LUKEMCKINNEY.NET IS LIVE!Move on to my brand new site! Behold the frequent updates! Gasp at the complete article archives!for all the latest updates and other non-article news go to the blog.6 Things You Won't Believe Science Can Do With DNAEverybody knows that DNA is a double-helix, which means they're way behind what science is able to do now.  If MC Escher built things that actually worked Learning Chinese (on a flight to China)Mandarin is beautiful and terrifying and completely insane. Two of those themes come across in this article. Please note how you can choose several combinations of weapons or to love someone.
If you’ve ever meant to learn another language you should totally do that. It’s mind-expanding in ways your brain literally does not have pathways to understand until you do it. Especially if it’s Mandarin, which is like trying to speak Escher and every character is an artwork. The 9 Most Amazing Lasers Right NowLasers are how science is cutting that edge you hear about. It’s the fastest moving science in the last century (a little speed of light joke), and is awesome. I have two degrees in laser physics from my previous life as an academic, so this one was a lot of fun! That’s probably also why they straightened out a couple of my nerdiest lines, probably for the best. I include my favorite below as a tumblr bonus:
The group sending nuclear-powered laser robots and hoping Martians don’t have a J’onn Connor. Lunatic Luchadors vs Every Monster Ever!Of all the amazingly terrible movies I’ve ever written about, only one has this moment:
Now are you the glorious action-taking glowing-headed hero on the left, or the lifeless, lumbering, soon-to-be-unconscious-and-the-world-will-not-mourn fool on the right? I normally wouldn’t be able to make my preferences any clearer. But my fine friends at Kink Engineering, their actions speak louder than mere words. And that camera-equipped Paul Hillier is worth a thousand with every click. And our powers combined!
The Sichuan Spice ExperimentThe only way to approach new food is by eating it. Anything else is waste and wimpiness. And if that means eating sliced pig snout, so be it.
You can’t claim you don’t like the look of a meal unless it stabs you in the eye, and I found food which can actually do that. And ate it. Irish people have +2 racial bonuses to Drinking and Bullshit, which is the exact recipe for North American St Patrick's day.  A far superior recipe for a real Irish celebration. Over one million people partied with this article on the day, including little sites like Fark. Enjoy!  Brand new brilliance over at CBS, where I've been hired as the Drinking and Video Games expert. Retroactively meaning my misspent youth was actually professional research!  Recent columns include Great Green Drinks for St Patrick's Day, The Most Unromantic Videogames, and Why Vodkatinis Are Actually A Good Thing. Enjoy! Cracked Recap Apparently "swimwear isn't bulletproof" is a controversial position. Though most female characters are lucky if their positions are even anatomically possible.  Snapping your own spine in midair is pretty badass. Behold the breast-window of Power Girl, the nymphomania of Starfire, the ultimate incarnation of the Speedo, and much more! Democracy was invented before the internet, and that's not a coincidence - it's a necessary condition. Anyone who's read YouTube comments would require that all votes be multiplied by the voters IQ minus one hundred.  These people not only think the government hides aliens, but that asking "pretty please" will work It's another Cracked article, complete with the now-traditional "Minor editorial change to the title which provokes legions of nitpicking comments!"  It also contains these Also: wannabe nerd-nitpickers, which is the most tragic thing I've ever written, trying to correct me by saying it's called "KITT" not "KARR", thereby revealing that they're blatantly unqualified to talk about 80s coolness. The True Names of Taste TAPS magazine continues to rock and non-coincidentally employ me. Fall 2011 sees me go all demonologist on beer's wonderful flavors, binding them to my service by knowing their true names! Names like "isoamyl acetate" and "holy hell, that stuff is nail polish why does taste so good?"  They updated my title to be even more delicious, if less accurate, and you can order the magazine here. TAPS is now available in online format, so you have no excuse. We know society started when humanity settled down to raise crops, but have you ever wondered why they’d bother? The advantages of agriculture might be obvious in retrospect, but “seeing the future” and “botany” and were just two of many skills cavemen didn’t have. They succeeded when they killed wild animals, ate meat, and had sex. Giving that lifestyle up for some really intense gardening wouldn’t appeal to guys back then. It still doesn’t appeal to most guys right now. The answer? Beer!  More tragically hilarious self-defense than someone's first time trying nun-chucks.  The Beer Festival Overload Experiment What happens when you try to drink an entire beer festival? And why is "Curry Beer" something that exists?  It's hard work this writing thing The 3 Stupidest Ways To Use A Phone Anyone can get themselves arrested by picking up a phone, but it takes a special effort to get arrested for refusing to put it down. Effort, and a single-digit IQ. Add a woman calling once every six minutes for a year and an idiot pitting his soaked handset against Hurricane Irene, and you start hoping phone radiation causes sterility. 7 Scientific Ways Coffee Gives You Superpowers Coffee doesn't just wake your brain, it makes it better, lets it drink more, fights cancer and upgrades Navy SEALs. It even works on old people, foreigners, and women! This article and quite a lot of my existence made possible by the Black Blood of the Earth, the most amazing coffee you can buy right now. 5 Sequels Made By People Who Must Not Have Seen The Original I’ve written about religion, politics, and the ethics of big business, but only now do I declare my most controversial statement: Crank is much better than Crank: High Voltage. I sugared this bitter pill with statements we can all agree on, like Highlander II being the worst second anything up to and including “losing a second lung.”
Even this looks more fun than the movie I write a weekly multiplayer gaming feature over at Lowpings. Left 4 Dead 2 makes zombie-killing even more fun than usual, which is more fun than skydiving through a nitrous oxide atmosphere. It's so fun it's still fresh even though it's about zombies, and that's imposible online. Chill magazine's July/August issue comes equipped with ME! And because they're brilliant, you can still read me online if you're careless enough not to frequent Ontario beer stores. Craft Brewing At The Cellular Level   *Air quotes invalidate any verbal contracts or obligations They changed my title, but I'm fairly sure the sentiment shines through in the text.  I prefer the dystopian futures with cool killer robots I spend two thousand words mocking facebook and they like me fourteen thousand times. Facebook is so screwed up even the Mystery Method works with 700% efficiency, and the Mystery Method is how you say "scared of women" in internet-ese.  This wasn't even the biggest, and it's literally (and multiply) a Giant Dick Move Funeral crashing, robbing a real-money bank (after inventing it), and killing God. Fun times!  Every once in a while comics remember that mutation is normally horrible and life-threatening.  Virtuality reverses the polarity of spiked bats and chainsaws from "Horror" to "HELL YEAH!"  He-Man sternly tells kids there's no magic solution to all their problems, then even more sternly refuses to disappear in a puff of hypocrisy. More Articles 7 Reasons Vladimir Putin Is The World's Craziest Badass (Cracked.com) You tell me the last time you saw a world leader use martial arts, sextuple the economy, or lie to the people in a way they like. The destruction of my homeland helps me counter the idiots who claim to be Irish every year! (It may not have been worth it.) There's a reality show which encourages people to breed with Tila Tequila, and it didn't even make the list. That's how badly civilization and even evolution are being reversed. The Craziest Kinect Contraptions (And How They'll Destroy Humanity) (Dialaphone.co.uk) The most popular videogames are entirely based on killing things, and now they can see us and move in the real world. There is no way this could backfire. Apparently Italian elections are a "World's Most Misogynist Man" competitions (with a cash-grabbing bonus round, like the Crystal Maze.) The 7 Most Terrifying Sex Patents (Cracked.com) Have you been having sex and thinking "Man, there just isn't enough wiring or glassware involved here?" Of course not, because you're still alive and unarrested. Here we see seven men who looked at human genitals and thought "I can do better than that!" Bolt Actions Speak Louder Than Words (Lowpings.net) Sniper rifles start a lot of arguments online, the exact opposite of their function in the real world. We look at insane worlds where shooting each other in the face can be made "fair". Science Goes To Your Head (TAPS magazine) TAPS Winter 2010/11 lays down the science of beer foam, foamy physics as unexpected as they are beautiful. The Rise And Fall of Call of Duty (Lowpings.net) One of the most popular shooting-people-in-the-face simulators in history has had its ups and downs. 8 Games That Were All A Dream (GamesRadar.com) Videogames aren't above the worst ending technique since "and then I swallowed the grenade." I discuss eight examples of writers who had five minutes to finish the story and spent four of those working out which way round pens go. |
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