebag for no reason? The Stanford Prison Experiment indicates that if the roles were reversed, you'd likely act the same way.

As it turns out, it's usually fear of repercussion that keeps us from torturing our fellow human beings. Give us absolute power and a blank check from our superiors, and Abu Ghraib- style naked pyramids are sure to follow. If it can happen to the sanest 35 percent of a group of hippie college students, it sure as h.e.l.l could happen to you.

3. BYSTANDER APATHY EXPERIMENT (1968).

The setup When a woman was murdered in 1964, the New York Times New York Times reported that thirty-eight people had heard or seen the attack but did nothing. John Darley and Bibb Latane wanted to know if the fact that these people were in a large group played any role in the reluctance to come to the victim's aid. reported that thirty-eight people had heard or seen the attack but did nothing. John Darley and Bibb Latane wanted to know if the fact that these people were in a large group played any role in the reluctance to come to the victim's aid.

The psychologists invited a group of volunteers to an "extremely personal" discussion and separated them into different rooms with intercoms, purportedly to protect anonymity.

During the conversation, one of the members would fake an epileptic seizure. We're not sure how they conveyed, via intercom, that what was happening was a seizure, but we're a.s.suming the words, "Wow this is quite an epileptic seizure I'm having," were uttered.

The result When subjects believed that they were the only other person in the discussion, 85 percent were heroic enough to leave the room and seek help once the seizure started. This makes sense. Having an extremely personal conversation is difficult enough, but being forced to continue to carry on the conversation alone is just sad.

However, when the experiment was altered so that subjects believed four other people were in the discussion, only 31 percent went to look for help once the seizure began. The rest a.s.sumed someone else would take care of it.

What this says about you Obviously if there's an emergency and you're the only one around, the pressure to help increases ma.s.sively since you feel 100 percent responsible. But when you're with ten other people, you feel approximately 10 percent as responsible. Problem: so does everybody else.

This sheds some light on our previous examples. Maybe the drivers who swerved around the injured woman in the road would have stopped if they'd been alone on a deserted highway. Then again, maybe they'd be even more likely to abandon her since n.o.body was watching.

We just need the slightest excuse to do nothing.

2. THE ASCH CONFORMITY EXPERIMENT (1953).

The setup Solomon Asch wanted to run studies to doc.u.ment the power of conformity, for the purpose of depressing everyone who would ever read the results.

Subjects were told they'd be taking part in a vision test. They were shown a line, and then several lines of varying sizes to the right of the first line. All they had to do was say which line on the right matched the original. The answer was objectively obvious.

The catch was that everybody in the room other than one subject had been instructed to give the same obviously wrong answer.

Would the subject go against the crowd when the crowd was clearly wrong?

The result If three others in the cla.s.sroom gave the same wrong answer, even when the line was plainly off by several inches, one in three subjects would follow the group right off the proverbial cliff.

What this says about you Imagine how much that figure inflates when the answers are less black and white. We all laugh with the group even when we don't get the joke or doubt our opinion when we realize it's unpopular.

"Well, it's a good thing I'm a rebellious nonconformist," you might say. Of course, once you decide to be a nonconformist the next step is to find out what the other nonconformists are doing and make sure you're nonconforming correctly.

1. MILGRAM (1961) AND MILGRAM 2 (1972): ELECTRIC BOOGALOO.

The setup At the Nuremberg trials, many of the n.a.z.is tried to excuse their behavior by claiming they were just following orders. So in 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the infamous Milgram Experiment, testing subjects' willingness to obey an authority figure.

Each subject was told they were a "teacher" and that their job was to give a memory test to a man (actually an actor) located in another room. Subjects were told that whenever the other guy gave an incorrect answer, they were to press a b.u.t.ton that would give him an electric shock.

As far as the subjects knew, the shocks were real, starting at 45 volts and increasing with every wrong answer. Each time they pushed the b.u.t.ton, the actor would scream and beg for the subject to stop.

The result Many subjects began to feel uncomfortable after a certain point and questioned continuing the experiment. However, each time a guy in a lab coat encouraged them to continue, most subjects followed orders, delivering shocks of higher and higher voltage despite the victims' screams.

Eventually, the actor would start banging on the wall that separated him from the subject, pleading about his heart condition. After further shocks, all sounds from the victim's room would cease, indicating he was dead or unconscious. Take a guess, what percentage of the subjects kept delivering shocks after that point?

Between 61 and 66 percent of subjects continued the experiment until it reached the maximum voltage of 450, continuing to deliver shocks after the victim had, for all they knew, been zapped into unconsciousness or the afterlife.

Most subjects wouldn't begin to object until after 300-volt shocks. Exactly zero asked to stop the experiment before that point (pro tip in case you're ever faced with a similar dilemma: Under the right circ.u.mstances 110-230 volts is enough to kill a man).

The Milgram Experiment immediately became famous for what it implied about humanity's capacity for evil. But by 1972, some of his colleagues decided that Milgram's subjects must have known the actor was faking. In an attempt to disprove his findings, Charles Sheridan and Richard King took the experiment a step further, asking subjects to shock a puppy every time it disobeyed an order. Unlike Milgram's experiment, this shock was real. Exactly twenty out of twenty-six subjects went to the highest voltage.

What this says about you Almost 80 percent. Think about that when you're at the mall: Eight out of ten of the people you see would torture the s.h.i.+t out of a puppy if a dude in a lab coat asked them to. And there's a good chance you would too.

THE FIVE CREEPIEST URBAN LEGENDS THAT HAPPEN TO BE TRUE.

THE best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, "It's all true, and I have the doc.u.mentation here to prove it!" best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, "It's all true, and I have the doc.u.mentation here to prove it!"

In that spirit, we've tracked down five of the creepiest tales and urban legends that really happened to real people, proving once and for all that nothing is more terrifying than everyday life.

5. THE LIVING SEVERED HEAD.

The legend Your head remains aware even after it's severed from your shoulders (giving you just enough time to reflect on how stupid you were to stand up on that roller coaster).

The legend says severed heads have been known to blink and, yes, even to try to talk.

The truth Throughout history, death by decapitation has been a.s.sumed to be instant and painless (the guillotine was designed as a humane execution method-the fact that it looked freakin' cool was a bonus) but there's evidence that your brain remains conscious anywhere from several seconds to a minute after your head gets lopped off.

One of the earliest and best-known proofs of this came from a Dr. Beaurieux, who conducted an experiment on a French murderer named Languille. Post-guillotining, Languille's eyes and mouth continued to move for five to six seconds, at which point he appeared to pa.s.s on. But then when Beaurieux shouted the subject's name, Languille's eyes popped open.

In Beaurieux's own words: "Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine, the pupils focusing themselves," and the doctor continued to get similar results for up to thirty seconds (at which point Languille possibly just got tired of playing decapitation peekaboo).

Since modern beheadings tend not to be scheduled public events, scientists are rarely on the scene to interview a freshly chopped head. However, according to the website the Straight Dope, unlucky eyewitnesses to car accidents have reported seeing facial expressions and eye movements that seem to indicate a long moment of awareness during which the victim's detached head had time to see their own body and register whatever horrifying emotions accompany such a realization.

We did find it comforting to learn that people have taken advantage of this horrific phenomenon.

Multiple adventurers and "ethnologists" who explored the Congo basin in the late 1800s wrote about a tribe that would tie a condemned man's head to a springy sapling before chopping it off, so that the head was then catapulted into the distance after the blow. Thus their last few moments of awareness were of their head sailing breezily through the air.

If you have to die, that's got to be one of the top five ways to go.

4. THE DEADLY ELEVATOR.

The legend The metal doors clamp down on a hapless victim, who can do nothing but scream in terror as the elevator dings and begins to rise, shearing off his head or limbs as it does. It's a scene that's turned up in several cheesy horror movies. But everyone knows the doors always safely open back up when they close on your hand.

The truth There are safety measures in place, sure. But as Dr. Hitos.h.i.+ Nikaidoh learned on August 16, 2003, sometimes they don't work. Why didn't the elevator open again or shut down when the doctor became pinned between the doors at the shoulders as he was getting on? To this day, n.o.body knows.

On that day, the doors held Dr. Nikaidoh in place like a vise as the elevator began to ascend, until it sliced his head in two at mouth level. Find that a little nauseating? Well, try to imagine what it was like for the other person in the elevator. Yes, a nurse was in there and had to spend almost an hour in a blood-soaked box with the doctor's head.

But don't worry, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only around thirty people are killed by elevators each year. In the United States alone.

3. THE TOXIC WOMAN.

The legend A sick woman arrives at a hospital, and when the nurses withdraw blood it is so toxic that it begins making everyone around her sick too. Realizing they're dealing with the human embodiment of the creature from Alien Alien, the nurses flee for their lives.

The truth On the evening of February 19, 1994, Gloria Ramirez was admitted to a California emergency room, suffering from an advanced form of cancer.

When a nurse drew Gloria's blood, she detected a foul odor, so foul that hospital staff started gagging and even collapsing around her. Eventually, as many as twenty-three people were affected. The ER was evacuated and a decontamination unit brought in.

She died just forty minutes after arriving at the hospital, and her autopsy was performed by men in full hazmat moon suits. Despite one of the most extensive forensic investigations in history, it's still not known what exactly turned this woman's blood toxic. Granted, the experts on the case have refused to take off their hazmat suits since that day and are now quarantined on a small island surrounded by barbed wire, but those are probably just the usual precautions.

2. SOMETHING OFF ABOUT THAT PICTURE.

The legend A young man is dropping off groceries at the house of an eccentric old lady when he notices an old photo that makes the hair on his arms stand on end. The photo's normal enough-a young boy in his Sunday best-but something just seems off. "Isn't that beautiful?" the old lady says, trying to stuff a cat into the dishwasher. "You can hardly tell he's dead."

The truth While most folks today are too squeamish to take more than a glance into the casket during a funeral, as recently as the early twentieth century someone dying meant it was time to break out the camera for a family photo, a practice known as memorial photography.

And, while it all sounds like the setup for some terrifying practical joke on the photographer, there was actually a somewhat reasonable explanation. Back then, taking pictures was expensive enough that it was a once-in-a-lifetime (er, or shortly thereafter) thing for most and required people to sit perfectly still for a couple of minutes. And if there's one thing dead people are good at, it's sitting still.

Eventually, the practice of memorial photography went out of style, maybe because picture taking became more affordable and didn't have to be reserved for special occasions such as death. Or possibly everyone just sat up all at once and said, "Wait, what the h.e.l.l are we doing?"

1. BURIED ALIVE.

The legend Some poor schmuck is committed to his eternal resting place, even though he's not quite ready to take that final dirt nap. Scratch marks are later found on the coffin lid along with other desperate signs of escape.

The truth This not only happened, but back in the day it happened with alarming regularity. In the late nineteenth century, William Tebb tried to compile all the instances of premature burial from medical sources of the day. He collected 219 cases of near-premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial, and a dozen cases where dissection or embalming had begun on a not-yet-deceased body.

This was an era before doctors such as the esteemed Dr. Gregory House gained the ability to solve any ailment within forty-two minutes (see page 205 for just how far away they were). If you showed up presumed dead, the good doctor probably leaned over your face, screamed, "Wake up!" a few times, and then buried you.