Walking ghost phase
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The walking ghost phase of radiation poisoning is a period of apparent health, lasting for hours or days, following a dose of 10-50 sieverts of radiation. As its name would suggest, the walking ghost phase is followed by certain death.Treatment
All current medical treatments are palliative, largely pain management.
Cause of death
A painful death, marked by delirium and coma, inevitably awaits any recipient of such a dose of radiation, between 2-10 days after the completion of the walking ghost phase of radiation poisoning.
Over time a number of internet strangers have started following me on Twitter. Usually these are robots and I block them. But sometimes they seem to be humans, and in those cases I usually start following them, too, out of a mixture of courtesy and curiousity (I should clarify for any potential readers: if I have ever met you in real life, I am not referring to you).
Unfortunately, so far they’ve all proven to be truly insufferable net startup aspirants. Their tweets are filled with self-aggrandizing accounts of (unsuccessfully) pitching venture capitalists, and intense discourse about the best way to pitch Walt Mossberg (you can be quite sure none of them ever have), and whether a TechCrunch writeup is really all you need anyway.
I don’t know why I don’t unsubscribe. I’m sure I will, soon. But every time I get one of these communiques, I think about the subject of the article quoted above. They’re all doomed, but they don’t know it yet. Maybe they suspect the truth. But that’s even worse, because it means they’re knowingly spending their last days on earth in stupid, unoriginal ways. It’s like a death row inmate asking for his last meal to be from McDonald’s. C’mon, you people are supposed to be geeks! Didn’t you see how Spock went out at the end of Star Trek II? That guy had class.
A interesting analogy.
I hadn’t heard of the “Walking ghost phase” before, though it seems like it would have been a better premise for “The Bucket List” than whatever lingering illness they ended up giving to Jack and Morgan.
I don’t block twitter spambots, but I also don’t add anyone who seems to be using the service as a networking/publicity tool. I imagine being one of these guys/gals must be pretty depressing–trying to distinguish yourself among the enormous crowd of automatons all striving for the same VC financing.