MARK 4 WILL FIX DOGS MARK 4 WILL FIX DOGS MARK 4 WILL FIX DOGS

Did you know …

That the films Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2 were both based on the real-life exploits of a real-life robot? It’s true!

“Johnny Mark 4” (the Mark 5 model was never actually built) was made by the Mitsubishi corporation some time between 1981 and 1984, and while “he” was never so intelligent as the character Johnny 5, he was programmed to be semi-autonomous; Mark 4 could complete household tasks with little direction and simulate human conversation reasonably well.

Where real life most significantly diverges from the films is that the titular “short circuit” occurred near the end of Mark 4’s functional lifespan, and, in fact, did not expand his intelligence and awareness as it did with his fictional counterpart.

In early 1985, Mark 4 was assisting in housekeeping duties at an animal shelter as part of a Mitsubishi public relations initiative. Some claim that the short circuit was the result of a dog urinating on Mark 4, but his engineers insist that he was fully waterproof. It’s more likely that Mark 4 simply backed into an electrical outlet while sweeping and received a damaging electrical charge. However it happened, significant short circuits occurred in Mark 4’s processing center that afternoon. Unfortunately, they were not enough to fully disable him; I say “unfortunately,” because the accident damaged something in Mark 4’s logic board, and he immediately stopped cleaning and began disassembling dogs. According to witnesses who viewed the incident from an adjacent hallway, Mark 4 attempted to reassemble the dog parts into a larger, more efficient dog, but the room and its windows were so . . . messy that it seems unlikely that any observer could accurately determine what Mark 4 was attempting. In any case, dogs don’t work like that, and Mark 4 died alone in the locked room as his battery pack was allowed to deplete.

In retrospect, it seems a little strange that they made a movie out of the incident. I can’t say I’m sorry that they did, though. What a fun couple of flicks!

Chickenscratch

Did you know …

That the vikings, Northern Europe’s preeminent seagoing rapists, had their own written language? It’s true!

Who’d have thought that that thieving race of badger people could even form human-like sounds, much less write them down?! When you see the letters themselves, though, it might make more sense; each viking character had to be able to be inscribed by dragging one’s own teeth over a flat stone surface, so it’s really just a bunch of scratches and tooth pieces.

Have you ever heard of the saga of Beowulf? It’s basically the 8th century’s version of All Dogs Go to Heaven—at some point a viking pulls somebody’s arm off and then kills their mother, which I believe ADGtH copied almost directly. Anyway, according to some theories, simply writing down the story of Beowulf fully wore down the teeth of an entire generation of vikings, which seems to have given the rest of Europe a moment to breathe and collect itself. That must have been nice! Of course the vikings were at it again a few years later, spreading disease and turning monks into hand puppets and stuff.

Those guys!

Tree-rocks

Wake up and get out of that tent! Someone left Camping Knowledge all over the place, and it’s not going to clean itself up.

Did you know …

That pinecones are nature’s tree-rocks? It’s true!

Why nature thought trees needed rocks, I’ll never know. And why nature produced such an inferior replica of a rock is likewise beyond me. Still, pinecones can serve many of the same purposes as rocks, including stacking, sorting, throwing, squeezing, burying, crushing, and hiding.

Pinecones are somewhat more flammable than true rocks, however, so keep that in mind when choosing your rock or tree-rock for a particular purpose. (e.g., a pinecone will work reasonably well for knocking a you squirrel off of a tree branch, but stick with the original if you need something to heat up in a campfire.)

Bloodmeal

Don’t you hate it when you come home from a long weekend, and your hair and clothes just smell like Camping Knowledge? Yuck. Get it here instead.

Did you know …

That you can pretty much eat mosquitoes all day long, and you’ll still be hungry? It’s true!

There are a couple of caveats to this:

First, if eating mosquitoes grosses you out for whatever reason, you may not be hungry after eating a few (you won’t be full either, though),

Also, if you’re a bat, you can probably eat mosquitoes until you’re no longer hungry. It seems unlikely that you’re a bat if you’re reading this, however, unless you’re perched on the shoulder of a human being or hiding in their hair. Even then, I suppose it’d be a pretty big coincidence if you read English. It’s a big world out there.

See, the reason that bats can fill up on mosquitoes but we can’t is kind of the crux of the issue. We (humans) are much, much bigger than bats. If you look closely, you’ll see that we’re way, way bigger—probably somewhere on the order of 10 to 15 times bigger, depending on the bat and the person (although I haven’t done any formal measuring and weighing).

Mosquitoes, likewise, are quite small. Not so small that they can’t fill up a bat’s little tummy, but you can jam hundreds of those little turds in your mouth and it won’t do you much good. What’s more, in any given mosquito-eating scenario, some of those mosquitoes have probably already been eating you, and unless you get all of them, eating a few of them back is barely going to allow you to break even.

Presumably there’s a way to efficiently maximize mosquito intake (I’m thinking of something like a giant funnel and a vacuum cleaner), but until such an item or strategy exists I’d say it’s just not worth it.

I give eating mosquitoes a C-.

Nature's canoes

Uh oh. What’s that sound? Crashing, twig-snapping, brush-stomping . . . oh, it’s only Camping Knowledge. Well, sit back and expose your soft gut, so that Camping Knowledge might consume you more easily.

Did you know …

That your modern canoe is modeled after the bellies of ducks? It’s true!

Canoe scientists realized long ago that you’d be hard pressed to create a more hydrodynamic buoyant shape than the underside of a duck, so they basically chopped the legs off and handed the design to the canoe manufacturing industry. Voila!

Aside from the legs, another duck feature noticeably absent from most canoes is the cloaca. At the time, scientists believed it wasn’t necessary to reproduce the cloaca in canoes, but believe you me, there are occasions when you absolutely wish there was an additional way to remove the swampy mixture of feces and uric acid from your boat.

Crawbird

Gather ‘round the campfire, science scouts, and open your damn ears so that I might pour into them rich, sweet, poisonous Camping Knowledge.

Did you know …

That all your average crayfish/crawdad/crawfish/craydad/dadfish/daddad wants from life is to fly? It’s true!

This may be surprising, because millions of years of evolution have landed the humble crayfish snugly amidst underwater rocks, algae, and mud. But that’s not their fault; evolution is a deck of cards, and winning with three nines doesn’t mean you didn’t always want a royal flush.

Anyway, most crawpigs are forced to satisfy their desire for flight by practically forcing themselves into the gullets of seagulls and the like. But if you ever get the opportunity, do a mudbug a favor and chuck it high into the sky. If it seems to be pinching onto your finger, why, that’s only a dadbug’s way of saying thanks. Send that little s.o.b. into orbit, and it will die a happy (if a little sooner than it probably expected.)

A side note: don’t throw lobsters. They are a distinct species, and they want none of that nonsense.

"Woodsie Wigglers"

Buckle up, little scientists, because it’s time for Camping Knowledge, harvested fresh from the wilderness.

Did you know …

That chipmunks are exactly the same on the inside as they are on the outside? It’s true!

Chipmunks are able to turn themselves inside-out at will, sort of like a water-weenie (or a “water wiggler,” depending on branding, I guess.) If you’re not familiar with water-weenies, they’re basically rubber cylinders, the walls of which are inflated with fluid. Sort of like a penis, I guess, except that water-weenies turn themselves inside out as a matter of course, which is not something recommended for most penes. If this description doesn’t fully summon a helpful mental image, I recommend traveling backwards in time to the early 1990s and checking out the gift shop of your local science center.

But this post isn’t about water-weenies, it’s about chipmunks. In order to escape predators, chipmunks can easily slide their skin around and through their bodies, allowing them the slip from tight situations. You’d never guess that this is possible, because an inside-out chipmunk looks exactly like an outside-out chipmunk. But once you’ve found yourself with a mouthful of chipmunk hair and mucus but no chipmunk, well, it becomes pretty obvious.

Bush Inventions

Did you know …

That some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest inventions came to him while he was camping? It’s true!

I only mention it because I’ll be going camping tomorrow as well. This means that I’ll be adding to my backlog of days that I still have to fill with science facts (I’m looking at you, May!). But it may also mean that the next great thing you buy was invented by me in the woods! Like, maybe an exciting new way to deal with rocks or something.

Anyhow, here are some of Teddy Roosevelt’s “bush inventions”:

-The crossbow

-The teddy bear

-Camp chairs
-Colored paper

-Syphilis

-The artichoke

-Franklin Delano Roosebot

-Baseball

-Chemical warfare

-Taxidermy

-Gas spectrometry

Wish me luck! I’ve never eaten live fish before!!

Flat Earth

Did you know …

That many prominent scientitians believe that the Earth, this one right here, is flat? It’s true!

If this is the case, many say, the flat Earth must be accelerating “upwards” through space at exactly 1G (~9.8 meters per second) to replicate the gravity we would feel if we lived on a spherical, Earth-sized Earth. And if this is true, it follows, our flat Earth would have achieved the speed of light after about seven years. By all accounts, Earth has existed for longer than 7 years. If this is true, and if we chose to accept Aaron Einstein’s theory of relativity, we should all have become infinitely dense as we approached to speed of light, and also time no longer passes.

How I’m writing this with infinitely dense fingers and trapped in a frozen instant of time is beyond me, but then again so are a lot of things.

Other scientific facts that are beyond me:

-Worms find each other attractive

-Compound bows

-Cheese is made of milk

-Plate tectonics

-Twins have identical DNA but distinct thoughts

-Rabbits can’t see the colors red, orange, or yellow

-Germ theory

Canned spine

Did you know …

That the human spinal column is basically just a stack of soup cans? It’s true!

Obviously your vertebrae aren’t literally soup cans, made by US Soup Concerns Inc. or whatever, but they are essentially soup cans, for all intents and purposes. Treat them as you would a column of soup cans. Would you whack a stack of cans with a bat? No, not unless you want to get thrown out of the grocery store. Would you tilt that can column to a precarious angle? No, not unless you wanted soup cans all over the place. Would you strap that stack to a bungie cord and toss it off a bridge? No! Not unless you were okay with losing a ton of soup!

The important exception to this analogy: Would you crack open one of those cans (or more, if you were having a party) and enjoy the savory soup inside? Yes, you probably would. And that’s ok with literal soup cans, but not with your vertebrae. You would be surprised at how awful that soup is, and it is extremely unlikely that it will be worth losing all movement and feeling in your lower body.

Rabblerawr thhbbbbtthhh gurrhick

Did you know …

That Tasmanian devils can spin, mini-tornado-style, as fast as 2000 rotations per minute? It’s true!

This is how most Tasmanian devils die. Spinning, or a combination of spinning and facial tumors. In any case, it’s just too fast for a living creature to spin.

Good kickflip, Scout!

Did you know …

That an adult dog knows the same number of words as a thirteen-year-old human child? It’s true!

Here are the words adult dogs/13-year-olds know:

-Come

-Sit

-Walk

-Food

-Handjob

-Bath

-Ganked

-Leash

-Retard

-Good

-Bad

-Kickflip

-Vet

The Notorious L.R.A.C.A.Q.C.

Did you know …

That the famed physicist Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro di Quaregna e di Cerreto (known to his friends as “Renny di Reggy,” or simply “Avogadro”) spent his whole life counting molecules one by one? It’s true!

It was painstaking work, but it was worth it in the end; Avogadro gave us one of the top five numbers ever! The only real tragedy is that Renny effectively removed himself from the dating pool by spending all his time counting, and . . . well, just look at him! Rwaarrr!

In case you’re wondering (I know you are), here are the top five numbers:

5. 420

4. Avogadro’s number (6.02 x 10^23, I think)

3. Pi

2. 69

1. 1

The Race of the Dandy Horse

Did you know …

That one of the earliest forms of the bicycle, called a velocipede or a “Dandy Horse,” was invented for the purpose of jousting? It’s true!

The Dandy Horse was invented in the early 19th century by the German baron Karl von Drais. Drais was an avid horseman (that is to say, he rode regular horses, not yet dandy horses), but found that any horse much larger than a Shetland pony was too tall for effective jousting. Drais designed the velocipe as a means of comfortably achieving adequate velocity while maintaining maneuverability and remaining at the appropriate height for jousting.

It occurs to me that I may have not been specific enough above. If you're picturing the Baron von Drais speeding across a field holding a lance, you have been mislead; Drais’ understanding of “jousting” was fairly unconventional. Instead of trying to knock another man off of a horse (or dandy horse) with a stick, the Baron would “joust” by speeding along with his right pointer finger outstretched, with the intention of thrusting it into the bottoms of unsuspecting walkers. This behavior landed Drais in quite a bit of legal trouble, got him banned from county fairs across Europe, and gave him an index finger so often broken and re-healed that it looked more like a miniature bolt of lightning than a human digit, but he never quit. He was a true sportsman.

Dedosde

Did you know …

That the Spanish phrase for "teeth" is "dedos de la cabeza," which directly translates to "fingers of the head"? It's true!

This is a good example of how language shapes your understanding of the world around you. "Teeth," naturally, derives from the Old English word for breasts ("teets") which is of course how we think of teeth in the English-speaking world. The German word for teeth, "gebiss," is the same as the German word for "slugs," which probably explains why Germans brush their teeth with salt. And the Czech word, "zuby," literally means "optional mouth pearls," something that makes complete sense if you've ever seen the famous Czech smile or Czech jewelry.

Ponies

Did you know …

That "ponies" are really just horses? It's true!

Many people operate under the misconception that ponies are a fully distinct species from horses, but this could not be further from the truth. A "pony" is simply a horse that has, at some point in its life, killed a human being.

If you're thinking, "no, that can't be true, I've looked in the eyes of some ponies, and I'd be able to tell if they had straight up murdered someone," you're half right. Naturally, doing something like stomping on someone's head or biting their throat out will earn a horse the pony label, but horses can also become ponies by indirectly or inadvertently causing the death of a human being.

For example:

-A horse stands on the oxygen supply tube of an old-timey diver. This horse is a pony.

-A horse and a human are trapped in a warehouse for two months. They have a large supply of jerky, but with its superior size and strength the horse is able to keep all the jerky for itself. The human dies of starvation, and the horse is a pony.

-A horse and a human are trapped in a garden paradise for several decades. They have all the fresh food they need, but the horse convinces the person to eat only apricots. The human dies of diabetes, and the horse is a pony.

-A horse is singing on a mountaintop, and the sound triggers an avalanche. The village below is buried by snow, tree trunks, and house-sized boulders. With no time to evacuate, nearly four hundred people perish. This horse is a pony.

-A horse gives false testimony at a murder trial. The defendant is wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death, and executed. This horse remains a horse, because the defendant was also a horse.

Love of ham

Did you know …

That of all the countries in the world, it's the country of America that eats the most ham? It's true.

Scientists postulate that this is because Americans simply love ham. Anecdotally, of course, this is well known; we're all familiar with the olde American nursery rhyme,

"Ham on my teeth

Ham on my tongue.

Ham in my belly,

Isn't it fun?

Ham for the lord

And ham for the child.

Ham in the house

And ham in the wild.

Flesh oh so tender

A bite most divine.

Bathe us, sweet Jesus,

In the blood of the swine."

They had fun back then, didn't they?

"Moon King, I offer you my finger, and the fingers of my child!"

Did you know …

That the first human in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, claimed to have seen God when he looked out the window of his spacecraft? It's true!

Upon returning to Earth, Gagarin realized that what he had actually been looking at was the moon, and that he had been suffering from the very first case of space fever. This, of course, was obvious to mission controllers the whole time, as their monitoring equipment indicated very early in the mission that Gagarin had defecated into each of his gloves, something that both Soviet and American space agencies would quickly come to recognize as a universal early symptom of space fever.

Nucleobutt

Did you know …

That every firefly (or "lightning bug") contains a tiny nuclear reactor in its butt-end? It's true!

Before you get too worked up, however, keep in mind that it's only a tiny, bug-sized handful of neutrons being smashed into a tiny, bug-sized handful of uranium, so if you had grand plans for strapping a bunch of bugs into a special power plant, or convincing them to squeeze together inside some kind of bombshell, think again.

The reaction happening in a firefly's butt cheeks only produces enough energy to create a momentary flicker of light, and that light is only as intense as it needs to be to convince another bug to sleep with the first bug (bugs are laughably promiscuous, and it doesn't take much). Unless your aim is to seduce bugs, I'd say you should just head back to the drawing board and leave those fireflies alone.

Batman?

Did you know …

That Batman, hero of filmstrip and comic strip, isn’t actually real? It’s true!

Apparently research institutions across the country have dropped hundreds of millions of dollars into batman/manbat genetic hybrid programs over the last fifty years, but no one has been able to produce a viable result. You can mix up human and bat DNA, but in the end you just can’t make a human heart fit inside a bat’s body.

Similar projects were aimed at “catwomen,” and while these were more successful in that the hybrid offspring survived, basically all they produced was a generation of people indistinguishable from other humans, except they were constantly trying to lick their own butts.

Anyway, unless you’ve got a comic starring a 2-inch pipistrelle flopping around with a fist-sized heart stuck to its tummy, pretty much every incarnation of Batman you’ve ever seen has been entirely made up.

Golden tongue, green throat

Did you know …

That the nicer a person’s voice is, the worse their breath smells? It’s true!

Many scientists believe that these golden-voiced cesspits are hosts to some sort of symbiotic organism; perhaps fungal colonies or families of beetles live in their throats, nourishing their vocal chords while also farting and shitting on them. Yuck, but, you know.

Anyway, nobody wants to get close enough to their awful mouth holes to get to the bottom of this bizarre correlation.

Grapeshot

Did you know …

That the first explosive devices were made out of grapes? It’s true!

Way back in the day, when people wanted to blow something up, they’d just stick a wick into a grape (purple or green), light it, and place the grape next to the offending object. Of course, being made of mostly water, plant fibers and sugar, no grape ever exploded. How could they?! Man, people were so goddamn stupid back then.

Functioning explosives weren’t discovered until someone tried the same trick with a stick of dynamite. Or, I should say, functioning explosives weren't discovered until someone tried the same trick with a stick of dynamite while someone else was watching from a safe distance. (Again, people were so pathetically dumb back then that a ton of them got blown up in the process of discovering whether or not dynamite was explosive.)

Blossoms

Did you know …

That you can give yourself a nice, rosy nose by regularly pinching the bridge and tip of your snout? It’s true!

Early US president George Washington made a habit of doing this. Excessive alcohol consumption can have the same effect (that is to say, breaking or inflaming the tiny capillaries beneath your nose skin), but Washington only ever drank pondwater. A red nose was very much in fashion at the time, because it reminded people of . . . well, whatever. In any case, GW’s pondwater gave him diarrhea (also in fashion) but not a red nose, so he made all efforts to keep his capillaries broken.

Try it out?

Worm Bones

Did you know …

That most worms have no bones? It’s true!

I say “most” because I can’t in good scientific conscience say that “all worms have no bones” until I’ve gotten a good look inside all worms. See, I’ve opened up a lot of worms—a LOT of worms—and so far none of them had anything that looked like bones inside them. The closest any of my worms ever came to being boney was a nightcrawler that apparently had a long, sharp porous bone in its midsection, but that turned out to be a toothpick that had just fallen out of my mouth.

I typically chew on five or six toothpicks at a time, so it’s not all that strange that one would go missing and I wouldn’t notice immediately.

I haven’t even opened up all the species of worms. My samples have pretty much been limited to what I can find in and around the gravel pit. But even if I were to reach a point where I’d carefully examined a worm from every worm species . . . even then I’m not sure I could definitively say that no worms have bones. I would have a very sound theory at that point, but there always remains the possibility that there are boney worms out there—perhaps, for example, individuals living under more stressful conditions develop bones (although I’d be hard pressed to imagine a more stressful situation than being chased around a gravel pit by a man with a paring knife).

But that’s science for you!