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[Strife26]

Not to mention the killing joke that the Brits won WW2 with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWGlJrG6sQ

[GiglameshDespair]

If you squint and look sideways, flashing lights in a pattern that also triggers epileptic fits could count?

[Culise]

Can we make a theoretical weapon?

Like, can we kill someone with a theory? A legitimate infohazard?

Do you mean indirectly as wierd joked, or directly via a sort of memetic basilisk (that is, as opposed to the classic Langford basilisk, which uses an image as a vector)?  I don't think such a thing is actually possible.  It seems rather implausible to me that we can create something created via a mental vector will result in a destructive positive chain reaction that kills the person with a literal thought.  That's not to say we can't introduce fresh new vulnerabilities in the future; hacking someone's "wetware" through a digital MMI is a time-honored cyberpunk tradition, after all, and anyone familiar with the damage malicious computer access can cause in the modern world should be aware of the potential issues that could be caused should a person of a particularly malicious bent obtain root access to, say, a wifi-capable pacemaker.  Leap into a future with digital memory implants or processing-enhancers wired directly into the brain, and I could see these being used as points of access to cause all sorts of problems.  I think most hypothetical variations of the concept in fiction, apropos of typical delivery mechanisms likely in reality, tend to be either visual (a la epilepsy) or aural (such as the much reputed, but rather unproven "brown note"), however, unless you count jokes about mental instability in key figures of mathematics being indicative of the subject's effect on its scholars; Lovecraftian-style things of which one was not meant to know tend to drive one insane rather than kill one directly.

[TheDarkStar]

Can we make a theoretical weapon?

Like, can we kill someone with a theory? A legitimate infohazard?

Interestingly, there is a correlation between having schizophrenia and doing highly logical things like mathematics. Of course, it's hard to tell if there's a causation there or if schizophrenics just tend to like math more.

[Tack]

Hello folks, in a thing I'm working on, the ozone layer is mostly gone.
Since most objects in space are invisible thanks to the ozone layer, would they become visible if ozone was depleted? And what objects would be visible to the naked eye? Would the night sky be visibly brighter?

Here's a question- what needs to be missing from the atmosphere for the sky not to be blue?

[wierd]

oxygen and nitrogen, (they make the sky blue via Rayleigh scattering.)

any atmosphere at all will produce such scattering, but it may not be blue in appearance.
(mars has red sky, due to dust particle scattering. Titan has an orange sky from smog like chemical particles)

you need an airless rock to have black daytime sky.

[Rolepgeek]

Would it be possible to have an atmosphere that scattered perfectly neutrally?

[wierd]

That would be a grey sky.

Theoretical, but not sure what compounds you would put in to have such a white/grey sky.

[Amperzand]

Supposedly massive amounts of CO2 would get you a white atmosphere.

[Max™]

Depends on what you mean by massive amounts of CO2 though Venus has contributions from the clouds and acid haze, so it's not the best example there, and not recommended as a vacation destination either!

[Erkki]

Isnt Venusian sky blue at altitudes above 45 km or so? The atmosphere has so much gas and temperature differential in it that its layered. The toxic stuff is mostly at the bottom.

[Kot]

White phosphorus shotgun shells.

[Amperzand]

Do you mean like shotgun shells that fire uncontrolled blasts of white phosphorus, or shotgun shells that fire white phosphorus explosives?

[Egan_BW]

Shotgun that shoots tiny smoke grenades, obviously.

[Amperzand]

Wouldn't just be smoke, but sure. I'm not sure exactly what the use would be, smaller smoke grenades seem kinda problematic.