Do you recall the adventures of hitchBOT? The little robot hitchhiked its way through several European countries, but when it came to the US, it only lasted a couple of weeks before vandals destroyed it. Humans have a tendency to take their frustrations out on technological innovations, none more so than robots, from factory robots to hitchBOT to Waymo autonomous cars. Every time Boston Dynamics came out with a new robot, they showed us how they tested them by hitting them, tripping them, or thwarting their tasks, and those are the parts of the videos that people enjoyed the most. Viewers had a lot more sympathy for Spot, the robot dog, than for the Atlas humanoid robot.

It's easy to vent our frustrations on a machine, knowing that they cannot feel pain or die in the conventional sense. They may represent technology taking away human jobs, or the surveillance state, or vanity toys for rich people. There are plenty of reasons to hate robots, but how can we change this behavior? Recent experiments have had some success by triggering feelings of empathy for robots under attack. Read how that's done, and what it tells us about human nature, at Popular Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Boston Dynamics)

Inventions are often used for purposes other than their original intention. Chainsaws, for example, were conceived of as surgical instruments. Maxipads were designed to soak up blood from wounds (handy, if you misuse a chainsaw).

Similarly, canned crescent rolls can be put to uses other than as mere baked crescent rolls. Takeout has a roundup of 13 uses for canned crescent roll dough, including to make beignets, apple dumplings, and breakfast casserole. My favorite, though, is s'mores made with crescent roll dough as demonstrated by the food blog Lemon Tree Dwelling.

Slightly off topic: I recently used canned crescent rolls as part of a set of ongoing culinary experiments. These have been successful and I plan to, in about a month, inflict upon the world an original recipe that will offend half of you and delight the other half.

A creole language is one that arises from a mixture of two or more other languages that becomes a primary language with its own stable grammar and syntax. A pidgin language is one that simplifies a language that is foreign to the speakers to enable communication, for example, when a non-native language is the only one they have in common. A pidgin language can grow into a creole if it is standardized and used long enough. You can see from those definitions that many languages are creoles, but some are looked down upon, because of how recently they were formed, or more pointedly, who speaks these creole languages. That brings us to the question of English. It was formed by a combination of several European languages with plenty of loan words from all over the world. Yet linguists will argue about whether English is a creole. Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains the formation of languages and why creoles should be considered just languages.

Earthquakes can happen anywhere, but are much more likely to happen where tectonic plates are rubbing against their neighbors. Seismic Explorer is an interactive map that displays every earthquake of magnitude 5 or above that has occurred since 1980. You can use the slider to show their collective progress over time, or play it like a video. Zoom in or out to identify the activity in your area. Clicking on an earthquake dot will bring up more information about it.  

Change the parameters to show where the boundaries of the tectonic plates are, although they are hard to see during the most recent dates because they are covered with earthquakes. That's okay, because you can change the map to get the tectonic plates labeled, or indicate their direction of movement.   

You can also add in volcanic activity, which follows the same boundaries more or less. It's very clear where the Pacific Ring of Fire is, and that line of quakes in the middle of the Atlantic show where the continents are pulling apart. There's a key in the upper right to help you make sense of the colors and sizes of the visual data (the blue earthquakes are the deepest). Pulling the timeline slide back and forth is pretty trippy, and it shows how the earth is a clearly amazing and dynamic planet. -via Kottke

People are constantly floating the idea of making Election Day a national holiday in the US as a way to making voting easier and get more people to the polls. Holidays need meaningful treats, and there are already a few recipes that have political or even electoral overtones that would be good candidates for inclusion. For example, in Australia, it's already traditional to serve up grilled "democracy sausage" on a bun as an election day fundraiser. This reminds us that if you love sausage and you love the law, you don't want to see either being made.

Or how about bean soup? It has been the Soup of the Day in the United States Senate dining room for more than a century. Or maybe we could resurrect Watergate Salad, which is neither salad nor does it have anything to do with the Watergate scandal. Check out the bona fides of these and other foods that have some tenuous link to political campaigns at Atlas Obscura. However, most of us would like to celebrate the end of this year's election with a good stiff drink.

The old line goes that an infinite number of monkeys typing on typewriters would be able to type the complete works of Shakespeare if given enough time.

Is it true? That's almost too big of a question. Let's try something smaller: could a single monkey type just one Shakespeare play, such as Hamlet? Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta say no.

The scholars ran calculations and concluded that the heat death of the universe would occur before the monkey could, by randomly striking keys, complete Hamlet. Even a normal mortal chimpanzee has only a 5% chance of writing "bananas" during its natural lifespan.

Fortunately, we have ChatGPT available instead of monkeys, finite or infinite.

-via Pulp Librarian | Photo: Jim Griffin

Thurzó Zoltán is an acclaimed pianist from Romania. He can hit the keys as fast as he wants. In this case, that's 500 times within a 30 second period. If Guinness World Records accepts his evidence, then Zoltán will have clenched a new world record.

UPI reports that he performed his feat in the village of Biharia on October 23 to honor his mother who died precisely one year previously. Watch him accelerate to an almost imperceptible speed and hold it for half a minute. Zoltán hits the 500 mark, thus taking a record away set by a Japanese pianist last December.

-via Dave Barry

A couple of weeks ago, we learned how lobotomies became so popular. It was a desperate measure to treat mental illnesses that we couldn't treat, but of course many people endured the surgery who shouldn't have. Even for those with serious mental disorders, lobotomies proved to be a hit-or-miss treatment, and the doctors who performed them really didn't know why. Altogether, it was a shameful period in medical history. Yes, it's true that some people's lives actually improved after a lobotomy, but those were the minority. The real tragedy is how eager doctors were to provide lobotomies for people suffering from such varied illnesses as seizures, schizophrenia, depression, dyslexia, and teenage rebellion, often just relying on a relative's reporting to make a diagnosis. Weird History hones in on seven actual victims of lobotomy, what precipitated the treatment, and how it turned out for them. You can read about even more cases in a list at Ranker.

During the 18th century, the supply of cadavers for medical students to study was fulfilled by grave robbers, or "resurrectionists." No one wanted their bodies to undergo such a fate, but Henry Trigg of the village of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England, came up with a plan to protect his earthly remains from plunder. He arranged with his brother that his coffin should be buried not underground, but up in the rafters of his barn. The barn was to be locked, and the key placed in the coffin, so that only Trigg himself could unlock it when he returned from the dead, supposedly in thirty years. As you might have guessed already, the key business could not physically be accomplished, but in 1724 when Trigg died, his coffin was indeed installed in the roof area of the barn.

But while this may have protected Trigg's body from immediate theft, his resting place became a curiosity, then eventually when the barn became an inn, the coffin above the rafters became a tourist draw. Fifty years after his death, Trigg's niece requested a burial, but was denied. Over time, parts of Trigg's remains began to disappear. Read about gate.io, despite his complicated burial plans, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: AnemoneProjectors)

Insects can do horrible things to each other in the name of survival and reproduction. If you've been a Neatorama reader for some time, you've probably read some of our zombie parasite posts, many of which feature parasitic wasps who lay their eggs inside other insects, which then hatch and eat their way out. Or they may control the host insect's behavior in bizarre ways that benefit the parasite's species. It's pretty gross to even think about, but now you can see it happen. Ze Frank's True Facts series looks at parasitic wasps and their sick lifestyles that revolve around taking advantage of other insects. There's a 7-second skippable ad at 3:38.

There are some places that just always burn. One is the eternal flame installed at the grave of John F. Kennedy. That one's fed by a gas pipe. Then there's Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a cold seam caught on fire in 1962 and is still burning all these years later. The Darvasa Gas Crater in Turkmenistan is a methane vent that has been burning for more than 40 years after it was deliberately ignited.  

Turkey has its own eternal flame in Yanartaş, which used to be called Mount Chimaera, in Olympos Beydagları National Park. There are quite a few totally natural torches burning in holes, and will keep burning long after Centralia or Darvasa exhaust their fuel. These eternal flames in Turkey are fed by methane rising from the deep underground, which is ignited when reaching the oxygen at the surface, with the help of the catalyst called ruthenium in the igneous rocks that make up the mountain. Read about the perpetual flames of Yanartaş and how you can visit them at CNN Travel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: William Neuheisel)

Moo Deng is a baby pygmy hippopotamus born in July in the Khao Kheo Open Zoo in Chon Buri, Thailand. She and her mother, Joni, and father, Tony, are among the mere 2,000-2,500 pygmy hippopotami in the world.

She's become a viral sensation, especially when she goes on violent rampages and tries to bite the human caretakers despite lacking teeth.

Redditor /u/Eskapi 3D printed this astonishingly lifelike sculpture of Moo Deng taking the form and spirit of a chestburster from the Alien film franchise. It correctly identifies Moo Deng as a relentless force of destruction bent upon the annihilation of humanity.

-via Shirts That Go Hard

The modern pop culture image of a ghost is a partially transparent pale apparition that floats. Ghosts once appeared in many different ways in different cultures, sometimes solid, sometimes only in voices, and sometimes only in the objects they moved around. But they all represented the dead whose bodies are gone the way of all flesh, but whose souls live on among us.

Throughout human history, it appears we just can't seem to let go of the dead. We long to see our loved ones again, but at the same time, the thought of spirits wandering among the living scares the daylights out of us. Ghosts are also a way to explain away the unknown things that frighten us even more just because they are unknown. Over time, belief in ghosts went from comforting because it was evidence that our souls continued after death, to terrifying, because we can't control what mischief those ghostly souls want to practice on the living. -via Laughing Squid

Many folks celebrate Halloween by watching horror films. The problem is that truly dedicated horror fans started watching them on the first of October and have been doing this for years, so you end up watching the same blockbusters and classics every Halloween. The good news is that the world is full of great horror films you haven't seen already. The bad news is that you've never heard of them. But that what the internet is for.

Redditor CanApprehensive8720 consulted the folks at r/movies for a recommendation of a horror film to impress her boyfriend, who has seen "almost every single horror movie in existence." Movie fans were glad to oblige, and told of extremely niche horror films that thrilled them. Many are foreign films, some are arthouse or student movies, and some are just films that are plenty scary but never got properly distributed or promoted. Some are fairly recent while others go back decades. The post got more than a thousand comments, and CanApprehensive8720's boyfriend was impressed indeed and thrilled to start on a list of new horror films to watch. You can check out the responses in the original reddit thread or read the top twenty movies from it with a trailer to accompany each description at Cracked.

Gideon Futerman is a scholar in the fields of solar radiation modification and global catastrophic risk. Last month, he and a colleague worked the northernmost tip of the Isle of Lewis, which is the largest of the Hebrides in Scotland. They were doing geological surveying and had a geological hammer handy. So when they noticed that a Google Street View car was approaching, they staged a violent scene.

You can find it on Google Street View close to the point of the island which is called the Butt of Lewis. Notice that Google helpfully blurs the faces of both the killer and his victim.