What’s With All These Stupid Robots?!

I might not know anything about building robots, but based on these two clips, it seems like the people who actually build them don’t either.

In the first video we’ve got some sort of mobile garbage can that can walk around like a crab, roll dice, and bang on its own head while repeating the same Japanese phrase over and over and over again. Which would be pretty convenient if you wanted to start a gambling operation for quadriplegics in your house or something, but we all know that quadriplegics don’t gamble much, and even if they did, what makes you think they’d want to do it in your house and not in a regular casino? Also, what if they don’t understand Japanese? That’s like inventing a robot to help gay Eskimos come out to their parents, or to teach Latvian orphans how to panhandle; it’s a great idea, but what are the rest of us supposed to do with it?

Then we’ve got the second one, which serves such little purpose that it pretty much has to be an art project of some kind. A pair of dismembered robot legs that periodically shoots fire while aimlessly pushing around a shopping cart? I’ll admit that’s kind of awesome, but again, what are we supposed to do with it? Should we look at it and think about the artist’s statement on mindless consumerism? Sorry, robot maker: Dawn of the Dead did it better. Is it supposed to make us think about the homeless problem? I’m looking at it right now, but the only problem I’m thinking about is how bad these robots suck.

I’ve been banging this drum for a while now, but maybe if I keep at it I can get the robot-making community to listen. If I were them, I know I’d definitely want to take advice from a Cracked blogger with absolutely zero knowledge of engineering. Is an enormous mechanized iron monstrosity with flesh-searing lasers and projectile weapons so much to ask for? Actually, screw it - pretty much ANYTHING with flesh-searing lasers would do. If you’re reading this, guys who made these two robots, just add flesh-searing lasers and we’ll be good to go.

See - I’m willing to compromise, robot-making community. Now it’s your turn.

Drinking Liquid Nitrogen

When I was a little kid, I used to do all kinds of stupid things to impress people. In 2nd grade I told a bunch of people that my dad held the Guinness World Record for “Best Driver” (and that he trained for it by playing Spy Hunter). In 3rd grade I told a kid that I wrote the lyrics to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” for Axl Rose. I had a jacket with all these patches on it, and one of them said “AIRBORNE” on it; I told everyone that a pilot gave it to my mom after she gave birth to me on an airplane.

I stuck gum in my hair at some kid’s house like three times in a row because he dared me to. At first his mom tried to get it out with peanut butter, but that didn’t work very well, so she eventually gave up and cut it out with a pair of scissors. When I did it again a week later, she didn’t bother with the peanut butter. The third time I’m pretty sure she just kicked me out of her house for being stupid.

I used to gather a small crowd in the cafeteria at school, step on my food, and then eat it.

I could go on, but you get the point: I was a weird kid who was willing to do basically anything for attention. I’ve matured quite a bit since then, of course, and have now channeled that impulse and turned it into a prestigious and lucrative career blogging for Cracked.com, but sometimes I wonder, “What would my life be like if I had never learned to control myself?”

Then I saw this video and I was like, “Oh, yeah - I’d be drinking liquid nitrogen and putting it up on YouTube.”

MIT’s Nexi MDS Robot

So apparently they’ve come up with a new kind of robot over at MIT. They’re called “MDS” robots, which stands for mobile, dexterous and social. According to the project’s website, the robots are meant “to support research and education goals in human-robot interaction, teaming, and social blah blah blah words words words.”

Congratulations, MIT: somehow you found a way to make robots boring.

Here’s what the so-called “geniuses” over at MIT completely forgot: designing robots that attempt to act like humans is LAME. What the hell happened? Did I go to sleep last night and wake up in a shitty mid-90s anime flick? Am I supposed to be dazzled because some robot can make a few facial expressions and point at stuff? I make facial expressions and point at stuff all the time, but you don’t see me bragging about it on YouTube, do you?

If you’re reading this, MIT guys, let me give you some advice. I bet you never thought that one day you’d be taking advice from a blogger on Cracked.com, huh? I never thought I’d be giving you guys advice either, and yet here we are. Crazy world.

The way I see it, MIT guys, there’s no point in trying to make robots that do stuff that humans do (like making facial expressions and pointing at stuff). Instead of that, why not try to make robots that do stuff that human beings CAN’T do? Since it’s so difficult for you guys to actually come up with good ideas, I’ve done you a favor and made a list. Wake me up when you make a robot that can:

Figure out how much everyone owes on a restaurant bill with more than 4 people

Successfully operate a self-checkout machine at a grocery store

Definitively end the argument over whether cats or dogs are “better”

Explain how the stock market works… to me

Fly (although I guess that would just be an airplane)

Kill Rachel Ray

Okay, I’ll admit it: those would all be pretty shitty robots. I guess that’s why I don’t go to MIT.

Robotic Dogs Are Coming To Kill You

Remember when everyone was freaking out about killer bees? Back in the 90s they were the imminent threat du jour, pressing northward in a buzzing swarm of honey, stingers and death. We were completely terrified knowing that these insanely aggressive bees were coming to destroy us all…

And then nothing happened. The killer bees never really showed up (other than in a few parts of the southwest), America turned its attention to other, more pressing matters (like, oh, I don’t know… TERRORISM?), and the vast majority of our great nation avoided the stinging wrath that was supposed to have been the killer bees.

That being said, allow me to introduce you to our latest national crisis. Fuck a bunch of bees¹ - we’ve got robot dogs² to worry about.

Why would the scientific community do this to us? Don’t we already have enough to worry about in the world without robot dogs running around our forests, adding knowledge to their AI databases until they’re ready to come kill us all with ruthless efficiency? What possible reason did scientists have to create such a thing? I can only come up with a few possibilities:

To keep our forests clear of litter and Al Qaeda operatives

Part of a plot to kill off all the cats in the world to end the lolcat phenomenon

To bring humanoid robots their slippers and newspapers

Because someone was like “I think I can make a robotic dog” and the other guy was like “Yeah right”

All perfectly valid, but none of them really do anything for me. The only benefit I get from this development is that I now get to live with the knowledge that there’s a robot dog out there somewhere; one that can almost certainly outrun me on pretty much any type of terrain. Thanks, scientists.

¹ Warning: Do NOT actually attempt to fuck a bunch of bees.

² I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s a “Robot Dog” wikipedia entry.

When you stop and think about it, a large part of our daily existence is filth-encrusted. You’re reading this on a computer, so chances are you’ve picked up thousands of bacteria just from touching the keys. Ditto if your bathroom door has a doorknob, and if it’s a curtain instead like mine, it’s filthy for a whole new set of reasons.

At the end of the day, we humans are basically huge, lumbering apartment complexes for hordes of microbes warring to be the first to get us to choke to death on our own vomit.

But never in my wildest flights of germophobic fantasy did I imagine it would come to this. Ladies and gentlemen, the snow is no longer trustworthy.

Snowflakes can only form when ice crystals have some material to cling to and grow on, and a new study has shown that about 85% of the time, that “material” is bacteria. That means catching snowflakes on your tongue is basically like enjoying a tootsie pop whose center is a deadly contagion.

Admittedly the bacteria the study found was one that harms only plants, but let’s not kid ourselves; it’s only a matter of time before the Ebola virus hitches a ride on some “white death” and cripples our nation’s most precocious, innocent, and precious resource: comedy bloggers.

Well, no thank you Jack Frost. Next Winter I’ll be staying in a dark, unventilated room stocked with plenty of my favorite meal: open dishes of chicken broth.

And you want to know something I won’t be doing in that room? Having sex with teen girls. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m not allowed near them. Rather, I cite this recent study showing that 1 in 4 teen girls in the US have an STD.

Statistically, that means that after an average night “on the town,” I stand to contract no less than 1/16th of a venereal disease! Well, that’s just a chance I’m not willing to take.

Women, stop spreading and start drinking tap water. Why, you ask? Because if you’re not going to treat your STD’s, maybe some of the prescription drug cocktail coming out of your faucet will knock the sucker out.

Once again, the tampering of mankind puts aright what nature set awrong. That old guy that wrote Frankenstein sure was ignorant.

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When not blogging for Cracked, Michael designs sanitary bunkers as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

12-Year-Old Kid Breaks Computers, Destroys My Entire Belief System

I’ve always considered myself a fairly rational person. I was brought up in an atheist household, never received any formal religious training, and have always generally believed that unusual occurrences can be explained by science. Or I did, anyway, until I watched this video. Now I know that science can’t explain everything… and I’m completely fucking terrified.

Why does this kid break every computer that he touches despite appearing completely normal otherwise? They called in a guy with all kinds of testing equipment to check it out, a bunch of reporters from a local news outlet investigated it, and there’s still no answer?! How is this possible?! I need an explanation here. If we can have 12-year-old kids running around calling themselves “Magneto Man” and baffling the experts (of Richland, New York no less!), then it’s only a matter of time before I believe in ghosts, leprechauns and Jesus.

So that’s great. Thanks a lot, internet - now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to church. Yeah - that’s something I do now. Or wait… what do they call the Jewish version of church again? Whatever it is, that’s where I’m going. Either there or to the forest where all the leprechauns and ghosts hang out. I’m pretty sure they drink together there at night. I should go, get loaded and think about Jewish Jesus. Between the ghosts, leprechauns, Jewish Jesus and getting loaded, that would be… FOUR BIRDS WITH ONE STONE!

That has to be some sort of record, doesn’t it?

Sure, I know that the Cracked Science Corner is Ian’s gig, but sometimes a story comes along that’s so important you just have say, “Hey, I’m gonna cut and paste someone else’s graphic and do a post that the Cracked readers will not read.” This is one of those times. Besides, as you may have noticed from that gaping hole in yesterday’s blog, Ian’s been as sick as a dog so really there’s nothing he can do about it.

Ready? Then let’s begin. It seems that researchers have stumbled upon something truly important: you can really mess with blind, hairless mole rats and they feel no pain. Don’t believe me? The researchers discovered that when . . . mole rates had their paws injected with a slight dose of acid . . . as well as some capsaicin — the active ingredient of chili peppers — the rodents showed no pain.

Apparently, the key to their pain resistance is the mole rat’s lack of a substance called Substance P. Well, realizing that torturing rats is no fun if they can’t feel it, scientists took the next logical step: the researchers used a modified cold sore virus to carry genes for Substance P to just one rear foot of each tested rodent.

And it worked!! This time when they burned the mole rats’ feet with acid, the moles felt it. Isn’t that awesome? I’m assuming the mole rats still couldn’t feel pain in the rest of their pink, vulnerable little bodies, but there’s no way to know for sure. I mean, who would bother testing that?

At this point, maybe you, as a non-scientist, are feeling a little bad for these critters. Don’t. The head researcher told reporters: “They’re the nicest, sweetest animals I’ve ever worked with — they look frightening, but they’re very gentle,” said neurobiologist Thomas Clarke at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Yeah, so screw ‘em. Stupid mole rats with their not feeling pain. We’ll show you.

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Gladstone writes for Cracked and others. Go to Wayne Gladstone Lives in Maine to see all his published stuff, his full name, and state of residence.

Welcome to another edition of Cracked Science Corner! (!!!!11!!) Today, we go behind the headlines to explore some fascinating new research that will turn you from a confident know-it-all into a sniveling pile of incertitude, all within a few mind-blowing seconds. Because as it turns out, approximately 90% of what you believe is crap—at least medically speaking, according to a recent study of commonly-accepted medical b.s.:

Reading in dim light won’t damage your eyes, you don’t need eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy and shaving your legs won’t make the hair grow back faster. These well-worn theories are among seven “medical myths” exposed in a paper published on Friday in the British Medical Journal…

Other myths busted—hey, that gives me an idea for a show—include the notion that hair and nails grow after death (which is thought to have originated with photos of Joan Rivers), that we only use 10% of our brains (it’s actually closer to 0%), and that eating turkey makes you drowsy (it actually has an effect similar to an ecstasy/crack speedball).

But the list failed to mention these additional myths, which are just as widely accepted, and just as false:

• Walking barefoot in public restrooms makes you thin and causes your albums to sell really well
• Marrying your adopted stepdaughter makes you a better film director
• Smoking marijuana does not make you vote for Ron Paul
• Believing 9/11 conspiracy theories causes mental retardation (turns out it’s the other way around)
• Bashing beloved rock legends for an easy blog post makes you popular
• Doing speed while pregnant makes your babies faster
• Having gay sex with gay men in restrooms makes you gay (it actually makes you cool); and finally,
• Reeding Cracked make you more smarder

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Ian Cooper is a frequent contributor to the Cracked Blog. For more of his thoughts on what a bad person you are, visit his website, Wrapped Up Like a Douche.

So Fox News is running a report on their website that tauts home remedies for medical ailments. Specifically, they recommend rubbing garlic on your skin to combat athlete’s foot and jock itch.

So ladies, next time you’re at the grocery store and you see an anxious guy in line with a bulb of garlic, odds are good that there are four reasons you don’t want to have sex with him:

1. He has jock itch
2. He has athlete’s foot
3. He reeks of garlic, and, most importantly,
4. He believes what he hears on Fox News.

Seriously, Fox News, this is the science you wanted to support? Every day you find a new disingenuous way to question the validity of global warming, but you’re completely sold on the garlic. Hey, you know what else is good for ending all your fungal worries? Drowning to death in a melted glacier.

You probably know that Hanukkah is a winter festival celebrated by Jews worldwide designed primarily to make non-Jews jealous of its eight nights of presents. (You may also have learned that this jealousy is unwarranted, as the haul of presents usually contains an unreasonably high percentage of socks.) But what you may not have known is that it’s also an environmental catastrophe:

The founders of the Green Hanukkah campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere. “The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won’t need another miracle,” said Liad Ortar, the campaign’s cofounder…

In an effort to show solidarity with the Chosen People in their campaign to fight global warming and ethnic stereotypes about stinginess, I propose that members of other faiths look for ways to reduce their own carbon footprints, such as:

Mormons: It’s estimated that up to 90% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the result of you asking me about God on the damn bus. Let’s work on that.

Baptists: Lower thermostat in Hell by 20% in the daytime.

Islamic Militants: Burning George W. Bush effigies and American flags is a significant source of airborne pollutants; why not try our new smokeless solar-powered effigy instead?

Atheists: When loudly parroting the talking points of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, be sure to do it in the direction of a wind farm.

Amish: Fewer wood-burning stoves, more Xboxes.

Wiccans: Exotic imported potion ingredients such as “eye of newt” can usually be replaced with fake crab legs; switch to energy-efficient electric cauldrons.

Buddhists: What is the sound of 50% fewer hands clapping?

Zoroastrians: Keep up the good work, dude!