From: awatson@pecan.cns.udel.edu (angela watson)
Subject: Re: "methods" list
Organization: ASH Limited 
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 00:23:12 GMT


	This is part 3 of 3 of the Methods file.

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==20. PENCILS UP YOUR NOSE, BANG DOWN ONTO TABLE (urban legend?)
   Time:      Seconds or never
   Available: All you need is a couple of sharp pencils and a table
   Certainty: Very uncertain
   Notes:     This is a myth, I think, since the pencils would go into your
      frontal lobes, which are basically optional. This is the
      legendary "exam suicide". Fine if you want a DIY frontal-
      lobotomy rather than death!

==21. GETTING SOMEONE TO MURDER YOU
   Time:      Depends on method used
   Available: Know any murderous psychopaths? No, not the tax people...
   Certainty: Depends on method used, & dedication of murderer
   Notes:     Forget it. Unless you contract someone to do it, the chances
      are that you are going to wake up in hospital without your
      wallet. If you do contract someone, how are you going to pay
      them? Can't take them to court for running off with your
      money and not doing the job.

==22. MAKE YOURSELF INTO AN H-BOMB (another silly one)
   Time:      Speed of light over 1/2 metre (couple of nanoseconds)
   Available: Nuke (fission OR fusion), 10 liters of heavy water
   Certainty: 100%
   Notes:     Drink the heavy water for several days, strap yourself to
      the nuke, and press the button. If you retained a couple of
      liters of the heavy water, the additional yield should be
      6 megajoules (give or take a few orders of magnitude). Note
      that heavy water is a poison, so you might not survive that
      long anyway.

==23. MICROMACHINES/NANOCOMPUTERS (science fiction)
   Time:      years or a fraction of a second - depends how you look at it
   Available: in 50 - 1000 years time?
   Certainty: Good assuming that the technology is developed
   Notes:     Basically, this involves a 'replicator' panel. You program it
      to replicate yourself, simplifying very slightly, with the
      exception of the urge to use this technique. After a while, you
      turn into a mindless zombie, trudging around from the exit of
      the machine to the entrance, for eternity. Strange philosophical
      implications.

==24. SCUBA-DIVING (various fatal 'accidents')
   Time:      see notes -most are minutes/hours
   Available: scuba diving gear, nobody around
   Certainty: see notes
   Notes:     The first method is to rise 30 metres or so without releasing
      your breath. Assuming that you can do it, it should cause your
      lungs to burst. The second is the bends - stay under long enough
      for the nitrogen to dissolve (30 metres for 30 minutes). go up
      rapidly without decompression time. This is unreliable, and
      may cause brain / joint damage. The third way is Carbon Monoxide
      poisoning - fill your tank with it, and stay away from other
      divers. You will fall asleep fairly quickly. See CO in poisons
      section. The final way is oxygen narcosis - however, this means
      that you have to go very deep with an oxygen-rich mix, and
      there are problems associated with that. The advantage of these
      methods is that insurance companies / relatives will assume that
      it was an accident ('misadventure'), with the possible exception
      of the CO poisoning.
      The source of this follows: (from the net)
      "Rising 30m without exhaling will usually result in an over
      pressured lung, possible subcutaneous emphazema, collapsed
      lung, death usually from drowning in your own blood. Rather
      painful and usually curable if you are rescued, but fair chance
      of dying if you aren't.
      Building up a high residual nitrogen time (say 30m for 30 min)
      then coming up without decompressing will get you bent fairly
      nicely. You don't feel much, but your joints tend to start
      stiffening up after half an hour. Death is very uncertain,
      coming from a stroke. Brain damage, joint damage etc are most
      likely. Probably can be rescued but some damage certain.
      Oxygen poisoning, going down 50+m until the partial pressure of
      the oxygen reaches a toxic level. Difficult to accomplish, very
      painful to get down that deep, cold pressure etc, possibility
      of nitrogen narcosis and forgetting what you are doing. Probably
      get bent, good chance of rescue.
      CO poisoning, mix a healthy batch of carbon monoxide in your
      tank as you dive, you tend to go to sleep under water, when
      combined with the above methods you have a pretty good winner,
      don't forget to forget your BCD."


==25. SUCKING YOUR BRAINS OUT
   Time:      Minutes
   Available: You'd need a Puma (TM) robot, & some other bits
   Certainty: certain, given proper programming
   Notes:     You would need an industrial robot to do this properly. Give
      it a saw attachment, a sucking tube attachment, and program
      it. Make a head restraint. When you are fixed securely into
      the restraint, start the robot's program. It will drill a hole
      in your head, and stick the tube into the hole. Program it to
      wiggle the tube back and forth so that it doesn't miss anything.
      This might work better if you put a stream of water into the
      hole as well, so that the sucking attachment doesn't just suck
      air all the time. Debugging the program could be amusing.

==26. MICROWAVES
   Time:      ?
   Available: Source of strong microwave emissions
   Certainty: ?
   Notes:     Cooking yourself. Point is to raise your core body temperature
      to fatal levels.

==27. DEHYDRATION
   Time:      a week or so?
   Available: you need to be able to stop medical help.
   Certainty: certain if your will-power stands up to it.
   Notes:     Don't eat or drink. Remember that food contains a high
      proportion of water. Avoiding medical help can be difficult.
      See 'starving to death'.

==28. SKYDIVING 'ACCIDENT'
   Time:      pretty damn quick.
   Available: need to join a skydiving club.
   Certainty: certain.
   Notes:     Join a skydiving club, continue to practise it for a while to
      clear off all suspicions and then once pack your parachute in
      a real mess (preferably knotted up, but not too clearly) and
      then jump. The para will not open and you will reach a terminal
      velocity of 220 km/h (160 mph/120 kn). Death is instant in the
      impact with the Planet Earth.
      This has the advantages of being 'accidental', and your family/
      friends do not have the additional pain and guilt associated
      with suicides.

==29. DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS; MODERN VERSION
   Time:      variable
   Available: a heck of a lot of razor-wire.. maybe a high-voltage supply
   Certainty: not very good
   Notes:     This is a modern variant of the Arabic 'Death of a thousand
      cuts'. Basically, jump onto a stack of unravelled razor wire,
      and roll around till you die.. it may help to connect a high-
      voltage, low current power supply to the wire, so that you have
      spasms, which should keep you getting cut even when you are
      unconscious. Also, you should make sure that you can't roll off
      the wire.

==30. CRUSHING
   Time:      seconds to minutes, depends on car press
   Available: a car press.. any good junkyard
   Certainty: certain as long as you can't escape
   Notes:     This is an elegantly simple one.. get into a car, in a car
      press, and shortly afterwards be squashed to death as your
      body is converted into a red pulp. It may be tricky getting
      the press to trigger, but if you hide in the car someone
      may come along and activate it. There are other ways of
      getting crushed, this just happens to be the most effective
      I can think up on the spur of the moment. Getting yourself
      run over by a fully loaded articulated lorry is quite good.
      You should remember that people quite often survive the actual
      crushing; they die when the weight is taken OFF them.

==31. WORLD WAR THREE
   Time:      moments if you are near a militarily significant site
   Available: happen to be one of the 'key-holders'? president maybe?
   Certainty: pretty certain
   Notes:     All you have to do is trigger world war three. Fire an ICBM
      or three at the Chinese and the Russians... This method has
      the advantage that you take everyone else with you! Trouble
      is, the number of people with the requisite access is minimal,
      and I sort of doubt that any readers of ASH can do this.

==32. HEATSTROKE
   Time:      4 hours or more
   Available: Very hot day; no disturbance from neighbors etc
   Certainty: depends on the weather
   Notes:     Basically, the point is to give yourself extreme heatstroke.
      You should pass out after a few hours. Use some aluminium foil
      to direct the sun's heat onto you, to speed up the process
      a bit. Try to reduce the chance of being interrupted, take off
      the phone etc. Obviously, start in the morning! Helps if the
      outside temperature is >100F.

==33. ACID BATH
   Time:      depends on acid
   Available: a lot of a very strong acid
   Certainty: fairly good
   Notes:     [from alt.suicide.holiday]
      "summer heat got you down? Try the new and improved neighborhood
      acid bath. Most metal working plants and some auto-repair shops
      will have a nice soothing acid bath. This, of course, is for
      those of you who enjoy extreme pain and don't want to make a
      mess for others to clean up. If you don't leave a note chances
      are they will never know what happened, aside from the shop /
      plant being broken into."

==34. FAKE CAR BOMB
   Time:      milliseconds
   Available: explosive
   Certainty: fairly good if enough explosive
   Notes:     This is a modification of the basic use-explosives method. What
      you do, is make a homemade car bomb, and drive off happily after
      chatting with your neighbour about how well your life is going,
      apart from a few minor death-threats from an Iraqi death-squad..
      To confuse the authorities even more, have a note in your pocket
      listing the telephone numbers of all the eastern foreign
      embassies in your pocket, together with a little line of random
      "code numbers" next to each.., and a random but large amount of
      cash listed against each code number. :-) Oh yes, and a heavily
      annotated copy of Jane's Defence Weekly - Xhosa edition.

==35. JUMPING OFF BRIDGES (slice and dice with piano wire)
   Time:      9.87 ms-2; 4 to 10 meters; calculate it yourself!
   Available: Rope, piano wire and a high bridge.
   Certainty: Fairly certain
   Notes:     Never been tried. Can also be used with a fairly
      high building, but then the art-motive will
      disappear.
      Cut the rope and wire in various lengths. Each
      length must not be longer than the height of the
      bridge.
      Tie one end of the ropes and wires to the bridge
      Tie the other part of the ropes to different bodyparts
      like thigh, calves, torso etc.  Then tie the
      piano wires around your joints. (Don't forget your
      genitals..)
      When you jump various parts of your body are whipped
      away by the piano wire nooses, and your bits are held
      up by the ropes swaying in the breeze.
      If you do this right you should end up with just your
      torso hanging by it's neck above the sea, highway,
      ground.
      Do it with friends, and call it art.

==36. BEING EATEN ALIVE
   Time:      depends, but probably a couple of minutes
   Available: zoo, or live in Africa/wherever
   Certainty: not brilliant.. what if they're not hungry and don't finish?
   Notes:     basically, find one or more hungry carnivores... tigers
      are nice. Also, sharks, lions, any of the big cats..

==37. BEING BURNED UP IN UNPROTECTED RE-ENTRY
   Time:      probably a few minutes
   Available: if you happen to be able to get into orbit
   Certainty: about as certain as you can get!
   Notes:     Just go for a spacewalk in a low earth orbit, and decelerate
      enough to enter the atmosphere. You'll get a great view...


==38. ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME (AIDS)
   Time:      Incubation period 1 to 10 years, death within 2 years of diagnosis
              of AIDS, Can have HIV for years/decades
   Dosage:    Just one intimate contact with an Infected person of any gender
   Available: Available to all for free
   Certainty: 99.9% certainty AFTER infected
   Notes:     [2]:
      This is not pain-free. This method may cost you alot of money if
      you allow others to get you medical attention. It may a little difficult
      to get infected as people who know they have it may not comply with
      your request. Could be great fun attempting to get infected depending
      upon your attitude (remember -any gender - you don't have to limit
      yourself - you're going to die, you might as well try it ;). Should be
      quite devastating to your family & close friends. You also get the
      satisfaction of leaving behind a virtual unrecognizable-as-you body !
      This also gives you the prime opportunity to point your finger at your
      dentist and say he did it for all the times you have suffered in their
      chair.  Happy dying !



==New methods not added to list yet; raw text

Nitros Oxide:
(so far)
Industrial -- No good. They add chemicals to keep people from abusing it.
Dentist-al -- Great. Perfect. BUT, kinda tricky to get a hold of.
Automotive -- A clever thought. You could definitely manage to mailorder
                 this from an ad in hot-nitros-cars magazines.

Administration:
An enclose space -- Sounds perfect. Comfortable. A "big box" is my choice.
  Scuba Equipment -- If you dive, you're all set. Take your tank down to
                      Performance Automotive for a nitros fill.
 Plastic Face Mask -- Steal one from your grandmother.
                    Buy one from a medical supply store.
                    Get lucky and be in an "impending plane crash" situation.
                    Grab one with the Nitros from the Dentist's Office.
       Gas-Mask! -- Go shopping at your local army supply store!
        Homemade -- Add some aquarium tubing from the Nitros canister to
                      a plastic bad over your head.
                    Aquarium tubing from the canister that goes into your
                      nose "post surgery" style. Don't forget to tape your
                      mouth closed!
                    Duct tape your face to the canister?



Method : Death by Painting Your Body
Dosage : Less than 1 can of paint depending on your body type
Time   : ? Probably less than 8 hours
Availability : Very available ! You have a choice of greasepaint or House paint
               You need a type of paint that will not allow your pores to
               breathe in order to be successful at this. You also have a
               smashing selection of colors you can choose to die in ! Nile
               Green ? Blood Red ? Basic Black ? Or any combo you desire..
               If you couldn't decide before what to wear to die in, this
               method will cause you considerable angst.
Certainty : This is a sure method, provided you have a paint that will block
            your pores from breathing. Don't forget the bottom of your
            feet. You must paint every last bit of available skin. If your
            pores can breathe, you won't die.
Notes : I read this in some theater journal 5 or so years ago, saying when you
        you do full body makeup, you must insure that parts of the body are
        left Naked to breathe or the actor will die. Usually for full body
        makeup, they leave the bottoms of feet, and some patterns on the body,
        like lines so the actor doesn't suffocate.


Anyway since we're all here, let me suggest nerve toxins as a viable
suicide method. In particular Antimycin A. There are NO antidotes to
this...though getting hold of it could be quite difficult. Death is
relatively swift and painless. Not as aesthetically pleasing as a Bungee,
though.

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	end part 3 of 3

-- 

Angela M. Watson / awatson@pecan.cns.udel.edu /       [.sig under] 
Psycho Kitten   / zaphodb@brahms.udel.edu    /       [construction]