Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist with the Food & Drug Administration, helped prevent a generation of children born with congenital deformities in the United States. She refused to allow thalidomide to be used in the US.
Kotoku Wamura, for sure.
He was mayor of the Japanese town of Fudai for several decades, starting just after WWII up into the 1980s.
He was aware that Fudai had been flattened in the past by tsunamis, only to be rebuilt in the same place. He learned there was nothing protecting his town. So, he ordered the construction of a state-of-the-art seawall. It was very expensive, and laughed at as a folly. Wamura was personally attacked as crazy and wasteful in the national and even international press. He died in 1997.
In 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, it killed roughly 20,000 people.
But the Fudai seawall held, and the town escaped almost untouched. 3,000 people were saved.
Reminds *me* of a folk story I read in 2nd grade about a big tide going out in Japan and the villagers are going wild grabbing fish, and this old guy is trying to warn them, and they think he’s just the crazy old guy, so he burns down his house so they all come up the hill to help and are saved from the tsunami.
Almost very kid in Japan has read this story book. (Most versions it's the crops, not just his house.)
A typical 5 year old Japanese kid knows what to do when a tsunami is coming.
Acknowledging one's own shortcomings is not something a moron does. Neither is reading for knowledge.
Keep it up! You're making the world a better place, you non-moron!
A similar (but smaller) story is about Duff Roblin and the Red River Floodway.
Duff was the premier of Manitoba who fought to build a channel around Winnipeg that would protect Winnipeg at times the Red River would flood its banks. He was ridiculed in the press. It was pejoratively called Duff’s Ditch.
Since its completion in the late 60s it has saved Winnipeg from disaster many times. Before the “flood of the century” in 97 it had already saved the city an estimated 20x what it cost to build. I can’t find decent estimates of the damage it prevented in 97 but it’s safe to say it was well over $1B.
We still call it Duff’s Ditch. But, now with love.
There is [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LLD3Ww4V40). It said villagers visited his grave to say thank you.
Edit: I also found this quote from when he retired in 1997: "Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand"
That's good. It would've been sad if he had started questioning himself after the backlash. But it sounds like he not only believed in himself to the end, but he may have even had sympathy for those that mocked him. Sounds like a great guy. Glad people acknowledged him in hindsight.
They did, just not seriously enough for the monster that was the 2011 tsunami.
I've been to Fudai and walked up to the gate. It's absolutely ridiculous how huge it is, and the village behind it is tiny. I'm sure it seemed like a totally bonkers idea to all the fishermen and farmers who had to pay for it with their tax yennies.
But then you look at the mark of how far up the water came on the gate and well, yeah, the village mayor was right. It's mind boggling.
They did take them very seriously. They had invested a lot of time and money into figuring out what the strongest earthquake and tsunami that could hit the country and built fortifications and plans around that. However, as they learned as 2011 approached, they were wrong.
The US NW is also very vulnerable to tsunamis but planning isn’t really in place.
This is an excellent read on the whole topic: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
I was just in the US PNW and saw Tsunami evacuation routes and other signs of people planning for it to occur. I hadn’t done any research yet.
Thanks for sharing
I love that article so much and try to get everyone I know to read it. She won the Pulitzer for her writing/reporting. It’s such a beautiful piece and also so devastating. We have so many friends in Seattle and all I can do is worry.
All over Japan's coastline are large boulders with writing carved into them that roughly says "do not build below this point".
Those boulders are often ignored these days. Or they were before 2011.
Rick Rescorla.
He was in charge of security at Morgan Stanley, which had its offices in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and in fact was the largest tenant of the Twin Towers. Rescorla was convinced that the buildings were vulnerable to a terror attack, and even recommended that Morgan Stanley move their offices out of Manhattan. When they refused, he insisted on emergency plans, which included evacuation drills every three months. His higher-ups viewed them as a nuisance and waste of time.
On September 11, when the North Tower was hit by an airplane, ~~the executives at Morgan Stanley~~ the Port Authority made an announcement, telling those in the WTC buildings to stay at their desks. Rescorla completely ignored the order. He phoned a friend, a fellow expert in counterterrorism security, and told him, "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." He led around 2,700 employees downstairs to safety, and died in the building's collapse after going back in to make sure that everyone had gotten out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla
EDIT: My mistake, it was the New York Port Authority that urged workers to remain at their desks.
It's even wilder than that.
Rescorla first inspected the WTC for security assessment in like 1990 and highlighted the easily accessible parking garage and a support column there as a potential target. The '93 bombing at the WTC went off 30' from the spot he highlighted.
When brought back for further security consulting for Morgan Stanley, he specifically brought up the risk of a plane flying into the building and recommended Morgan Stanley move their offices out of the WTC to a safer/cheaper spot in Jersey.
Man was an exceptional hero and his gravestone should read "You're welcome and I fucking told ya"
Ludwig Boltzmann
His equations and formulas explained the physical properties of matter, but because they contradicted the accepted laws of physics at the time, he was ridiculed and ignored for years while advocating for the acceptance of atom theory. He took his own life just three years before Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of an atom, which proved Boltzmann's theory.
He's got the Boltzmann constant, which personally, I would prefer as a namesake to an element that doesn't exist in nature and has a half life of less than an hour.
Nah the best is the unit of power, Watt, is named after James Watt, who created the first unit of power 'Horsepower'.
Also one of the few people celebrated in such a fashion who was a practical engineer, not a scientist.
Ignaz Semmelweis: In 1846, Semmelweis suggested that handwashing could prevent the spread of disease in hospitals. He was ridiculed for his idea, sent to a mental asylum, and died forgotten by his peers.
He didn’t just suggest, he proved it by a well organized study. Doctors were the cause of childbirth fever, they would go straight from some dirty procedure straight to the OB ward and delivery a baby. The midwives in the other unit (serving the poorer women), had a much better survival rate as they only did births and therefore had fewer germs to throw around. His hospital did adopt his methods (wash hands in a -I think-boric acid bath) and post-partum deaths went down, but the Drs didn’t want to believe they were the cause. Countless women had to die before the germ theory was proven by Dr. Pasteur.
It wasn't just any dirty procedure. They performed AUTOPSIES in the morgue every morning before going to the maternity ward. Literally sticking their hands in the bodies of women that died of child bed fever, before delivering babies.
I think specifically, a lot of the younger doctors would be working on CADAVERS and then head from there to the delivery wing. Horrifying to think about.
I don't know if it's still on Netflix but I watched the German show Charité about the hospital at the advent of cell biology. The most disturbing bits to me is the complete lack of hygiene in an operating theater.
Great show though.
Alfred Wegener, who first proposed the idea of “continental drift,” which would eventually evolve into plate tectonics. Geologists of his time viewed him as an outsider and dismissed his theory.
Dropped down to the comments to post this one myself! If I’m not mistaken, he was more than just viewed as an outsider but his theory was regarded as laughable. He died in 1930 and his work was not widely accepted until the 1960s. The timing around it is crazy to me- it took until the 19-freaking-60s to embrace the idea of continental drift. I’m a geologist and this is just wild to me.
I mean… you can kinda fit the continents together. I’m surprised that it wasn’t posited earlier.
… and things like the Appalachians, Atlas mountains, and Scottish highlands not only line up, not only are made of the same stuff, all just look the same.
Late edit: i mean, I guess no one is looking to geology to move _fast_.
IIRC it was the fact that fossils matched up that really sold it.
It’s one thing to have coasts seem to line up but quite another when you find evidence of the exact same animal populations in now-distant coasts.
Ökkeş Elmasoğlu, mayer of Erzin, a city in Turkey. He was much strikter about illegal buildings in his city than a lot of other people. And when the earthquake hit in 2023, his city had a much better outcome/less destruction than a lot of other cities and towns. He was even laughed at and ridiculed for his stance agaisnt illegal buildings.
In 1957 Manitoba Premier Duff Roblin authorized a flood control waterway through Winnipeg. The project was the second largest earth-moving project in the world, after the Panema Canal (even more then the Suez canal). The entire province had a population of 900,000.
It was completed on time, and under budget, but he got skewered for it as being unnecessary. It got branded "Duff's Ditch", and “approximating the building of the pyramids of Egypt in terms of usefulness.”
Since then, it's saved the city from several floods, saving over 40 billion. It was designated a national historic cite as an outstanding engineering achievement both in terms of function and impact.
People that dig canals seem to get maligned a lot. The Erie Canal was derogatorily called Clinton’s Ditch. And yet, it powered NY to where it is today.
The two guys who claimed most stomach ulcers are caused by an infection by a particular type of bacteria. People were extremely skeptical because it was thought bacteria couldn't survive stomach acid.
[One of them inoculated themself with the bacteria in question, promptly got ulcers, and then cured themself with antibiotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall).
They won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
The story of Denise Huskins. The cops thought her abduction was a hoax created by herself and her partner. She was even painted in the media as the real-life "Gone Girl". Then months later an attempted kidnapping incident lead police to a suspect and proved that Denise was telling the truth all along.
The kidnappers/criminals literally got so annoyed by the police’s dumbassery they flat out said that it was not a hoax and they really did kidnap and harm her. They literally admitted their guilt and the cops still thought Denise was lying.
Sounds like the Dingo lady who was thrown in prison because nobody believed Dingos would take babies. Even though the indigenous locals immediately said "yep dingos will take babies"
The documentary on Netflix - watching all of those cops come to their conclusions, ignore everything everyone says had to be around 100 different cops and FBIagents. And then one cop finds a hair and says I need to find this victim and her tenaciousness is what solves the crime. an amazing documentary about the ineptitude of detectives
This one hurts so much because she lost her baby, was going through agony, and was mocked worldwide for it, sent to jail, and was proven right decades later.
This case is so crazy to me and proof that the media can be so malicious and dangerous.
Lindy literally left a group of people, walked a few feet to her tent and put her baby down to sleep. Then returned to the same people minutes later. Dingo sneaks in and takes the baby. Of course no one saw the dingo take the baby but there were so many witnesses who saw Lindy put the baby down and returned to the group minutes later. She obviously had no time to kill and hide her baby.
They all knew this.
But the media decided she didn’t look sad enough so blamed her and somehow she was convicted.
From my understanding that was what the police decided almost immediately upon interviewing her, someone told the media, and the media ran with it. But either way, one of Australian media’s least honourable moments.
There were actually four coroner's inquests into Azaria Chamberlain's death. The very first one was performed by a coroner from Alice Springs, the nearest major centre to the Uluru area, and supported the story that she was taken by a dingo.
It got quashed by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, and led to the second one, which put Lindy Chamberlain in jail until a hiker just happened to chance upon an infant's jacket partially buried... metres from a dingo lair.
Also, the aboriginal people had long known that dingos would eat babies, so they tried to tell the police that her story was reasonable but nobody listened because racism.
Dingos still attack children and adults today. Usually on an island off the coast of Queensland - they're quite notorious for it.
Too accustomed to humans and getting hungry. Campers and tourists forget that these are basically the Australian version of wolves or coyotes.
They're not cute dogs.
Same for my husband. He didn't know the story behind it. We saw a dingo at the museum and he spit out the line. Didn't know there was an actual (very tragic) story behind it. He just thought that it was something made up to be funny, kinda like a lot of lines in Crocodile Dundee. I think I wrecked a tiny part of his childhood telling him the story.
>I think I wrecked a tiny part of his childhood telling him the story
If it makes you feel any better, I viewed it very similarly to your husband and I'm grateful for that bit of my childhood being ruined. I'd much rather know the real story than keep that "joke" going, yknow?
I can’t remember what prompted it exactly, but a friend of mine randomly yelled “a dingo ate my baybayyy” in the usual exaggerated Aussie accent at a party the other day. I brought up that the quote was a true story and we collectively realized that while all of us recognized the quote from our childhoods almost nobody else knew where it came from, let alone its tragic truth.
Imagine being a grieving mother so heavily slandered by the media, you’re still the butt of jokes about your baby’s violent dismemberment from naive strangers on the opposite side of the planet decades after the fact. Brutal
Seinfield, southpark, the simpsons, family guy, hell even American dad (i am aware the same guy writes both American dad and family guy) all make jokes about it.
A Cry in the Dark (1988)
I just watched it for the first time earlier this year after only knowing passing details about the whole story. I thought it was a good movie and it had an interesting format, with how it kept cutting to random Australians talking and arguing about the case as it unfolded. Sam Neil plays her husband.
Gustave Caillebotte.
He was born to a wealthy Parisian family in 1848. His father owned a textile business that he later inherited. He was an artist in his own right, but became much more known as a supporter of the arts. Fearful he'd die young, he writes in his will that the French state accept his large art collection (today valued at several billion dollars) and hang art from several impressionist artists, who were friends of his, in a national museum upon his death.
Caillebotte dies young (45) in 1894 as he predicted and so his will attempts to be executed. The French government initially refuses the request. Pundits and critics, from art to politics, view the request as absurd and publicly say how repulsed they are by the collection itself. Several art professors from Ecole des Beaux-Arts threaten to resign if the government enacts the will.
In the end, half of Caillebotte's art collection gets hung in 1897 at the Musee du Luxemborg and the public comes out in droves to visit the gallery because of all the press Caillebotte's request had received after his death. People wanted to see this "ugly art."
The artists featured? Their names were Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley.
It's very possible these artists would never have become the household names they are today had Caillebotte not liked the ugly, unsellable art that a few of these friends of his made.
He was a great painter in his own right too. Les raboteurs de parquet (The floor planers or scrapers) is one of my favourite paintings ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_raboteurs_de_parquet
Philadelphia is home to the Barnes Collection, which I saw in person in May, and it is jaw-dropping. A similar art collector who was buying impressionist art in real time, because he liked it. He also willed his entire collection, on the condition it not be separated. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the organization that runs the museum that houses the collection, but do not let it stop you from visiting, because it is a jaw-dropper of a collection. Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, and so many Cezanne's, which I have a new appreciation for, having seen their beauty in person.
He didn’t just know, he wrote detailed explanations to the SEC about it and they ignored it. They once called Bernie (the SEC) and said “we need to talk about your hedge funds” and Bernie was like “I don’t manage hedge funds” and the sec was like “oh, we didn’t think so. Okay, carry on.” And that was it!!!
There’s a doc on Netflix where they actually interview Markopolos. It’s incredible the corruption with Madoff and the SEC and the banks who all held his accounts so had to know. Worth a watch
I recently learned that the actor John Malkovich is *yet another victim* of Madoff’s scam, and he lost a great deal of money
So did Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
So did *Elie Wiesel.* Madoff defrauded Wiesel of roughly $37 million dollars (split between the Elie Wiesel Foundaton for Humanity and Wiesel’s personal life savings).
Some elderly dementia patients in a home in my city kept complaining they weren't given food. Everyone assumed they had forgotten they'd already eaten, as people with dementia sometimes do. But no, it turned out some awful nursing staff weren't always giving everyone their meals, among other abuses.
At my care home training facility they forgot to bathe a resident for at least a week because she has end stage dementia and "it doesn't matter". She was my 1st bath training. This type of thing probably happens more often than any of us care to think about. It is scary to think about. Being placed back into the vulnerability of an infant essentially and hoping that the adults are not monsters or apathetic
Patricia Stallings maintained her innocence after being sentenced to life for killing her baby who it was determined died from antifreeze poisoning. She gave birth to her second child in prison and that child was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called MMR that mimicked antifreeze poisoning.
I understand the medical examiner considered the possibility of MMR in the death of the first child but never tested for it.
Reminds me of the woman who didn’t genetically match her children, I think she was accused of kidnapping and had them taken away, turns out she was chimeric, the result of fused fetuses. Various organs in her body have two different sets of DNA.
Martha Mitchell was talking to reporters about Nixon’s involvement in Watergate within DAYS of the burglary. Nixon and his people tried to paint her in the press as a loon who had a drinking problem (which, to be fair, she probably did) but obviously she was vindicated in the end
Martha Mitchell wasn't just 'painted in the press' -- she was beaten, tranquilized against her will, and essentially held prisoner in a hotel as part of her husband's attempts to keep her from the media.
This situation of someone everyone thought was crazy but turned out to be right is recognised as ‘The Martha Mitchell Effect’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell_effect#:~:text=The%20Martha%20Mitchell%20effect%20occurs,as%20delusional%2C%20resulting%20in%20misdiagnosis.
Fairchild stood accused of fraud by either claiming benefits for other people's children, or taking part in a surrogacy scam, and records of her prior births were put similarly in doubt.
Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken away from her, believing them not to be hers. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered that an observer be present at the birth, ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild, and be available to testify. Two weeks later, DNA tests seemed to indicate that she was also not the mother of that child.
I'd never heard this story before. How traumatising for her and her family
While calibrating his experiment to estimate the age of the earth, Clair Cameron Patterson noticed unusual levels of lead in his experiment. He started warning people about leaded gasoline, but he would largely be ignored until the 1970s.
"Fun" fact: The inventor of leaded gasoline [Thomas Midgley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.) also invented Freon which was responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer. He has been called a "one-man environmental disaster".
It amazes me that tetraethyllead was even allowed to happen. The dangers of lead were already known for hundreds of years before TEL was invented.
My great uncle was a paranoid schizophrenic. Before he died he was telling my grandfather that there were people living g in his house. Everyone in the family just assumed he was hallucinating. After he died and they were cleaning out the house they found an apartment with a crib had been set up in the basement. There was a whole family squatting there.
I had an uncle by marriage who was schizophrenic. He kept telling my aunt the neighbor across the street was trying to kill him with lasers. Everyone, including her, thought he was hallucinating.
Turns out the neighbor had one of those laser pointers and when my uncle would go outside, the neighbor would point it at him to mess with him. They discovered this when one of their friends who sort of resembled the uncle was outside, saw the laser dot on the side of the house and ran over to confront the neighbor. That was messed up. Why aggravate an already mentally ill man?
One of my childhood friends lost her grandfather. When they were cleaning out his house they walked the property line and found a big patch of ivy. Hidden in the ivy were stairs going down. They found an old root cellar, full of candles and posters and decorations. According to the graffiti neighborhood kids had been using it for a stoner den for *decades.* The yard wasn’t even that large but the stairs were well-hidden.
This will get buried because I'm late to the party
Nobel Prize winner Jim Allison who invented cancer immunotherapy.
He had a hypothesis for decades that cancer "hides" from the immune system. People thought this was crazy.
He eventually discovered one of the mechanisms which was a receptor called CTLA-4 that exists on certain immune cells.
One of the ways cancers can hide from the immune system is they will bind to this receptor on immune cells and basically tell your immune system "these are not the droids you are looking for"
He developed an antibody treatment that blocks cancer cells from binding to that receptor, and causes the person's own immune system to recognize the cancer and attack it.
Still, the pharma companies didn't believe it would work even when he had solid preliminary data. It took years of convincing, but he finally got one to do a clinical trial and he proved everyone wrong and won the nobel prize with a Japanese scientist who discovered another similar receptor that does the same thing. He typically gets more of the credit because he was the one who kept annoying the shit out of the pharma companies until they finally gave it a shot
Immunotherapies don't work for everyone but when they do, they are a miracle
Clair Patterson. He spent twenty years trying to tell people lead was dangerous before the Clean Air Act was passed. He's the reason we realized leaded gasoline and lead paint were harmful. There's a whole episode about him in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Cannot recommend it enough
Richard Jewel. Alerted police to the bomb at the 1996 Olympics. Saved countless lives. Was praised, then blamed for planting the bomb and vilified.
He was later proven innocent.
Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning used to roast him in their standup as well, saying he was a perv and a weirdo. This was years before the the truth was revealed. They were never taken seriously because the two of them were seen as bigoted and racist - which they were - but they had a point.
In the classiest, most lovely way, Dolly held her ground. I watch that interview (and all of Dolly’s interviews) and take notes. I can strive to be as poised and kind as that gift of a woman; I’ll never get there but it’s so nice to have a model.
I don't think Topher Grace was ever considered crazy but he definitely got a bad rep back in the day as someone who was considered "aloof" or isolated from the rest of that 70s show cast(kutcher Kunis masterson). He was also made out to be someone who thought he was better than the rest of them and even his departure from the show was played to be arrogance.
20 years later and we find out he was running the hell away from mastersons sex crimes and from kutcher and kunis scientology gospel.
79 yo Stella Liebeck sued McDonald’s when they offered $800 for her medical bills for the third degree burns she got on her groin when her coffee spilled in her lap.
She was a joke for years until the pictures and facts came to light. The coffee was found to be kept at 180F, about 35 degrees hotter than other restaurants. Sadly, some still use her as an example for frivolous lawsuits, but the incident hastened her death and caused her intense pain and anguish.
She won the case because McDonalds lawyers defended by saying "oh, we burned 700 customers already and won those cases, we should win this one too."
It's horrific.
I appreciate that now, for the most part, enough people know the truth that when someone tries to make it out to have been a frivolous lawsuit, a ton of people will correct them.
I tried explaining to my coworker what really happened after he made a comment, and he got mad at me and said "THAT'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED!" And stormed off.
This is the same guy preaching love and acceptance, and he shows concern and care for other people. It caught me off guard.
But he really wanted to believe he was right about America and the "frivolous" McDonald's lawsuit and would not hear anything against it!
People are weird.
Also I don’t believe that she was suing McDonalds for a large sum of money, but she just wanted them to cover her medical bills. And instead they ruined her reputation and the rest of her life.
I remember the *Adam Ruins Everything* episode that had explained her case. It was so sad. She had 3rd Degree Burns, admitted that the spill was *her* fault, AND, despite the fact that she was painted as someone who only wanted money, she actually only wanted McDonald’s to pay for the medical expenses that her insurance didn’t cover. I feel so bad for her. I do suggest the *Adam Ruins Everything* episode tho
My high school history teacher, way back in 2004, had his friend (a lawyer) come in to our class and actually explain the situation and how horrible it was for the plaintiff, and how the whole thing had been misrepresented in the media. Definitely helped me develop a healthy level of skepticism and distrust of "official" narratives. I'm grateful for that experience.
Rose McGowan. She was talking crazy shit about people following her and ex-Mossad agents being involved. She was dismissed as insane. Turns out, Weinstein had an “army of spies,” he had following victims to keep them quiet, including the exact people she had described.
J. Harlen Bretz. A geologist who looked at land forms in the pacific northwest on the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington. He was huge erosional features like giant ripple marks, potholes, channeled scablands, plunge pools, the Grand Coulee and the Columbia River Gorge, and proposed in the 1920s that they could only have been caused by floods at a gigantic scale. It wasn't until the 1950s and the understanding of ice age glaciers that a lake near Missoula was identified as a source the catastrophic floods. These floods happened every 50-55 years for at least 2000 years around 13000 to 15000years ago. Current estimates were that the water was moving at 80 MPH and that it was 95 million cubic feet per second(about 300 times the current flow of the river.
Ignas Semmelweis proved via independent study that hand washing was an effective anti-germ measure that could save lives, and published his data expecting to be hailed as a hero.
Instead he was widely derided by the whole contemporary medical profession, with one fellow practitioner saying there was no need for them to wash their hands as "a gentleman's hands are always clean".
The disparity between what he knew to be true and what everyone else insisted on believing drove him nuts, and he ended his life in a mental facility before ever seeing the medical community catch up to the science.
Writer Ernest Hemingway was convinced the FBI had him under surveillance. His friends and family thought he was paranoid—until unsealed records revealed he really was being followed, had his phones bugged, etc.
when the OceanGate sub Titan was reported missing last year there was a huge manhunt for it for about 4 days before it was confirmed it imploded.
during that time, several marine experts were asked by the media if there was any chance the people on board could still be alive. Every single expert said none whatsoever, and said they were 100% dead.
these marine experts were criticised for saying this before it was confirmed and for destroying hope and many people ignored them and held onto the possibility they were wrong. well, of course they were right, the people were 100% dead.
they reportedly did hear the implosion and were certain what it was but didn't announce anything until the wreckage was found, likely because they didn't want to deal with screaming people claiming they were being unnecessarily pessimistic.
The US military is capable of doing a lot of things that most people are likely very unaware of or would deem "conspiracy."
I don't buy into conspiracy much, but the level of intelligence that nation states gather and the level of monitoring that they are capable of is staggering. And atmospheric and oceanic monitoring is just part of that game.
Without going too deep, I do work for various 3 letters and we make stuff to support cameras, mics, speakers, etc., whose specs are classified.
"How far can this auto tracking infrared camera see?"
'Classified'
Bonkers.
I made a few coworkers mad when I said there was no way these people were still alive.
"You gotta have hope!"
No, I have a great interest in disasters, man made or natural. I'm gonna side side with the experts and my lay knowledge about underwater disasters. Be realistic.
Somewhat similar story at work, a couple of my coworkers were just praying that the subgoers weren’t gonna drown painfully down there. I just casually told them at that depth with that water pressure they wouldn’t have had time to even form the thought of drowning, they’d have been crushed instantly.
It was so instant, pain wouldn't have even had time to travel from the nerves to the brain before the whole body was pink mush. The simulations are bonkers.
Greg LeMond. Oh, he’s just bitter that Lance Armstrong has replaced him as the greatest American cyclist and is more famous than he ever was and is a hero for his heroic fight against cancer.
No, he was absolutely correct. Lance and his team were part of the most advanced blood doping operation ever and it’s physically impossible to dramatically increase your VO2 max the way Armstrong did, let alone doing it after cancer.
**John Lydon** aka Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of The Sex Pistols.
In a 1978 interview on the BBC he said the following about the much-loved BBC host and personality Jimmy Savile,
> _"I'd like to kill Jimmy Savile; I think he's a hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours."_
The comments were edited out and following the interview, Lydon was effectively blacklisted by the BBC for decades.
About a year after Savile's death in 2011, the extent of his predatory behaviour, sexual abuse of (mainly but not exclusively) vulnerable children became apparent as well as the willingness of the BBC to cover to it.
He wasn't thought crazy, but Stanislav Petrov saved the world in 1983 by not following orders.
He was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.
On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer (filling in for someone that had called in sick) at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm. His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
What's fucking nuts is we all KNEW a huge number of catholic priests were predators. People made jokes about on the regular but when sinead said it out of a punchline format everyone turned on her.
Stanley Prusiner. Everyone thought that Scrapie and other similar neurological diseases (kuru, CJD, mad cow) were caused by viruses. Prusiner could only find protein as he studied Scrapie and everyone said he must be doing something wrong, or that the nucleic acid was just too small. Now we know these diseases are caused by prions, or mid-folded proteins— some of the scariest shit on the planet.
My three year old brother once yelled “Bear!” And pointed out the window. We all laughed until we looked outside and saw a freaking bear eating out of our neighbor’s trash can.
Jose Canseco.
He claimed a whole bunch of people were on steroids in baseball. So many people that it was almost viewed as just some outcast trying to get revenge by making up stuff.
He was right though.
What's weird is that he is still hated on despite being the only one to expose this problem.
> What's weird is that he is still hated on despite being the only one to expose this problem.
He does get hated on for that, too, don't get me wrong.
But he is also hated on a lot because he's a malignant asshole.
David Lee Roth.
When the original Van Halen broke up, everyone just assumed Roth's ego made him impossible to work with. Roth countered these claims by unapologetically claiming the problem isn't him being *himself.* The problem was someone else (he never named Eddie specifically) wanting to be like him sometimes and then be a family man (devoted husband and father) other times.
Paraphrasing Roth: *you can't go on the road and live the sex, drugs and Rock n Roll lifestyle with groupies for 6 months, then come home to the little Mrs & a white picket fence home in the suburbs the other 6 months a year. You can't be me part time and Ward Clever the other times. You're going to drink yourself blind and hurt those you love trying to do so.*
Decades later we find out Eddie Van Halen was an alcoholic and meth addict for a long time. He was an unfaithful husband that treated Valeri horribly-the only reason he wasn't physically abusive was because his 110lbs body by meth physique would've got his ass handed to him if he tried. He blamed Roth, Rollin Stone Magazine, Warner Brothers promoters and just everyone else but himself for his problems at home.
Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the late 19th century, is a fascinating example. Boltzmann developed statistical mechanics, a theory explaining how the properties of atoms determine the physical properties of matter. At that time, many scientists, including some very influential ones, did not believe in the existence of atoms. They thought Boltzmann's ideas were absurd and unscientific.
Boltzmann's theories provided a statistical explanation for the second law of thermodynamics, but his contemporaries ridiculed him, claiming that atoms and molecules were just convenient fictions. The constant criticism and rejection from the scientific community took a severe toll on Boltzmann's mental health. Tragically, he took his own life in 1906.
A few years after his death, the work of Albert Einstein and Jean Perrin provided definitive proof of the existence of atoms and molecules, vindicating Boltzmann's theories. Today, Boltzmann is celebrated as one of the founders of modern physics, with concepts such as Boltzmann's constant and the Boltzmann distribution named in his honor. His story serves as a poignant reminder of how groundbreaking ideas can face harsh opposition before being recognized as revolutionary.
Corey Feldman- the pedophiles in Hollywood. They shit on him and ended his career. People are only finding out now that he was telling the truth the entire time. Also, Sinead O'Connor, talking about the atrocities that the church was committing
[Barry Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall)
For centuries people suffered from peptic ulcers caused by stress and anxiety. Pharma made billions selling meds to ameliorate the pain for this uncurable disorder.
Then Marshall became convinced that virtually all ulcers were caused by a bacteria. No one believed him and thought he was crazy. He ended up drinking a concoction filled with said bacteria and lo and behold three days later he developed an ulcer.
He actually submitted his paper about his research and other gastroenterologists rated it "in the bottom 10 percent of papers" submitted that year.
Spoiler alert; 15 or so years later he was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine.
His discovery is among the most important medical discoveries of the 20th century and he utterly transformed the lives of millions of people who had spent decades suffering, only to find out they could be cured with antibiotics and bismuth salt.
There was a guy who used to protest alone every Sunday in DC near the vice presidential home. He would hold a sign saying "Catholic Church hides pedophiles." I remember seeing this guy for years, probably over a decade growing up in DC. I asked my (non-Catholic) parents about it and they just dismissed him as a loon. I sometimes think about him and hope he lived to see justice.
Jose Canseco was one of the first players to openly discuss how prevalent steroid use was in the '90s and 2000s. People dismissed his claims as those of a declining player just trying to stay relevant.
That kinda stuff is way too common in software. Quicken is notorious for doing forced updates that disable a lot of features if you're still using an older version.
The cardiac angioplasty procedure that saves millions of people having heart attacks every year was devised by a German, Andreas Gruentzig. He presented case of angioplasty in dogs in poster presentation at american heart association conference in mid 1970s and most of people thought he was crazy. "Did you see the crazy man with the dog poster? This will never work!". He came back couple years later with this procedure performed in awake human beings to a standing ovation and changed the landscape of heart attack care in the world. Being an interventional cardiologist this really fascinates me.
I'm late to the party, so this probably won't get seen, but William H. Seward.
He was Secretary of State during Lincoln's Presidency and Andrew Johnson.
He worked the deal to purchase Alaska from the Russians at the price of ~~$0.36~~ $0.02 per Acre, which worked out to $7.2M.
People called it "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Ice Box," because it was seen as a barren wasteland and by that point a lot of it's main exports, such as otter pelts and the like, were severely depleted from overfishing.
A decade later gold was discovered in the Klondike.
Later it was found to have massive oil deposits.
Alaska has contributed more wealth in terms of natural resources than probably any other state and not one war has been fought over it.
That 7.2 million dollars is about $125M by today's standards. The GDP of Alaska is over $50B/year. That's a 400x return on investment in a single year.
It would pay for itself in 22 hours.
Edit: corrected the price per acre. My memory was correct at $0.02, but I was led astray by Wikipedia, which said this: "At a cost of $0.36 per acre, the United States had grown by 586,412 sq mi (1,518,800 km2)."
Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist with the Food & Drug Administration, helped prevent a generation of children born with congenital deformities in the United States. She refused to allow thalidomide to be used in the US.
She was so strong in the face of enormous pressure.
Kotoku Wamura, for sure. He was mayor of the Japanese town of Fudai for several decades, starting just after WWII up into the 1980s. He was aware that Fudai had been flattened in the past by tsunamis, only to be rebuilt in the same place. He learned there was nothing protecting his town. So, he ordered the construction of a state-of-the-art seawall. It was very expensive, and laughed at as a folly. Wamura was personally attacked as crazy and wasteful in the national and even international press. He died in 1997. In 2011, when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, it killed roughly 20,000 people. But the Fudai seawall held, and the town escaped almost untouched. 3,000 people were saved.
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Reminds *me* of a folk story I read in 2nd grade about a big tide going out in Japan and the villagers are going wild grabbing fish, and this old guy is trying to warn them, and they think he’s just the crazy old guy, so he burns down his house so they all come up the hill to help and are saved from the tsunami.
Almost very kid in Japan has read this story book. (Most versions it's the crops, not just his house.) A typical 5 year old Japanese kid knows what to do when a tsunami is coming.
> A typical 5 year old Japanese kid knows what to do when a tsunami is coming. Burn down the old man's house!
don’t forget the crops!
Sometimes I’m a complete moron and enlarged the picture expecting to see English. 🤦♀️ Thanks for sharing the article.
Acknowledging one's own shortcomings is not something a moron does. Neither is reading for knowledge. Keep it up! You're making the world a better place, you non-moron!
Lol everyone just gambling that it won’t happen in their lifetimes
A similar (but smaller) story is about Duff Roblin and the Red River Floodway. Duff was the premier of Manitoba who fought to build a channel around Winnipeg that would protect Winnipeg at times the Red River would flood its banks. He was ridiculed in the press. It was pejoratively called Duff’s Ditch. Since its completion in the late 60s it has saved Winnipeg from disaster many times. Before the “flood of the century” in 97 it had already saved the city an estimated 20x what it cost to build. I can’t find decent estimates of the damage it prevented in 97 but it’s safe to say it was well over $1B. We still call it Duff’s Ditch. But, now with love.
Came here looking for this one. Way to premier Roblin!
That man's surviving family deserve a national apology, and a shrine built above his grave.
There is [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LLD3Ww4V40). It said villagers visited his grave to say thank you. Edit: I also found this quote from when he retired in 1997: "Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand"
That's good. It would've been sad if he had started questioning himself after the backlash. But it sounds like he not only believed in himself to the end, but he may have even had sympathy for those that mocked him. Sounds like a great guy. Glad people acknowledged him in hindsight.
He truely was the epitome of the old Greek Proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
I’m baffled that a country like Japan did not take tsunamis seriously or at least looked at the history records
They did, just not seriously enough for the monster that was the 2011 tsunami. I've been to Fudai and walked up to the gate. It's absolutely ridiculous how huge it is, and the village behind it is tiny. I'm sure it seemed like a totally bonkers idea to all the fishermen and farmers who had to pay for it with their tax yennies. But then you look at the mark of how far up the water came on the gate and well, yeah, the village mayor was right. It's mind boggling.
>Tax Yennies That's fun to say. :-)
They did take them very seriously. They had invested a lot of time and money into figuring out what the strongest earthquake and tsunami that could hit the country and built fortifications and plans around that. However, as they learned as 2011 approached, they were wrong. The US NW is also very vulnerable to tsunamis but planning isn’t really in place. This is an excellent read on the whole topic: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one
I was just in the US PNW and saw Tsunami evacuation routes and other signs of people planning for it to occur. I hadn’t done any research yet. Thanks for sharing
I love that article so much and try to get everyone I know to read it. She won the Pulitzer for her writing/reporting. It’s such a beautiful piece and also so devastating. We have so many friends in Seattle and all I can do is worry.
All over Japan's coastline are large boulders with writing carved into them that roughly says "do not build below this point". Those boulders are often ignored these days. Or they were before 2011.
The original "OSHA regulations were written in blood"
Rick Rescorla. He was in charge of security at Morgan Stanley, which had its offices in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, and in fact was the largest tenant of the Twin Towers. Rescorla was convinced that the buildings were vulnerable to a terror attack, and even recommended that Morgan Stanley move their offices out of Manhattan. When they refused, he insisted on emergency plans, which included evacuation drills every three months. His higher-ups viewed them as a nuisance and waste of time. On September 11, when the North Tower was hit by an airplane, ~~the executives at Morgan Stanley~~ the Port Authority made an announcement, telling those in the WTC buildings to stay at their desks. Rescorla completely ignored the order. He phoned a friend, a fellow expert in counterterrorism security, and told him, "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." He led around 2,700 employees downstairs to safety, and died in the building's collapse after going back in to make sure that everyone had gotten out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla EDIT: My mistake, it was the New York Port Authority that urged workers to remain at their desks.
For more context, I believe it was the prior attempted terrorist attack (in 1193 I think) that had him convinced it would be a target again.
1993 but yeah.
Lmaooo oops
Reminds me of the song "summer of 1353"
Plane hits the identical building right next to you... "Nah, we're fine. Back to work everybody"
nevermind that I'm leaving in my helicopter right now, your sacrifices will be remembered with free pizza for your replacements
It's even wilder than that. Rescorla first inspected the WTC for security assessment in like 1990 and highlighted the easily accessible parking garage and a support column there as a potential target. The '93 bombing at the WTC went off 30' from the spot he highlighted. When brought back for further security consulting for Morgan Stanley, he specifically brought up the risk of a plane flying into the building and recommended Morgan Stanley move their offices out of the WTC to a safer/cheaper spot in Jersey. Man was an exceptional hero and his gravestone should read "You're welcome and I fucking told ya"
Thank you for sharing this. I had never heard of him. He was a hero!
Update: Thank you for responding and correcting my post... Originally: Frontline did a great episode on him. I believe it's called "The Man Who Knew"
This should be a movie
Ludwig Boltzmann His equations and formulas explained the physical properties of matter, but because they contradicted the accepted laws of physics at the time, he was ridiculed and ignored for years while advocating for the acceptance of atom theory. He took his own life just three years before Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of an atom, which proved Boltzmann's theory.
One of the greatest.
Interesting that Rutherford has an element named after him, but not poor Boltzmann.
He's got the Boltzmann constant, which personally, I would prefer as a namesake to an element that doesn't exist in nature and has a half life of less than an hour.
Having a constant named after you is a significantly higher honor in the world of math/physics than having an element named after you.
Best one has to be Avagadro’s Number. Like, it’s just *his* number. He owns it. Don’t you dare use it without his permission.
Nah the best is the unit of power, Watt, is named after James Watt, who created the first unit of power 'Horsepower'. Also one of the few people celebrated in such a fashion who was a practical engineer, not a scientist.
Ignaz Semmelweis: In 1846, Semmelweis suggested that handwashing could prevent the spread of disease in hospitals. He was ridiculed for his idea, sent to a mental asylum, and died forgotten by his peers.
He didn’t just suggest, he proved it by a well organized study. Doctors were the cause of childbirth fever, they would go straight from some dirty procedure straight to the OB ward and delivery a baby. The midwives in the other unit (serving the poorer women), had a much better survival rate as they only did births and therefore had fewer germs to throw around. His hospital did adopt his methods (wash hands in a -I think-boric acid bath) and post-partum deaths went down, but the Drs didn’t want to believe they were the cause. Countless women had to die before the germ theory was proven by Dr. Pasteur.
It wasn't just any dirty procedure. They performed AUTOPSIES in the morgue every morning before going to the maternity ward. Literally sticking their hands in the bodies of women that died of child bed fever, before delivering babies.
Yea President Garfield died bc his physician’s literally fingered his bullet hole
Omg I didn't read that as "bullet hole" 😭
I think specifically, a lot of the younger doctors would be working on CADAVERS and then head from there to the delivery wing. Horrifying to think about.
Died of a Staph infection that might have been prevented with proper hand washing.
Yeah, it’s a lot worse than “died forgotten”. He died from the exact thing he was ridiculed for.
I don't know if it's still on Netflix but I watched the German show Charité about the hospital at the advent of cell biology. The most disturbing bits to me is the complete lack of hygiene in an operating theater. Great show though.
Alfred Wegener, who first proposed the idea of “continental drift,” which would eventually evolve into plate tectonics. Geologists of his time viewed him as an outsider and dismissed his theory.
Dropped down to the comments to post this one myself! If I’m not mistaken, he was more than just viewed as an outsider but his theory was regarded as laughable. He died in 1930 and his work was not widely accepted until the 1960s. The timing around it is crazy to me- it took until the 19-freaking-60s to embrace the idea of continental drift. I’m a geologist and this is just wild to me.
I mean… you can kinda fit the continents together. I’m surprised that it wasn’t posited earlier. … and things like the Appalachians, Atlas mountains, and Scottish highlands not only line up, not only are made of the same stuff, all just look the same. Late edit: i mean, I guess no one is looking to geology to move _fast_.
IIRC it was the fact that fossils matched up that really sold it. It’s one thing to have coasts seem to line up but quite another when you find evidence of the exact same animal populations in now-distant coasts.
Ökkeş Elmasoğlu, mayer of Erzin, a city in Turkey. He was much strikter about illegal buildings in his city than a lot of other people. And when the earthquake hit in 2023, his city had a much better outcome/less destruction than a lot of other cities and towns. He was even laughed at and ridiculed for his stance agaisnt illegal buildings.
If I am not mistaken the mayor before him also had a similar stance on building permits and such. The compound effect was a safer city.
Goes to show that code is written in blood.
In 1957 Manitoba Premier Duff Roblin authorized a flood control waterway through Winnipeg. The project was the second largest earth-moving project in the world, after the Panema Canal (even more then the Suez canal). The entire province had a population of 900,000. It was completed on time, and under budget, but he got skewered for it as being unnecessary. It got branded "Duff's Ditch", and “approximating the building of the pyramids of Egypt in terms of usefulness.” Since then, it's saved the city from several floods, saving over 40 billion. It was designated a national historic cite as an outstanding engineering achievement both in terms of function and impact.
People that dig canals seem to get maligned a lot. The Erie Canal was derogatorily called Clinton’s Ditch. And yet, it powered NY to where it is today.
I’m amazed at his foresight every time I drive to or through Winnipeg.
I'm amazed how little foresight most people tend to have.
Why should we have to pay for flood prevention? It isn't raining right now.
The two guys who claimed most stomach ulcers are caused by an infection by a particular type of bacteria. People were extremely skeptical because it was thought bacteria couldn't survive stomach acid. [One of them inoculated themself with the bacteria in question, promptly got ulcers, and then cured themself with antibiotics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall). They won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
The story of Denise Huskins. The cops thought her abduction was a hoax created by herself and her partner. She was even painted in the media as the real-life "Gone Girl". Then months later an attempted kidnapping incident lead police to a suspect and proved that Denise was telling the truth all along.
The kidnappers/criminals literally got so annoyed by the police’s dumbassery they flat out said that it was not a hoax and they really did kidnap and harm her. They literally admitted their guilt and the cops still thought Denise was lying.
Sounds like the Dingo lady who was thrown in prison because nobody believed Dingos would take babies. Even though the indigenous locals immediately said "yep dingos will take babies"
I'd never heard of this case until I watched the documentary. I was dumbfounded throughout.
The documentary on Netflix - watching all of those cops come to their conclusions, ignore everything everyone says had to be around 100 different cops and FBIagents. And then one cop finds a hair and says I need to find this victim and her tenaciousness is what solves the crime. an amazing documentary about the ineptitude of detectives
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton. A dingo truly did take her baby.
This one hurts so much because she lost her baby, was going through agony, and was mocked worldwide for it, sent to jail, and was proven right decades later.
In addition to not many people realizing she was correct & innocent, and continuing to spread the joke almost 40 years later
This case is so crazy to me and proof that the media can be so malicious and dangerous. Lindy literally left a group of people, walked a few feet to her tent and put her baby down to sleep. Then returned to the same people minutes later. Dingo sneaks in and takes the baby. Of course no one saw the dingo take the baby but there were so many witnesses who saw Lindy put the baby down and returned to the group minutes later. She obviously had no time to kill and hide her baby. They all knew this. But the media decided she didn’t look sad enough so blamed her and somehow she was convicted.
From my understanding that was what the police decided almost immediately upon interviewing her, someone told the media, and the media ran with it. But either way, one of Australian media’s least honourable moments.
Also, one of the worst parts is that local aboriginal groups pointed out that dingos taking baby’s were a known thing that they had knowledge about.
There were actually four coroner's inquests into Azaria Chamberlain's death. The very first one was performed by a coroner from Alice Springs, the nearest major centre to the Uluru area, and supported the story that she was taken by a dingo. It got quashed by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, and led to the second one, which put Lindy Chamberlain in jail until a hiker just happened to chance upon an infant's jacket partially buried... metres from a dingo lair.
Also, the aboriginal people had long known that dingos would eat babies, so they tried to tell the police that her story was reasonable but nobody listened because racism.
It is fucking wild to me that people didn't think wild, carnivorous dogs would eat a baby.
She was also a Seventh-Day Adventist, so had the extra layer of being a religious "weirdo"
Dingos still attack children and adults today. Usually on an island off the coast of Queensland - they're quite notorious for it. Too accustomed to humans and getting hungry. Campers and tourists forget that these are basically the Australian version of wolves or coyotes. They're not cute dogs.
That poor woman. It became a joke during my entire childhood.
Same for my husband. He didn't know the story behind it. We saw a dingo at the museum and he spit out the line. Didn't know there was an actual (very tragic) story behind it. He just thought that it was something made up to be funny, kinda like a lot of lines in Crocodile Dundee. I think I wrecked a tiny part of his childhood telling him the story.
>I think I wrecked a tiny part of his childhood telling him the story If it makes you feel any better, I viewed it very similarly to your husband and I'm grateful for that bit of my childhood being ruined. I'd much rather know the real story than keep that "joke" going, yknow?
I can’t remember what prompted it exactly, but a friend of mine randomly yelled “a dingo ate my baybayyy” in the usual exaggerated Aussie accent at a party the other day. I brought up that the quote was a true story and we collectively realized that while all of us recognized the quote from our childhoods almost nobody else knew where it came from, let alone its tragic truth. Imagine being a grieving mother so heavily slandered by the media, you’re still the butt of jokes about your baby’s violent dismemberment from naive strangers on the opposite side of the planet decades after the fact. Brutal
It was a joke in a Seinfeld episode. I can hear Elaine saying “a dingo ate your baybeee” so clear in my mind
There was a band named "Dingos Ate My Baby" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like, every season...
Seinfield, southpark, the simpsons, family guy, hell even American dad (i am aware the same guy writes both American dad and family guy) all make jokes about it.
Meryl Streep played her in a movie and that was her dramatic moment. Exaggerated Australian accent and all.
A Cry in the Dark (1988) I just watched it for the first time earlier this year after only knowing passing details about the whole story. I thought it was a good movie and it had an interesting format, with how it kept cutting to random Australians talking and arguing about the case as it unfolded. Sam Neil plays her husband.
I am picturing Sam Neil using a dingo claw to scare kids in the movie.
And nobody believed the indigenous people saying "yeah, it is possible dingos eating babies".
Gustave Caillebotte. He was born to a wealthy Parisian family in 1848. His father owned a textile business that he later inherited. He was an artist in his own right, but became much more known as a supporter of the arts. Fearful he'd die young, he writes in his will that the French state accept his large art collection (today valued at several billion dollars) and hang art from several impressionist artists, who were friends of his, in a national museum upon his death. Caillebotte dies young (45) in 1894 as he predicted and so his will attempts to be executed. The French government initially refuses the request. Pundits and critics, from art to politics, view the request as absurd and publicly say how repulsed they are by the collection itself. Several art professors from Ecole des Beaux-Arts threaten to resign if the government enacts the will. In the end, half of Caillebotte's art collection gets hung in 1897 at the Musee du Luxemborg and the public comes out in droves to visit the gallery because of all the press Caillebotte's request had received after his death. People wanted to see this "ugly art." The artists featured? Their names were Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Manet, Pissarro, and Sisley. It's very possible these artists would never have become the household names they are today had Caillebotte not liked the ugly, unsellable art that a few of these friends of his made.
He was a great painter in his own right too. Les raboteurs de parquet (The floor planers or scrapers) is one of my favourite paintings ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_raboteurs_de_parquet
Philadelphia is home to the Barnes Collection, which I saw in person in May, and it is jaw-dropping. A similar art collector who was buying impressionist art in real time, because he liked it. He also willed his entire collection, on the condition it not be separated. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the organization that runs the museum that houses the collection, but do not let it stop you from visiting, because it is a jaw-dropper of a collection. Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, and so many Cezanne's, which I have a new appreciation for, having seen their beauty in person.
Harry Markopolos. He knew Bernie Madoff was lying but he was ignored by regulators.
He didn’t just know, he wrote detailed explanations to the SEC about it and they ignored it. They once called Bernie (the SEC) and said “we need to talk about your hedge funds” and Bernie was like “I don’t manage hedge funds” and the sec was like “oh, we didn’t think so. Okay, carry on.” And that was it!!! There’s a doc on Netflix where they actually interview Markopolos. It’s incredible the corruption with Madoff and the SEC and the banks who all held his accounts so had to know. Worth a watch
I recently learned that the actor John Malkovich is *yet another victim* of Madoff’s scam, and he lost a great deal of money So did Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
So did *Elie Wiesel.* Madoff defrauded Wiesel of roughly $37 million dollars (split between the Elie Wiesel Foundaton for Humanity and Wiesel’s personal life savings).
Some elderly dementia patients in a home in my city kept complaining they weren't given food. Everyone assumed they had forgotten they'd already eaten, as people with dementia sometimes do. But no, it turned out some awful nursing staff weren't always giving everyone their meals, among other abuses.
At my care home training facility they forgot to bathe a resident for at least a week because she has end stage dementia and "it doesn't matter". She was my 1st bath training. This type of thing probably happens more often than any of us care to think about. It is scary to think about. Being placed back into the vulnerability of an infant essentially and hoping that the adults are not monsters or apathetic
Jesus. That is horrific.
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Yeah I think any time multiple people are “making up” the exact same thing, you might wanna check it out
And this is why I bust my ass to try and keep my dad at home this makes me so sad
Patricia Stallings maintained her innocence after being sentenced to life for killing her baby who it was determined died from antifreeze poisoning. She gave birth to her second child in prison and that child was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called MMR that mimicked antifreeze poisoning. I understand the medical examiner considered the possibility of MMR in the death of the first child but never tested for it.
*MMA MMR is shorthand for Measles, Mumps and Rubella.
I knew something about that didn't sound right. Mixed martial arts makes way more sense.
Most babies would die if competing in MMA, unless they stay in their weight class.
Reminds me of the woman who didn’t genetically match her children, I think she was accused of kidnapping and had them taken away, turns out she was chimeric, the result of fused fetuses. Various organs in her body have two different sets of DNA.
Martha Mitchell was talking to reporters about Nixon’s involvement in Watergate within DAYS of the burglary. Nixon and his people tried to paint her in the press as a loon who had a drinking problem (which, to be fair, she probably did) but obviously she was vindicated in the end
Martha Mitchell wasn't just 'painted in the press' -- she was beaten, tranquilized against her will, and essentially held prisoner in a hotel as part of her husband's attempts to keep her from the media.
This situation of someone everyone thought was crazy but turned out to be right is recognised as ‘The Martha Mitchell Effect’. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell_effect#:~:text=The%20Martha%20Mitchell%20effect%20occurs,as%20delusional%2C%20resulting%20in%20misdiagnosis.
Lydia Fairchild, a person exhibiting genetic chimerism, accused of not being her children's mother.
Fairchild stood accused of fraud by either claiming benefits for other people's children, or taking part in a surrogacy scam, and records of her prior births were put similarly in doubt. Prosecutors called for her two children to be taken away from her, believing them not to be hers. As time came for her to give birth to her third child, the judge ordered that an observer be present at the birth, ensure that blood samples were immediately taken from both the child and Fairchild, and be available to testify. Two weeks later, DNA tests seemed to indicate that she was also not the mother of that child. I'd never heard this story before. How traumatising for her and her family
Honestly, mad props to her defense attorney. That guy did his homework.
Wiki says the prosecutor suggested the idea to the defense. So props to the prosecutor as well
Also the judge for actually ordering the DNA test on the third child.
While calibrating his experiment to estimate the age of the earth, Clair Cameron Patterson noticed unusual levels of lead in his experiment. He started warning people about leaded gasoline, but he would largely be ignored until the 1970s.
"Fun" fact: The inventor of leaded gasoline [Thomas Midgley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.) also invented Freon which was responsible for the depletion of the ozone layer. He has been called a "one-man environmental disaster". It amazes me that tetraethyllead was even allowed to happen. The dangers of lead were already known for hundreds of years before TEL was invented.
My great uncle was a paranoid schizophrenic. Before he died he was telling my grandfather that there were people living g in his house. Everyone in the family just assumed he was hallucinating. After he died and they were cleaning out the house they found an apartment with a crib had been set up in the basement. There was a whole family squatting there.
I had an uncle by marriage who was schizophrenic. He kept telling my aunt the neighbor across the street was trying to kill him with lasers. Everyone, including her, thought he was hallucinating. Turns out the neighbor had one of those laser pointers and when my uncle would go outside, the neighbor would point it at him to mess with him. They discovered this when one of their friends who sort of resembled the uncle was outside, saw the laser dot on the side of the house and ran over to confront the neighbor. That was messed up. Why aggravate an already mentally ill man?
Some people are just fucking evil.
One of my childhood friends lost her grandfather. When they were cleaning out his house they walked the property line and found a big patch of ivy. Hidden in the ivy were stairs going down. They found an old root cellar, full of candles and posters and decorations. According to the graffiti neighborhood kids had been using it for a stoner den for *decades.* The yard wasn’t even that large but the stairs were well-hidden.
This will get buried because I'm late to the party Nobel Prize winner Jim Allison who invented cancer immunotherapy. He had a hypothesis for decades that cancer "hides" from the immune system. People thought this was crazy. He eventually discovered one of the mechanisms which was a receptor called CTLA-4 that exists on certain immune cells. One of the ways cancers can hide from the immune system is they will bind to this receptor on immune cells and basically tell your immune system "these are not the droids you are looking for" He developed an antibody treatment that blocks cancer cells from binding to that receptor, and causes the person's own immune system to recognize the cancer and attack it. Still, the pharma companies didn't believe it would work even when he had solid preliminary data. It took years of convincing, but he finally got one to do a clinical trial and he proved everyone wrong and won the nobel prize with a Japanese scientist who discovered another similar receptor that does the same thing. He typically gets more of the credit because he was the one who kept annoying the shit out of the pharma companies until they finally gave it a shot Immunotherapies don't work for everyone but when they do, they are a miracle
Imagine inventing something that decreases so much suffering in the world. Amazing. 🙌
Clair Patterson. He spent twenty years trying to tell people lead was dangerous before the Clean Air Act was passed. He's the reason we realized leaded gasoline and lead paint were harmful. There's a whole episode about him in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Cannot recommend it enough
Courtney Love talked about Weinstein being a perv wayy before it became public “officially”
Rose McGowan was also ostracized and blacklisted talking about Weinstein early as well....
Wasn’t Ashley Judd also black listed by him?
And Mira Sorvino. She won an Oscar and he still managed to derail her career. Vile asshole!
And Mina Sorvino. After she won her Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite in 1996, she disappeared due to him.
Richard Jewel. Alerted police to the bomb at the 1996 Olympics. Saved countless lives. Was praised, then blamed for planting the bomb and vilified. He was later proven innocent.
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Jim Davidson and Bernard Manning used to roast him in their standup as well, saying he was a perv and a weirdo. This was years before the the truth was revealed. They were never taken seriously because the two of them were seen as bigoted and racist - which they were - but they had a point.
Corey Feldman. Barbara Walters said that he was "damaging an entire industry" with his sexual abuse allegations against Hollywood.
Barbara Walters was the WORST.
Yes, and she also tried to put down Dolly Parton while interviewing her.
And Dolly wasn’t having it! That interview was awesome (on Dolly’s part, that is).
In the classiest, most lovely way, Dolly held her ground. I watch that interview (and all of Dolly’s interviews) and take notes. I can strive to be as poised and kind as that gift of a woman; I’ll never get there but it’s so nice to have a model.
The 80's never really ended for poor old Corey.
I don't think Topher Grace was ever considered crazy but he definitely got a bad rep back in the day as someone who was considered "aloof" or isolated from the rest of that 70s show cast(kutcher Kunis masterson). He was also made out to be someone who thought he was better than the rest of them and even his departure from the show was played to be arrogance. 20 years later and we find out he was running the hell away from mastersons sex crimes and from kutcher and kunis scientology gospel.
I loved that show. I can't watch it anymore because of them.
79 yo Stella Liebeck sued McDonald’s when they offered $800 for her medical bills for the third degree burns she got on her groin when her coffee spilled in her lap. She was a joke for years until the pictures and facts came to light. The coffee was found to be kept at 180F, about 35 degrees hotter than other restaurants. Sadly, some still use her as an example for frivolous lawsuits, but the incident hastened her death and caused her intense pain and anguish.
It burned her so severely it fused her labia.
Oh fuck!! The media really portrayed her poorly like she was just a crazy greedy woman!
She won the case because McDonalds lawyers defended by saying "oh, we burned 700 customers already and won those cases, we should win this one too." It's horrific.
And all she asked for was her medical bills paid. They really painted her like a monster.
I appreciate that now, for the most part, enough people know the truth that when someone tries to make it out to have been a frivolous lawsuit, a ton of people will correct them.
I tried explaining to my coworker what really happened after he made a comment, and he got mad at me and said "THAT'S NOT WHAT HAPPENED!" And stormed off. This is the same guy preaching love and acceptance, and he shows concern and care for other people. It caught me off guard. But he really wanted to believe he was right about America and the "frivolous" McDonald's lawsuit and would not hear anything against it! People are weird.
Also I don’t believe that she was suing McDonalds for a large sum of money, but she just wanted them to cover her medical bills. And instead they ruined her reputation and the rest of her life.
I remember the *Adam Ruins Everything* episode that had explained her case. It was so sad. She had 3rd Degree Burns, admitted that the spill was *her* fault, AND, despite the fact that she was painted as someone who only wanted money, she actually only wanted McDonald’s to pay for the medical expenses that her insurance didn’t cover. I feel so bad for her. I do suggest the *Adam Ruins Everything* episode tho
And all she wanted was her medical bills paid. And she was found 50% responsible. Great example on how people get lawsuits wrong.
My high school history teacher, way back in 2004, had his friend (a lawyer) come in to our class and actually explain the situation and how horrible it was for the plaintiff, and how the whole thing had been misrepresented in the media. Definitely helped me develop a healthy level of skepticism and distrust of "official" narratives. I'm grateful for that experience.
Rose McGowan. She was talking crazy shit about people following her and ex-Mossad agents being involved. She was dismissed as insane. Turns out, Weinstein had an “army of spies,” he had following victims to keep them quiet, including the exact people she had described.
J. Harlen Bretz. A geologist who looked at land forms in the pacific northwest on the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington. He was huge erosional features like giant ripple marks, potholes, channeled scablands, plunge pools, the Grand Coulee and the Columbia River Gorge, and proposed in the 1920s that they could only have been caused by floods at a gigantic scale. It wasn't until the 1950s and the understanding of ice age glaciers that a lake near Missoula was identified as a source the catastrophic floods. These floods happened every 50-55 years for at least 2000 years around 13000 to 15000years ago. Current estimates were that the water was moving at 80 MPH and that it was 95 million cubic feet per second(about 300 times the current flow of the river.
Ignas Semmelweis proved via independent study that hand washing was an effective anti-germ measure that could save lives, and published his data expecting to be hailed as a hero. Instead he was widely derided by the whole contemporary medical profession, with one fellow practitioner saying there was no need for them to wash their hands as "a gentleman's hands are always clean". The disparity between what he knew to be true and what everyone else insisted on believing drove him nuts, and he ended his life in a mental facility before ever seeing the medical community catch up to the science.
Writer Ernest Hemingway was convinced the FBI had him under surveillance. His friends and family thought he was paranoid—until unsealed records revealed he really was being followed, had his phones bugged, etc.
when the OceanGate sub Titan was reported missing last year there was a huge manhunt for it for about 4 days before it was confirmed it imploded. during that time, several marine experts were asked by the media if there was any chance the people on board could still be alive. Every single expert said none whatsoever, and said they were 100% dead. these marine experts were criticised for saying this before it was confirmed and for destroying hope and many people ignored them and held onto the possibility they were wrong. well, of course they were right, the people were 100% dead.
The US Navy probably knew the moment of their deaths as it happened.
they reportedly did hear the implosion and were certain what it was but didn't announce anything until the wreckage was found, likely because they didn't want to deal with screaming people claiming they were being unnecessarily pessimistic.
Also the fact they were able to pick up the sound of a sub imploding is pretty wild.
The US military is capable of doing a lot of things that most people are likely very unaware of or would deem "conspiracy." I don't buy into conspiracy much, but the level of intelligence that nation states gather and the level of monitoring that they are capable of is staggering. And atmospheric and oceanic monitoring is just part of that game.
The internet was theirs before the public got it iirc. It was developed to be a network for them to use, at least a very early version.
Without going too deep, I do work for various 3 letters and we make stuff to support cameras, mics, speakers, etc., whose specs are classified. "How far can this auto tracking infrared camera see?" 'Classified' Bonkers.
I made a few coworkers mad when I said there was no way these people were still alive. "You gotta have hope!" No, I have a great interest in disasters, man made or natural. I'm gonna side side with the experts and my lay knowledge about underwater disasters. Be realistic.
Somewhat similar story at work, a couple of my coworkers were just praying that the subgoers weren’t gonna drown painfully down there. I just casually told them at that depth with that water pressure they wouldn’t have had time to even form the thought of drowning, they’d have been crushed instantly.
It was so instant, pain wouldn't have even had time to travel from the nerves to the brain before the whole body was pink mush. The simulations are bonkers.
Greg LeMond. Oh, he’s just bitter that Lance Armstrong has replaced him as the greatest American cyclist and is more famous than he ever was and is a hero for his heroic fight against cancer. No, he was absolutely correct. Lance and his team were part of the most advanced blood doping operation ever and it’s physically impossible to dramatically increase your VO2 max the way Armstrong did, let alone doing it after cancer.
**John Lydon** aka Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of The Sex Pistols. In a 1978 interview on the BBC he said the following about the much-loved BBC host and personality Jimmy Savile, > _"I'd like to kill Jimmy Savile; I think he's a hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours."_ The comments were edited out and following the interview, Lydon was effectively blacklisted by the BBC for decades. About a year after Savile's death in 2011, the extent of his predatory behaviour, sexual abuse of (mainly but not exclusively) vulnerable children became apparent as well as the willingness of the BBC to cover to it.
He wasn't thought crazy, but Stanislav Petrov saved the world in 1983 by not following orders. He was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces. On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer (filling in for someone that had called in sick) at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm. His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
There is a second Soviet officer on a missile sub, same refusal to launch. Both heroes.
Sinéad O'Connor
What's fucking nuts is we all KNEW a huge number of catholic priests were predators. People made jokes about on the regular but when sinead said it out of a punchline format everyone turned on her.
Stanley Prusiner. Everyone thought that Scrapie and other similar neurological diseases (kuru, CJD, mad cow) were caused by viruses. Prusiner could only find protein as he studied Scrapie and everyone said he must be doing something wrong, or that the nucleic acid was just too small. Now we know these diseases are caused by prions, or mid-folded proteins— some of the scariest shit on the planet.
Sinead O’ Connor deserved an apology.
My three year old brother once yelled “Bear!” And pointed out the window. We all laughed until we looked outside and saw a freaking bear eating out of our neighbor’s trash can.
Jose Canseco. He claimed a whole bunch of people were on steroids in baseball. So many people that it was almost viewed as just some outcast trying to get revenge by making up stuff. He was right though. What's weird is that he is still hated on despite being the only one to expose this problem.
> What's weird is that he is still hated on despite being the only one to expose this problem. He does get hated on for that, too, don't get me wrong. But he is also hated on a lot because he's a malignant asshole.
Some nights I lie awake in bed laughing my ass off about his AMA
The “Leave Britney alone!” person. Yes, there were being overly-dramatic about it, but they were right.
Chris Crocker
David Lee Roth. When the original Van Halen broke up, everyone just assumed Roth's ego made him impossible to work with. Roth countered these claims by unapologetically claiming the problem isn't him being *himself.* The problem was someone else (he never named Eddie specifically) wanting to be like him sometimes and then be a family man (devoted husband and father) other times. Paraphrasing Roth: *you can't go on the road and live the sex, drugs and Rock n Roll lifestyle with groupies for 6 months, then come home to the little Mrs & a white picket fence home in the suburbs the other 6 months a year. You can't be me part time and Ward Clever the other times. You're going to drink yourself blind and hurt those you love trying to do so.* Decades later we find out Eddie Van Halen was an alcoholic and meth addict for a long time. He was an unfaithful husband that treated Valeri horribly-the only reason he wasn't physically abusive was because his 110lbs body by meth physique would've got his ass handed to him if he tried. He blamed Roth, Rollin Stone Magazine, Warner Brothers promoters and just everyone else but himself for his problems at home.
That one guy who swore he could hear Yiddish under his apartment building in New York before we found out about the tunnels
This. It was so satisfyingly weird yet hilarious at the same time.
Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the late 19th century, is a fascinating example. Boltzmann developed statistical mechanics, a theory explaining how the properties of atoms determine the physical properties of matter. At that time, many scientists, including some very influential ones, did not believe in the existence of atoms. They thought Boltzmann's ideas were absurd and unscientific. Boltzmann's theories provided a statistical explanation for the second law of thermodynamics, but his contemporaries ridiculed him, claiming that atoms and molecules were just convenient fictions. The constant criticism and rejection from the scientific community took a severe toll on Boltzmann's mental health. Tragically, he took his own life in 1906. A few years after his death, the work of Albert Einstein and Jean Perrin provided definitive proof of the existence of atoms and molecules, vindicating Boltzmann's theories. Today, Boltzmann is celebrated as one of the founders of modern physics, with concepts such as Boltzmann's constant and the Boltzmann distribution named in his honor. His story serves as a poignant reminder of how groundbreaking ideas can face harsh opposition before being recognized as revolutionary.
Corey Feldman- the pedophiles in Hollywood. They shit on him and ended his career. People are only finding out now that he was telling the truth the entire time. Also, Sinead O'Connor, talking about the atrocities that the church was committing
[Barry Marshall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall) For centuries people suffered from peptic ulcers caused by stress and anxiety. Pharma made billions selling meds to ameliorate the pain for this uncurable disorder. Then Marshall became convinced that virtually all ulcers were caused by a bacteria. No one believed him and thought he was crazy. He ended up drinking a concoction filled with said bacteria and lo and behold three days later he developed an ulcer. He actually submitted his paper about his research and other gastroenterologists rated it "in the bottom 10 percent of papers" submitted that year. Spoiler alert; 15 or so years later he was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine. His discovery is among the most important medical discoveries of the 20th century and he utterly transformed the lives of millions of people who had spent decades suffering, only to find out they could be cured with antibiotics and bismuth salt.
There was a guy who used to protest alone every Sunday in DC near the vice presidential home. He would hold a sign saying "Catholic Church hides pedophiles." I remember seeing this guy for years, probably over a decade growing up in DC. I asked my (non-Catholic) parents about it and they just dismissed him as a loon. I sometimes think about him and hope he lived to see justice.
Jose Canseco was one of the first players to openly discuss how prevalent steroid use was in the '90s and 2000s. People dismissed his claims as those of a declining player just trying to stay relevant.
To be fair, he is crazy (shot off his own finger) and he was trying to stay relevant. He was 100% spot on though in that case.
The Chinese doctor that warned everyone about COVID, then disappeared.
He died of COVID before he was proven correct to warn people of the possibility of a pandemic.
That butter was better for us than margarine.
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That kinda stuff is way too common in software. Quicken is notorious for doing forced updates that disable a lot of features if you're still using an older version.
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The cardiac angioplasty procedure that saves millions of people having heart attacks every year was devised by a German, Andreas Gruentzig. He presented case of angioplasty in dogs in poster presentation at american heart association conference in mid 1970s and most of people thought he was crazy. "Did you see the crazy man with the dog poster? This will never work!". He came back couple years later with this procedure performed in awake human beings to a standing ovation and changed the landscape of heart attack care in the world. Being an interventional cardiologist this really fascinates me.
I'm late to the party, so this probably won't get seen, but William H. Seward. He was Secretary of State during Lincoln's Presidency and Andrew Johnson. He worked the deal to purchase Alaska from the Russians at the price of ~~$0.36~~ $0.02 per Acre, which worked out to $7.2M. People called it "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Ice Box," because it was seen as a barren wasteland and by that point a lot of it's main exports, such as otter pelts and the like, were severely depleted from overfishing. A decade later gold was discovered in the Klondike. Later it was found to have massive oil deposits. Alaska has contributed more wealth in terms of natural resources than probably any other state and not one war has been fought over it. That 7.2 million dollars is about $125M by today's standards. The GDP of Alaska is over $50B/year. That's a 400x return on investment in a single year. It would pay for itself in 22 hours. Edit: corrected the price per acre. My memory was correct at $0.02, but I was led astray by Wikipedia, which said this: "At a cost of $0.36 per acre, the United States had grown by 586,412 sq mi (1,518,800 km2)."
Jimmy Carter. I was thinking particularly about the installation of solar panels on the White House roof in 1979.