May 6th, 2009 by Tombro
People have been locking other people for years and years and years and, not surprisingly, people have tried going about this in a variety of strange and interesting ways. The problem gets tricky when you have a lot of people locked up together. Here are some approaches that people have taken that stray a bit from the good old familiar gray building with the towers and the walls and Burt Reynolds playing football in the yard.
Prison Concept #1: The Panopticon
Remember the HBO series “Oz“? In it the narrator, Augustus Hill, appears in a floating cube — essentially a glass cell where everyone sees everything. In addition, the unit he’s in, “Emerald City” was designed as a place where everyone could be seen at any time (although there were actually lots of nooks and crannies where Bad Things could and did happen. Turns out “Oz” absconded with a page from Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham proposed the Panopticon, a round prison building with a central guard tower. The cells would be backlit so that prisoners would be silhouetted, and guards in the tower would be shielded so that the prisoners would never know when they were really being watched. Paging George Orwell…
A schematic of the Panopticon as proposed by Bentham
A real panopticon in Cuba. Quaint!
It’s even more charming on the inside — what lovely light!
July 19th, 2008 by admin
Lord knows I love getting boxes full of goodies, especially when they contain a hodgepodge of MP3 players and speakers. Apparently, the Almighty One also believes that Crave readers need a little more God-fearing in their lives, because my latest shipment included an MP3 player in this shape…
March 3rd, 2008 by OddO
[Correction: Thanks to a reader tip we’re now up from 93 to 233!]
Looking for something but you aren’t sure just what it is? Sometimes a search engine just isn’t enough if you have no real idea of what you’re searching for. With that in mind, here are 93 233 great sites for finding all kinds of things online from the useful and unusual to the bizarre and obscure.
Since this is OddOrama after all let’s start with the weird (and somewhat more obvious) ones and work from there. These sites are all worth seeing if you haven’t already: Cracked, Dark Roasted Blend, Deputy Dog, Digg’s Offbeat News Section, Grow a Brain, Miss Cellania, Neatorama, The Presurfer, WebUrbanist, National Geographic’s Weird News Section. Know a few of these? That’s alright, these lists get more obscure as you go - with many that may be less entertaining but make up for it by being strangely useful!
MakeUseOf likewise has a two-part series with 40 usual websites you should know and 40 more. Many of these are far more useful if also more obscure. Some of them serve a single function you might never have thought you needed but that could prove useful once you know it exists. These are perhaps more geeky and functional in general, but haven’t you always wanted fast-and-easy disposable logins for popular websites or even free disposable phone numbers?
WebUpon has a two-part series featuring 9 websites you should know and 9 more along the same lines. The emphasis here is on semi-useful niche sites you may not have heard of. Some choice ones from the second (and arguably more interesting) list include a textbook rental site, local venue reviews and a bizarre community-based lending program.
ACleverCookie’s list of 7 clever websites you should know about truly does have strange and unheard of sites, including ones that help you find older versions of programs you use, discover local happenings in your area or even find out who is sick in your area. Some are more useful than others but they’re all pretty interesting and even more obscure than those on some of these other lists.
DailyBits has a more targeted list of 18 undiscovered gaming websites you should know that serve a variety of functions from highly specific game-related sites to more general resources. If you’re a gamer this is a must-bookmark article. The list includes all kinds of freeware, cheat, gaming trivia and history for pretty much every kind of game geek.
And to top it off, here are 100 more useful ones from LifeHacker.biz. Know of more? That’s what comments are for!
February 14th, 2008 by OddO
We’ve all heard by now the one about the faked moon landing, that Azerbaijan doesn’t even exist or that the government manipulates the water supply to keep us drugged, right? What you might not have heard is that some people attribute John Lennon’s death to Stephen King or that we are controlled by aliens or bar codes, possibly both.
According to one theorist who has written a short book on the subject, Nixon, Reagan and (for good measure) Stephen King were involved in the murder of John Lennon: “… government codes in major magazines, Including the killers face, and true identity. Mark Chapman’s name attached to a letter to the editor printed weeks before the murder and more that proves a Nixon, Reagan, and yes, Stephen King conspiracy.”
The War of the Worlds broadcast that panicked the populace nearly a century ago was not just a humorous hoax but was instead a controlled psychological experiment: “… what has been
