4 Awful Things We're Now Considering Nerd Behavior I'm not a pleasant person to be around. I mean, I'm mostly OK on the outside, but it sometimes seems like the person who lives in my brain and presses the buttons that make me do things is just trying to see how far he can push the envelope before society exiles me to a desert island with nothing but a few years' worth of snacks and a solar-powered laptop so I can play Fallout 2. I'm basically just like any other sociopathic nerd, and I'm guilty of every one of the behaviors I'm about to explain. #4. Lucasfilm Here's an awful truth: We may love the stuff our favorite artists create, but we don't give two shits about them as people. There's no better example of this than the Star Wars prequels. LucasfilmFear leads to anger, anger leads to hastily typed forum posts and a meaningless life. You get angry when someone does something to hurt you or someone/something you care about, not when someone fails to keep doing something you like. I'm not above this at all. Again, this makes no sense.
5 Reasons The Greatest Movie Villain Ever is a 'Good' Witch When you think of The Wizard of Oz's cast of villains, you most likely think of the flying monkeys and the Wicked Witch of the West, and maybe the pissy apple trees and the green dudes guarding the WWotW's castle. Also known as 'Winkies.' True story. If you've seen or read 'Wicked,' you might have a more sympathetic view of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's her, right there. Glinda, not the Wicked Witch of the West, is the cause for everything that goes wrong for Dorothy and her new friends in the land of Oz, and she starts instigating the film's central conflict the second Dorothy shows up. You remember the story, right? And that's when Glinda the Good Witch floats down and merrily interrogates Dorothy to find out if she is a good witch or a bad witch. "And remember only bad people are disabled, Dorothy" You caught that, right? "It's like Saddam's execution all over again." Right off the bat, the Western Witch wants to know who killed her sister. What?!
The seven most disturbing psychology experiments - Weird.Answers.com In the annals of unnerving social science work, one name stands out in the pantheon of researchers, an unassuming Harvard professor who put together the experiment that bears his name. In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram found himself curious about the nature of obedience to authority, specifically the propensity of ordinary people to comply with orders to commit evil acts as happened in Nazi Germany. To test his ideas, Milgram devised an experiment in which subjects were situated in front of a board of switches and instructed to ask questions of a fellow volunteer who was restrained to a chair in the other room. When the restrained person got a question wrong, Milgram's experimenter instructed the student at the board to throw a switch and administer a shock. As the shocks grew in intensity, the subject in the other room screamed in pain, begged to be let free, and finally fell into a chilling silence - apparently either unconscious or dead from the torture. The results were stunning.
6 Double Standards We're All Guilty Of Every one of us has decried a double standard at some point. The double standard in the workplace when it comes to paying women, or among universities when it comes to letting in people who thought high school was boring. But while we're wondering how admissions departments sleep at night, there are some much more common double standards that we rarely complain about since we're too busy obliviously believing in them. PSAs Are About Other People, Not Us If you leave your house occasionally, even just through the magical portal of television, you'll be no stranger to PSAs (public service announcements) warning you about the dangers of drugs, drunk driving, texting while driving, not reading to your kids and not eating "the other white meat." However, if a corny anti-drug commercial has ever made you want to shout at your TV "NOW I AM GOING TO GO DO EVEN MORE DRUGS!" Getty"I am going to do ALL THE DRUGS! And it's not just because the commercials are corny. Getty Or a metrosexual.
The 6 Best Towns To Live in (If You Have a Death Wish) Maybe the greatest thing about human beings is if you show us the most desolate, horrible place on Earth, at least one of us will scratch his chin and say, "I bet land is really cheap there." Boom, a month later, there are apartments and a Waffle House. We're not kidding, there are people living and working right now in places where you wouldn't think a man could survive for even a day. Places like... Where is it? Drive about five hours out of Ethiopia's population center until the ground gets too rugged to proceed, then get out and travel by camel-back into one of the cradles of human civilization in the Danakil Desert. This is the region of the world where human life began, and life has been comparatively smooth sailing for those of us who escaped this hellhole. Lifestyle In the 1960s, an American company set up a mining community in the Dallol region in order to mine the mineral, potash. "Hey Hank, this is fun and all but I was thinking maybe, you know, fuck it. But, hey. Ah, Siberia.
The 6 Weirdest Cities People Actually Live In Look, we're idiots: None of us knows what, exactly, goes into city planning, but we assume it's probably a lot of distinguished gentlemen emailing each other about math, statistics and blueprints. But somewhere along the line, somebody accidentally CC'ed the insane asylum, and we wound up with the following civilizations that simply should not be: #6. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.com Back in 1945, the USSR discovered oil just off the coast of Azerbaijan. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.com"If you find yourself plummeting into the sea, you've gone too far." Five thousand people live and work on Neft Dashlari, right there in the face of logic and Poseidon alike. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.comThey went a little crazy on the swimming pool, though. But if there's one thing the Soviets weren't exactly known for, it was the reliability of their engineering; they always did prefer to glue things together with a combination of balls and aggressive optimism. Via Skyscraper.talkwhat.comOur guess? #5. #4. For money!
5 Surprising Upsides of Horrible Natural Disasters There's a reason natural disasters are called that, and not "natural fun times." It's a constant scourge on our development as a species that we are perpetually beaten down by the wrath of nature. But that's why it's so surprising to learn that occasionally, just occasionally, natural disasters can have surprising upsides. Here are a few cases where the universe's fury has actually worked out pretty well for some of the people involved. #5. Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images Surprisingly for two peoples united in their shared love of rotating meat, for most of the 20th century, Turkey and Greece really, really hated each other. But when a huge earthquake hit Istanbul and northern Turkey in 1999, the Greeks reacted out of character. Goodshoot/Goodshoot/Getty Images"They're hoarding gold! Then, less than a month later, a separate earthquake hit Athens. This time the thaw stuck around. Digital Vision. #4. Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images Via WikipediaIt was kind of a big deal. #3.
3 Reasons Real Heroes Tend to be Weirdos Last week, Cleveland resident Charles Ramsey was propelled to national fame when he saved the lives of three kidnapping victims while enjoying some McDonald's for lunch. And thanks to his subsequent freewheeling TV interview, the world also learned that Charles Ramsey is a total weirdo. Fox NewsWith the hair of a god. Yes, Ramsey follows in the footsteps of Antoine "bed intruder" Dodson and a hatchet-wielding drifter named Kai, who rose to Internet stardom this past February after saving a California utility worker from a rampaging motorist claiming to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. #3. Mind you, Ramsey wasn't the only Clevelander interviewed about the kidnapping. Today In this situation, calling the cops was the rational response. The Washington Post / GettyRamsey, seen here explaining his unified theory of UFOs and the federal deficit to a radio show host. So what happened in Cleveland last week? #2. Creatas/Creatas/Getty Images"I WOULD DIE FOR ANY OF YOU!" #1. Why?
4 Ways 'Futurama' Is Becoming a Reality Millions of fans are shedding soggy Slurm-flavored tears over the news that Futurama has been cancelled (again), rendering the season that will premiere this June its very last. Once again, television audiences will be left with a dearth of quality Hypnotoad-related programming. But good news, everyone! While the TV show may be gone, you are already living it. Well, some aspects of the show, anyway! One day, God willing. #4. One of Futurama's most iconic images is that of New New York's citizens zipping through the sky in pneumatic tubes. Meanwhile, in the Present: Meet the ET3. KurzweilaiFinally, public transit gets some dignity. The ET3 -- which stands for Evacuated Tube Transport, because its creators alarmingly don't understand how acronyms or numbers work -- is an experimental pressurized air system designed to carry passengers at a speed of 4,000 miles per hour. #3. On Futurama, everyone loves Bender, the cigar-chomping, beer-swilling, felonious robot buddy of the Planet Express crew.