Humans are hard-wired to function in groups. But it's a double-edged sword -- it takes a lot of us to build a city, but as anyone who has ever witnessed a riot can attest, people's ability to act like idiots also multiplies in crowds. And this phenomenon can manifest itself in really weird and even fatal ways.
We realize that advertising should be taken with a whole shaker of salt, especially when it comes to toys, where there's a long history of making products look better than they are (as multiple generations of Sea Monkeys owners can testify). These board game boxes, though, go beyond deceptive advertising and right into the realm of 'See, this is wh
Just as ads in the 1950s assumed that all women were housewives desperate for new ways to starch their husbands' shirts, advertisers today demonstrate an extremely low opinion of their male customers.
The cutesy, cartoony little picture books you find in the beanbag section of the library aren't actively teaching kids to idolize crack dealers or mock the disabled, right? Actually, some of the biggest names in the industry are practically seeding our children's brains with impending personality disorders.
It turns out that some movies and shows that became enduring classics were dangerously close to being terrible, and we probably wouldn't be talking about them today if a few folks hadn't switched gears on the fly.
Since society has had several thousand years of practice at recognizing con artists, you'd think we'd get pretty good at spotting them. But you'd be wrong. For a scam to succeed, it doesn't take any kind of special genius. Or even average genius.
Fortunately for the people who go their entire lives without ever discovering the difference between a 'practical joke' and 'randomly harming other people just because,' an entire industry has emerged to help them.
We tend to romanticize the age of exploration, like it was all grand exotic frontiers and tiny people tying sailors down with ropes. What we don't hear about so often is the scurvy and the starvation and the months of endless walking through landscapes full of awfulness. And that's too bad, because it actually makes their stories that much more bad
Like a slapstick movie where the buffoon main character encounters a priceless work of art, and then accidentally destroys it in some hilarious way, a shocking number of the world's great pieces have in fact been ruined in this fashion.
Some day you might wind up in front of a judge due to a 'hilarious' misunderstanding (or because you had to murder some dudes). If so, there are several things that can tip the scales of justice in your favor that have nothing to do with the law or evidence.
When it comes to depicting computer hacking onscreen, it's no surprise that the implausible scenarios Hollywood's tech-challenged screenwriters manage to pull out of their asses don't even come close to resembling the real thing. Except it turns out that, every once in a while, they inadvertently get it right on the money.
