T he story of the babysitter and the clown statue is one of the most popular urban legends of all time. But what’s even more terrifying is the person behind the clown makeup. Serial killer John Waye Gacy (left). Gacy dressed as “Pogo the Clown” (right). | Historic Mysteries Did one of the most prolific serial killers of all time give us a reason to forever fear clowns? Let’s begin with a quick retelling of the urban myth about the babysitter and the clown statue. This story is best told by your cool big sister — but let us give it a shot. The legend goes like this: A married couple asks a babysitter to look after their kids so they can go out to dinner. They ask the babysitter to stay in the guest room upstairs while they’re gone, just in case one of the kids wakes up. Halfway through dinner, the couple calls the babysitter to check in. The sitter says everything is fine, but is it okay if she covers up the clown statue in the guest room with a sheet or a blanke...
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A science experiment that went wrong and left behind a half-man, half-goat who attacks people in the woods? Now that’s a juicy urban tale. Add a hunger for flesh and sightings ranging back to the 1950s and we’ve got ourselves straight-up legend. The story of the Goat Man has been retold for decades. The Goat Man has appeared in pop culture almost as many times as he’s been spotted in real life. It all began in a small town in Maryland called Bowie. Who (Or What) Is The Goat Man? Our story begins at the Beltsville Research Agricultural Center in Maryland. Yes, it’s a very bland name for a very spooky place. A scientist at the facility named Stephen Fletcher was working on an ill-fated experiment where he was mixing the DNA of his assistant with the DNA of a goat. Shockingly (lol) something went terribly wrong and the Goat Man was created. Those that have seen him and lived to tell the tale describe him as an axe wielding goat-humanoid hybrid with horns and clo...
Since before Threadripper launched, we’ve known that AMD had an eight-core variant of the chip waiting in the wings. The new CPU has hit the market as the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X , with eight cores, 16 threads, and support for AMD’s X399 motherboard platform. The Threadripper 1900X has a 3.8GHz base clock, a 4GHz Turbo clock, and a 200MHz XFR range for short-term boosting if the CPU’s thermals and power consumption permit it. That’s not very different from the Ryzen 7 1800X, with its 3.6GHz base clock, 4GHz Turbo, and 100MHz XFR. The larger changes are at the platform level, where the 1900X has 60 PCIe 3.0 lanes and a quad-channel DDR4 configuration compared with just 16 PCIe lanes and dual-channel RAM for the 1800X. The I/O capabilities and PCI Express 3.0 lanes give the 1900X an edge over the 1800X, provided you’re running workloads that can take advantage of them. The 180W TDP is almost certainly a carry-over from the other Threadripper chips as opposed ...
SanDisk is offering a new 400GB microSD card, a breakthrough that would make it the largest microSD currently on the market. SanDisk, which is owned by Western Digital, hasn’t revealed details beyond stating that the capacity breakthrough was the result of WD “leveraging its proprietary memory technology and design and production processes that allow for more bits per die.” Western Digital set the previous record two years ago, when it launched a 200GB microSD card. The speed appears to come with a tradeoff. SanDisk trumpets its A1 speed rating, saying: “Rated A1, the SanDisk Ultra® microSD card is optimized for apps, delivering faster app launch and performance that provides a better smartphone experience.” This is a generous reading of the A1’s target performance specification. Last year, the SD Association released a report discussing the App Performance Class memory card specification and why the spec was created in the first place. When Android added ...
That was the sound Microsoft's browsers made last month as they leaked user share. Yet again. According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge -- an estimate of the world's personal computer owners who ran those browsers -- slid by nine-tenths of a percentage point, ending at a combined 22.2%. The August decline was the largest since January. It can be difficult to accurately spot short-term trends with Net Applications' data: At times, changes seem more an artifact of the company's methodology. IE+Edge's latest plunge may signal a renewal of losses after a five-month slow-down in the desertion rate, or it could be simply a hiccup. Overall, however, Microsoft's fortunes remain dark in the browser race. While the share loss in the eight months of 2017 has been just over half that of same period of 2016 -- illustrating a slowing of the bleeding -- IE+Edge has shed almost a full percentage point e...