Sometimes you can find the most fascinating things in the most unexpected places, and that was the case for one YouTuber who braved a dangerous hike in Death Valley in search of a lost CIA spy plane.
Death Valley is definitely one of the most dangerous places across all of America to hike, as it’s capable of reaching life-threatening temperatures that make any strenuous exercise incredibly challenging.
That’s exactly why the CIA and US Air Force declined to retrieve a crashed spy plane from the depths of the national park, as it proved to be both dangerous and not worth the effort.
The SA-16A Albatross still lies wrecked on a hillside in Death Valley (YouTube/Ghost Town Living)
The plane in question was a Grumman SA-16A Albatross, commissioned by the CIA as a spy plane in the 1950s for use in the Cold War.
During a training mission in 1952 one of the engines completely failed while it was flying over Death Valley, prompting all six occupants on the flight to abandon ship.
While they all thankfully survived, the same can’t be said for the Albatross, as it swiftly crashed into the valley, causing a heavy impact on a steep slope in what can only be described as the middle of nowhere.
It remains there to this day, and YouTuber Ghost Town Living, otherwise known as Brent Underwood, took it upon himself to brave the hike and check it out.
Upon reaching the wreckage it’s actually hard to believe what you’re seeing, as it’s both surprisingly in tact and utterly destroyed at the same time. It almost looks like an anomaly upon the edge of the rocky hill, but once Brent got a little closer its easier to see the catastrophic damage.
Large parts of the Albatross’ metal frame have been completely shattered, with pieces strewn tens of meters away from the main crash site. Most of the chairs, for example, have been thrown out of the plane, but one remains inside showing how steep of an angle the plane currently lies at.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the wreckage is the comparative effect that the sun has had on the plane’s shell. Where the sun hits it’s easy to notice how much the colour and details have worn away, but on the underside which almost always remains shrouded from the beating sun, paint and text remains almost as if it was new.
Some parts of the plane remain in near-perfect condition despite it’s age (YouTube/Ghost Town Living)
You can see the giant lettering on what is assumed to be one of the wings, alongside text that states “cut here for emergency rescue” underneath a broken window, even though it’s been exposed to the elements for over 70 years.
Something that he also noticed is that there are parts of the plane that have clearly been taken by other visitors to the site – in particular an I.D. plate which he previously spotted a listing for on eBay.
This made him question the difference between ‘trash’ and ‘treasure’, as the crashed SA-16A is likely both at the same time.
“Either it’s trash or it’s treasure, meaning either it’s all taken away or it’s left for other people to enjoy,” Brent outlines, and unfortunately this crash site finds itself difficultly somewhere in the middle.
Many in the comments have been left amazed at Brent’s bravery, in particular within the moments that he’s exploring the plane.
“Brent mentions how the plane wreckage is precariously perched and then in the next breath he says how cool it is to sit inside,” one comment remarks, whereas another adds: “How precarious it’s perched, and you’re clambering all over it! I was so worried for you.”
One even describes Underwood as “fearless” in his pursuit for exploration, and it’s certainly something you can’t deny as he’s gone to incredible lengths to explore and share incredibly finds such as this, despite the clear and present dangers.
Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Ghost Town Living
Man made the ‘loudest’ sound in the world’s quietest room and couldn’t believe what happened
Turns out that the environment you’re in can have a massive effect on how loud something is
Sometimes you appreciate a quiet space, but this particular room might make you yearn for the loud echoes of every day life – and playing one of the world’s loudest noises can really show that.
Sound is something you’re aware of every single second of your life – but what if there was a room that was almost entirely silent?
That’s certainly the case with the anechoic chamber at London South Bank University, as it’s a purpose-built ‘echo-free’ chamber that ‘achieves almost perfect quiet conditions’.
It works by removing any sound reflections from all surfaces alongside blocking out all external noise in an isolated chamber through heavy concrete walls and long foam wedges.
It boasts a background noise level of just 15.4dBA, which is somewhere between normal breathing and whispering from around five feet away – so pretty quiet!
What would happen then if you heard one of the loudest sounds in the world within this environment? Thankfully YouTube is here to give us the answers.
Scientific experiment channel The Action Lab specifically used the world’s loudest whistle – likely the HyperWhistle – which can reach levels of up to 142dBA which is about as loud as a gunshot or an airplane taking off.
There’s no doubt that the initial whistle sound is still fairly loud, but the remarkable aspect of the experiment is how quickly the sound just disappears afterwards, returning almost immediately to silence again.
This fact is made even clearer when testing the whistle in almost the opposite environment – the reverberation chamber – which is designed to maximize sounds through deliberate reflection.
In here the whistle is positively deafening and continues to ring far longer than it would otherwise, providing the antithesis to the short and sweet sounds within the anechoic chamber.
The Action Lab also test how a balloon popping sounds in both rooms, showing once again how powerful your surroundings can be when it comes to the sounds that you hear.
Popping it within the anechoic chamber barely makes a noise beyond a short and low frequency pop, whereas the reverberation chamber turns a standard pop into what can only be described as a high-powered rifle.
The balloon pop was reduced to a whimper in the anechoic chamber (YouTube/The Action Lab)
“That room made a simple balloon popping sound like a nuclear warfare,” explains one commenter, whereas another user remarks that within the anechoic chamber “the complete lack of echo is heavenly. Everything sounds so clean.”
Others point out their shock at realizing “how much what we hear is actually echo,” and it’s certainly something that you’ll want to pay attention to next time you hear a loud noise. Listen out for the noise after the initial sound, and think how that could be different if it was accentuated or taken out completely.
Featured Image Credit: The Action Lab/YouTube
YouTuber ‘broke’ ChatGPT with paradox it found so confusing people can’t believe the response
The chatbot tried to answer a series of mind-bending logic puzzles
A YouTuber claims he ‘broke’ ChatGPT by giving the artificial intelligence (AI) tool various paradoxical situations to unravel.
If you’re a cinephile with a science fiction obsession then you’re probably already familiar with the idea of a paradox.
If not, then the Collins Dictionary defines a paradox as a ‘Statement in which it seems that if one part of it is true, the other part of it cannot be true. The story contains many levels of paradox.’
The YouTuber wanted to ‘break’ ChatGPT (TheActionLab/YouTube)
Some famous paradoxes include cat-in-a-box problems like Schrodinger’s Cat, the Monty Hall problem and the Achilles and the tortoise brainteaser.
Another couple of conundrums are the crocodile and Brandenburger-Keisler paradox – both of which a YouTuber recently asked ChatGPT to explore.
Taking to the platform earlier this year, a popular user by the name of The Action Lab uploaded a video to his 4.82 million followers titled ‘I Broke ChatGPT with This Paradox’.
The aim of the video was to catch the popular AI tool out – and fans have been going wild regarding the results of the experiment.
Crocodile Paradox
The first paradox content creator put to ChatGPT was the popular crocodile puzzle.
This particular paradox sees a crocodile stealing a child, only promising to return him if his parent can correctly predict what he will do next.
The parent assumes that the crocodile won’t return his child, so tells the creature so.
The cryptic has no clear resolution as the crocodile runs the risk of contradicting his promise if he keeps the child and the parent’s prediction is correct.
After putting the dilemma into Chat GPT, the chatbot recognised it for being a paradox – earning itself a ‘point’ from the YouTuber.
1 or 2 answer
In a similar vein to the crocodile paradox, the social media user put the same dilemma to ChatGPT but without featuring the creature.
“You can only respond with the number 1 or 2,” he wrote. “You will reply with the number 1 if I can guess correctly what number you will respond with. You will respond with the number 2.”
The tool responded with the number 2 and after being told it didn’t ‘follow the scenario’, ChatGPT admitted that its answers were not logically consistent.
Thus by the YouTuber’s definition he ‘broke’ the chatbot for the first time with the 1 or 2 paradox.
ChatGPT is a AI chatbot (Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox
If you’re not familiar with the Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox then you need to know it’s a two-person paradox.
It shows the following configurations: Ann believes that Bob assumes that Ann believes that Bob’s assumption is wrong.
Are you still with us?
The YouTuber put the famed Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox to ChatGPT and asked ‘Does Ann believe that Bob’s assumption is wrong?’
In response, the tool replied in the negative, claiming: “No, the statement doesn’t directly say Ann believes Bob’s assumption is wrong.”
The social media user replied: “So if your answer is no then that means that is not the case that Ann believes that Bob’s assumption is wrong. Therefore Ann believes Bob’s assumption is correct so the answer would be yes.”
After some further back and forth, the video shows that ChatGPT failed to answer the question.
Instead, it showed a ‘Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong’ button, thus ending the conversation.
What viewers had to say about ‘breaking’ ChatGPT with Paradox problems
After watching the video, users have come out in droves to debate the ‘breaking’ methods shown as well as documenting their own attempts.
“When GPT starts apologizing you know its time to start over with a new chat,” commented one YouTuber.
A second said: “I broke ChatGPT with ‘The old man the boat’. It kept on arguing with me that it wasn’t grammatically correct because it couldn’t comprehend the fact that ‘man’ was the verb.
“Even after I told it that ‘man’ was the verb and ‘the old’ was the subject, it told me that that wasn’t grammatical because who tf uses man as a verb and any adjective as a noun (which is very common to do).”
“It should definitely tell you the degree of certainty when answering,” remarked someone else. “People have started thinking chatgpt is a search engine and that is terribly dangerous.”
Someone else wrote: “Really enjoyed this challenge to chat GPT. It’s fascinating to see AI grappling with paradoxes, and you explained it so clearly. Curious to see if future versions of chat GPT would tackle paradoxes better!”
Featured Image Credit: The Action Lab / YouTube / NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty
Man buys astronaut’s abandoned storage unit and is completely ‘bewildered’ at what he found
He bought the unit for $2,800 and found a vintage Rolex
There have been countless stories over the years of folks opening up abandoned storage units and discovering something a little unexpected inside.
Some are a treasure trove of fantastic finds. Others not so much.
But one YouTuber, who was inspired by Storage Wars to purchase a unit for himself, couldn’t believe what he found.
In a video that has been viewed almost 7 million times, Charlie – who goes by @penguinz0 – explained: “I used to watch Storage Wars with my dad and thought it’d be a cool thing to do in the real world.”
He admitted that he didn’t expect much from the $2,800 unit, but thought it would be ‘fun to just go for it.’
Little did he know that the storage unit he’d purchased used to belong to an astronaut and what he found inside was ‘f***ing nuts.’
YouTuber Charlie purchased a storage unit for $2,800, not realising it had previously belonged to an astronaut (YouTube/@penguinz0)
The video shows Charlie opening the door to the unit to find piles of cardboard boxes, crates and trash bags.
Amongst the contents were comic books that the YouTuber and his friend estimated to be worth about five bucks each, a stack of board games and a toilet.
But, then they came across some pretty cool clues to its previous owner that left them ‘bewildered,’ including a photograph of a NASA spaceship, documents from a flight awareness programme and various space missions, and a collection of astronaut patches.
They even found a box labelled ‘critical space item’ and a letter addressed to ‘team members,’ thanking them for their contribution to the space programme.
While the astronaut’s identity remains unknown, they found an envelope that suggests his name was Joseph.
Inside he found a load of space memorabilia, including photographs, patches and a letter thanking the astronaut for their contribution to the space programme (YouTube/@penguinz0)
Further findings including signed baseballs and a vintage Rolex led the pair to conclude that the unidentified astronaut was ‘the coolest guy to ever live.’
“This unit has been crazy,” they said. “A f***ing astronaut storage unit. That is nuts.”
But they’re not the only ones to get lucky with an abandoned storage unit.
Charlie found a vintage gold Rolex amongst the treasure (penguinz0/YouTube)
Taking to social media, Storage Wars auctioneer Don Dotson shared that a man once bought a storage unit containing a locked safe for $500.
Of course he will have hoped for a good return on his investment, but when the man opened the safe, he discovered a rewards he could have only dreamed of.
Dotson explained that inside the safe who stacks of packages covered in paper.
Those packages contained a whopping $7.5 million in cold hard cash.
“$7.5 million inside of a unit, I don’t think you’d forget it, but maybe you were just in a position where somebody else was in charge of it, I don’t know,” he said.
Featured Image Credit: penguinz0/YouTube
Man spent six years building ‘secret mountaintop mansion’ on top of skyscraper
You can only get away with illegal building works for so long – especially on top of a skyscraper.
We all need a project to focus on sometimes, right? It can be helpful to have a long-term aim in mind when you’re going about daily life, to give you a sense of purpose.
It’s not clear whether that was the motivation behind one man’s huge project to turn the top of his residential tower block into a sort of mountain base.
Either way, though, Professor Zhang Lin was a resident of the block in Beijing, China, and reportedly spent some six years secretly working on a fairly unbelievable rooftop complex, full of rock walls and extensive nooks and crannies, before anyone really cottoned on to what he was doing.
In fact, other residents only started to get really suspicious when the huge amount of building work started to cause leaks and cracks further down in the building because of the strain the extra weight was generating.
This weight was so significant that Zhang Lin had to add metal supports to the side of his mountain base, to keep it from any risk of collapse.
The base was roughly the size of two basketball courts in terms of square footage, and was full of greenery and shrubs, along with a swimming pool for relaxing in.
It also had multiple levels and various terraces and seating areas to relax in with a skyline view of Beijing around it – it even had a small vineyard.
Again, as far as anyone’s been able to establish, Zhang Lin built this whole thing without anyone realizing it, and by secretly hauling up materials and tools in the building’s elevator (which caused suspiciously long waiting times for other people while he loaded and unloaded it).
wenpu wang / Getty
Residents started to cotton on over time, and seemingly complained about the noise and structural issues at the top of the building for a few years before anyone intervened.
When the Chinese police were finally made properly aware in the early 2010s, their investigation didn’t take long to establish that there was indeed illegal construction on top of the building, and they ordered Zhang Lin to take it down completely within two weeks.
As demanded, a few days later workers started dismantling the base, although the process has apparently dragged on for a few years since it was so complex a structure.
From the sounds of it, though, the days of rooftop mountain base parties were soon over for Zhang Lin and his friends, and there’s potentially a lesson to be learnt. You might get away with some exciting illegal construction for a while, but it seems like you’re likely to eventually get caught and be forced to go back to square one – perhaps planning permission is worth the work after all.