Something Awful offers a fuller list expanding on Asimov’s three laws of robotics (not to be confused with Ellis’s revisionary three laws). Sample laws include:

10. A robot, when given contradictory orders by two human beings, and assuming those orders do not violate the First Law, must decide which order to follow based on which human being has a deeper voice.

18. A robot must be very careful when tickling a human being, because a robot does not know what it is like to be tickled, and therefore cannot safely apprehend when it is no longer funny and it starts to become cruel.

23. A robot must shut up around girls and let me, Isaac Asimov, do the talking; however, a robot may bail me out if things start to go haywire.

(Link via Boing Boing.)

I went to the dentist the other day for a root canal and a filling. The cavity that I got the filling for was so deep (that is, close to the nerve) that they prescribed me penicillin to make sure we took care of any infection that might have found its way in through the tooth decay. This led to something of a quandary, however: Was I allowed to drink tonight, at my weekly bar night, while on antibiotics?

Being in my twenties, I decided that I may not be entitled to the same foolish notions of immortality common to teenagers, but I believe I’m close enough to justify feeling nigh-invulnerable. So, I had some beer first, then came home slightly tipsy, and then checked the internet to see whether I was going to die.

Good news! I should be fine. However, it was difficult to find a source that sounded even semi-reputable from mere googling. You see, when you search for “penicillin” and “alcohol,” you get some folks saying it’s a bad combo, and others saying it’s fine, but the top results are still random strangers on the internet more often than, you know, doctors (who presumably still use telegraphs and smoke signals as their preferred means of communication). Moreover, the top sites for answering questions along these lines seem to be the kind of sites where someone asks a question and then everybody votes for a favorite answer. I appreciate that two Yahoo! Answers readers took the time to vote on which answer seemed most plausible (or at least desirable) to them, but I’m nervous about accepting medical advice from someone identified only by the email address “cute_blondie_angel@yahoo.com.”

That’s not to say that this isn’t good advice, of course, or that the cute and blonde are incapable of dispensing useful medical wisdom. After all, it seems that cute_blondie_angel actually is training to be a prenatal doctor. I mean, I guess you could say she “claims to be” training, but that seems like a weirdly specific thing to claim. Moreover, one could make the argument that she’s no less authoritative than the (supposed!) transcript from a TV show I first linked to as somehow acceptably convincing.

In conclusion, the internet may or may not be full of lies, but I’ll forgive it as long as it offers semi-convincing packaging for the lies I prefer to hear.

People responded a little too favorably to flipsiding for it to be very useful as an alternative to Rickrolling. I mean, heck, I knew I adored the Kidd Video theme song (“Video to Radio,” now the #1 Google result for “flipsiding”), but how could I have known that you lovable denizens of the intertron agreed with me?

And heck, even Rickrolling seems a little too good-natured to work as a prank, as far as I’m concerned. It’s like sending someone a postcard that’s secretly a candygram. In the tradition of pranks and jokes I grew up with, however, you send a candygram filled with black ink or electric eels. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down? Enough of this touchy-feely BS.

Thus, in an attempt to effect more mischief, I have uploaded to YouTube the most heinous music video I have ever witnessed in my entire life. When I confronted this … this … thing with my comrades, I was overtaken by a sudden sense of illness. Dan was forced to shield his eyes. I think Tony blacked out the memory of the experience entirely. Its evil is so thick and viscous that I dare not even allow its name to ooze from my mouth. Let’s just say that witnessing this Lovecraftian spectacle, in a darkened room surrounded by parents and their innocent babes, made me fear the prospect of ever bringing a son or daughter of my own into a world where such a thing could be created.

Use this with extreme caution, and may God have mercy on my soul.

GOOD Magazine offers a guide to the secret organizations that rule the world, including all your favorite hits from yesteryear:

• The Freemasons
• The Trilateral Commission
• The Order of Skull and Bones

… And more! (Bavarian Illuminati not included. This link brought to you by Boing Boing.)

A useful cheat-sheet from the Boston Globe.

Put lightsabers in them. (A top ten list on Videogum, link via Boing Boing.)

Jason and Kai discuss Hello Kitty for Men (link via Boing Boing).

Jason: I hate to say it, but I actually kind of like those shirts
» they figured out my whole gender! dark colors, sans serif cat faces.
Kai: Um, I was kind of okay with Hello Kitty already, for the most part
» I mean, not really complaining about the new stuff
Jason: you also wear women’s pants you bought at good will
» and multiple articles of clothing with unicorns
Kai: Yeah, when you look at the other pieces in the puzzle, I guess that one makes sense
Jason: I think they are looking to broaden their market beyond people who already have real style
» so as now to include people like me, who want sans serif cat faces.
» … that is remarkably close to “sans serif cat feces”
» in fact, that’s what I see every time I look at it
» I can’t see the word “faces” after “cat” without assuming defecation is somehow involved

Barack and Michelle Obama have inspired Time to offer “A Brief History of the Fist Bump” for your reading pleasure. Some excerpts include:

Some claim the act of knuckle-bumping began in the 1970s with NBA players like Baltimore Bullets guard Fred Carter. Others claim the fist bump emerged off the court, citing the Wonder Twins, minor characters in the 1970s Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoon The Superfriends, who famously touched knuckles and cried “Wonder Twin powers, activate!’ before morphing into animals or ice sculptures. One might also credit germaphobics for the fist bump’s invention. …

Even the terminology used to describe the silent move is under dispute. On reporting Obama’s speech, The New York Times described it stuffily as a “closed-fisted high-five” … One Internet poster even referred to it as “the fist bump of hope.” Other terms for the move include “power five,” “fist pound,” “knuckle bump,” “Quarter Pounder” and “dap.”

Please see Penny Arcade’s crucial pamphlet for more information on the proper usage of this gesture in social situations.

I couldn’t pass up on linking to a headline that claims “Thoughts of Death Make Us Eat More Cookies.” Not only is it a great headline, but it recalls one of my favorite Onion articles: the press release for T.C. McCrispee’s, a snack cracker manufactured to “ease the crushing pain of modern life.”

Unfortunately, the science behind the death and cookies article sounds dubious to me. This is reporting on a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research that reports that students who are asked to write an essay about death want to consume more cookies than the control group, suggesting that consumption helps make us forget about our own mortality. That would make perfect sense—if the control group were asked about something that also produces anxiety but has nothing to do with the negative repercussions of cookie consumption. In this case, the control group wrote an essay about going to the dentist.

I guess a headline reading “Thoughts of Dentist Make Us Eat Fewer Cookies” probably doesn’t sound quite as surprising, though. (They sort of address this in later experiments discussed in the same paper, at least.) Personally, I prefer to believe that we now have scientific evidence that cookies are awesome.

This is not your father’s Indiana Jones. Or, for that matter, the Indiana Jones of your childhood. The rush at seeing Harrison Ford once again don the iconic fedora is undeniable, but Crystal Skull never quite succeeds at replicating the experience of the earlier films. That’s a high bar, of course: Raiders of the Lost Ark is a tried-and-true classic, and The Last Crusade is a brilliant romp. At times, the Spielberg of the ’80s, full of great stunts and sharp asides, fights to escape the nuclear holocaust of special effects-laden blockbusters that have come since, but too often he is dragged into a morass of “top this” action scenes and plot that veers into the bizarre. There are a few good stunt sequences in Crystal Skull and, while the movie and Ford are enjoyable, it lacks the pure joy that informed the earlier outings and elevated them to the classic status they so rightly deserve.

Still, it may have been better than Temple of Doom.