When Geeks Go Wild

Why are some of the most intelligent people on the planet also some of the stupidest?

Case in point. Two geekoids - one an editor at a tech mag called "Make", the other an R&D drone at Eyebeam decided to get together for a little mayhem. (Eyebeam is a not-for-profit arts and technology center which fosters the creative use of
new technologies through research and production initiatives, education programs and exhibitions. I got that straight off their website.)

By mayhem, I'm being literal. Lovers of the arcade classic, "Frogger", they decided to take a Roomba - those little robotic vacuum cleaners - and trick it out with a remote control and a green costume so that it resembled, well...a frog.

Most of you can see where this is going, but for those Y-generation kids out there who have no idea what frogger is - the purpose of the video game was to guide a frog from one side of an extremely busy highway, across several lanes of traffic, to the other side. Where inevitably the frog would get eaten by a crocodile, but that's unimportant here.

I should mention that this was NOT a controlled experiment. These Texas yahoos stepped outside onto Austin's Sixth Street, put down their frog and watched with glee as they sent it into traffic. Live traffic. Go, go gadget frog!

They send it across. Then back. And out again. And back. Over and over they send this robotic frog out into traffic, laughing as cars swerved to avoid hitting the poor creature (more likely to avoid damaging their tires). On the 10th trip - the equivalent of sending it through 40 lanes of traffic - it finally got nailed by a white Toyota 4-Runner.

By this point, according to the article, it was probably a good thing that the Roomba-frog got nailed because they noticed a nearby building security guard on the phone with the police. Kudos to the security guard. Needless to say, the morons (and their equally moronic friends who stood around watching) high-tailed it back to the safety of their hotel. But what got me was this part:

As people in the suite laughed, shouted and talked about what they'd just witnessed, (the tech) summed up his evening.

"We had a lot to drink before we got here," he said, "but there's nothing to sober you up like steering a robot through traffic."

Hey, here's a tip. Friends don't let friends drink and roomba.