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Mythbusters: Pee on the PS2 edition
It's the stuff great urban legends are made of: A drunk University of Wyoming student supposedly knocked himself out and earned a trip to the hospital after urinating on a still-plugged-in PS2 at an off-campus party. The story got pushed by Fark on Monday and is slowly making its way into the mainstream media, getting a mention yesterday on Fox News Live.We're a bit incredulous. First of all, it's arguable whether or not the physics of the story would even work. The popular Discovery TV show Mythbusters determined that it's nearly impossible to get shocked by peeing on the supercharged third rail of a train track because the urine stream isn't consistent enough to carry a charge. Even if the drunken party-goer somehow did get close enough for a solid stream, we find it hard to believe that the measly power output of a PS2 would knock someone out for a full ten seconds.The original report itself doesn't exactly inspire confidence, either -- Fun Tech Talk is not exactly a well-known and respected source for news. While the post reads like an AP brief, there's no link to any outside sources or mention of who originally reported the story. There are some journalistic inconsistencies too -- the party supposedly happened late Saturday night, but the dateline says it was written that same Saturday.The final nail in the coffin? None of the three students mentioned in the piece turn up on the University of Wyoming's online student directory.While we'd like to believe in the poetic justice for anyone stupid enough to pee on a game system, we've got to nip this one in the bud. As the Mythbusters themselves might say, this one is busted.
GDC: Networker's paradise, but beware
One thing we like to do here at Joystiq is bring you some of the more offbeat information that concerns the culture of games, gamers, and the people who make them, so file this under the rubric of "offbeat" (careful not to transpose those syllables, because getting them right is important given the subject matter to come). I stationed myself in a very busy GDC restroom for approximately five minutes just after the lunch hour and counted the ratio of hand-washers to neanderthals who didn't wash their hands. This is just my first data point, and an incomplete one at that. Given the evil looks that that I got for standing there, I chose to curtail the survey. So: knowing that these numbers are based on a very small sample size, and knowing that a more robust statistical survey would be more desirable, I provide these numbers anyway. The ratio was 11 to 3 in favor of hand-washers. Not bad! Two of the fellows who skipped the hand-washing were the unkempt sort who probably don't wash much else, either. The third gent was wearing a suit. Guess he was just eager to get back to gladhanding. We'll conduct a 10-minute survey at E3 to see if the ratio's any different when the audience is more international and the so-called "unwashed masses" are present in greater quantities. [Image comes from Duchamp's Fountain ]
