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Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix
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In an ongoing effort to call out the PR tactic of silence which started with a focus on SimCity, Rock Paper Shotgun points out that after the public outcry, controversy, and an apology from Deep Silver which concluded "we want to reiterate ... how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again", the special edition of Dead Island: Riptide which includes a statue of a woman's severed torso silently went on sale anyway.
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Criminal Cartels And The Rule Of Law In Mexico: Summary, PDF

The cartels have thousands of gunmen and have morphed into diversified crime groups that not only traffic drugs, but also conduct mass kidnappings, oversee extortion rackets and steal from the state oil industry. The military still fights them in much of the country on controversial missions too often ending in shooting rather than prosecutions. If Peña Nieto does not build an effective police and justice system, the violence may continue or worsen. But major institutional improvements and more efficient, comprehensive social programs could mean real hope for sustainable peace and justice.

comment posted at 8:02 AM on Apr-25-13

Video game character design is frequently questionable, but some designers don't like being questioned. Penny Arcade imagines equal opportunity questionability, while their reporter Ben Kuchera examines the broader issue.
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"I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living" - Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes, has apparently canceled her 2013 tour via Tumblr. (previously)
comment posted at 9:50 AM on Apr-24-13

Best Warhammer 40K Costume Ever
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Paul F. Tompkins and Allison Brie talk Community and Mad Men and then they create unsexy gifs and imitate various internet memes.
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On April 7, an airstrike on a Taliban commander killed him and a total of 16 civilians, 12 of them children. Hamid Karzai condemns the attack and says that the CIA is carelessly planning these airstrikes that go awry far too often. Kunar district was the site of another airstrike that killed civilians in February.
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San Francisco in 1955 in color "Shot by filmmaker Tullio Pellgrini, the 20-minute movie gives an up-close-and-personal tour of the city from Pellgrini's automobile. His narration is charmingly earnest in a way that's promotional of the city's virtues while never stepping over into being particularly phony or cloying."
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Waterbridges are old hat.
Norwegians are now intending to build a ship tunnel; of course there were critics. The idea for the Stad ship tunnel was first mooted in 1874.
comment posted at 4:57 PM on Apr-20-13

Wall Street begins playing again with the same matches that burned the economy in 2008 From the New York Times: "The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans during the boom — the kind that went so wrong during the bust — are busily reviving the same types of investments that many thought were gone for good. Once more, arcane-sounding financial products like collateralized debt obligations are being minted on Wall Street. " (View article on a single page)
comment posted at 12:09 PM on Apr-20-13

A blog featuring stills from films and their corresponding color palettes.
comment posted at 10:43 AM on Apr-20-13

What started as a report of a convenience store robbery near the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last night has sprawled into a chaotic manhunt for the perpetrators of the recent terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. The deadly pursuit, involving a policeman's murder, a carjacking, a violent chase with thrown explosives, and the death of one suspect, has resulted in Governor Deval Patrick ordering an unprecedented lockdown of the entire Boston metropolitan area as an army of law enforcement searches house by house for the remaining gunman. The Associated Press has identified the duo as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who remains at large. Both are immigrants from wartorn Chechnya in southwestern Russia. The Guardian liveblog is good for quick updates, and Reddit's updating crowdsourced timeline of events that has often outpaced mainstream media coverage of the situation. You can also get real-time reports straight from the (Java-based) local police scanner.
comment posted at 9:46 AM on Apr-19-13

Aereo is a web service that allows subscribers to watch broadcast TV on their computers or mobile devices. The broadcast networks are furious. Aereo is ready for a PR fight, and is currently winning the legal battle. Variety wonders: Is Aereo Actually a Good Thing?
comment posted at 9:17 AM on Apr-19-13

"This video has been dramatically enhanced in quality, using modern video editing tools. The film has been motion stabilized and the speed has been slowed down to correct speed (from 18 fps to 24 fps) using special frame interpolation software that re-creates missing frames." Watch corrected and cleaned footage of circa 1900s London and Cork (5 min 35 sec). (via)
comment posted at 12:15 PM on Apr-18-13

"Is organic produce better for you?" is a simple question asked by a middle schooler in a science fair. Using fruit flies fed organic vs. conventional produce, Ria Chhabra tracked the flies and saw improvements based on their diet. Now barely a sophomore in high school, the project lead to university research labs, science fair awards, publication in top-tier peer-reviewed journals, and quite likely, scholarships at her pick of top-flight universities.
comment posted at 12:08 PM on Apr-18-13

Do you like music? Do you like entropy? Do you have Spotify? If so, then go here to listen to a song chosen completely at random. It might even be good!
comment posted at 1:13 AM on Apr-18-13

So now it turns out I need around 1,500 readers to get that $5 for my hypothetical site. Say I want to pay myself $500 for the month. It’s not a ton of money. I need 150,000 page views. That jumped right up there, didn’t it? Now look at sites that employ a number of highly skilled, professional writers that are full time and making a livable wage. You’re suddenly looking at millions and millions of page views required to keep everything afloat, much less expand.

Ad-blockers, the games press, and why sexy cosplay galleries lead to better reporting.
comment posted at 9:12 PM on Apr-17-13

Popular Science explores the psychology behind anti-drug PSA's and whether they help keep kids off drugs...
comment posted at 6:47 PM on Apr-16-13

Blood, Sweat, and Steel: My Afternoon with the Ace of Swords. “When I got this sword, it was completely covered in blood rust.” Sword maker Francis Boyd is showing me yet another weapon pulled from yet another safe in the heavily fortified workshop behind his northern California home. “You can tell it’s blood,” he says matter-of-factly, “because ordinary rust turns the grinding water brown. If it’s blood rust it bleeds, it looks like blood in the water. Even 2,000 years old, it bleeds. And it smells like a steak cooking, like cooked meat. I’ve encountered this before with Japanese swords from World War II. If there’s blood on the sword and you start polishing it, the sword bleeds. It comes with the territory.” [Via]
comment posted at 7:40 AM on Apr-17-13

Does BuzzFeed Know The Secret? The National Republican Congressional Committee seems to think so, since they redesigned their website. But they're just following BuzzFeed's advice.
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How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 "moon rocket" engine back to life - "The story of young engineers who resurrected an engine nearly twice their age."
comment posted at 5:56 AM on Apr-15-13

OK, this is a single-recipe post, but if you would like to host a steak dinner for more than like two people and get sous-vide-like results with less hassle and equipment, here's what you do: Freeze the steaks, sear them hot, then stick them in a low oven for an hour. Nathan Myhrvold (Modernist Cuisine) explains.
comment posted at 6:56 PM on Apr-13-13

"At night, [Nicols Fox] wears a shirt woven with silver fibers to reduce her radio frequency exposure, and though her house has electricity, she shuts it off and uses gas lamps whenever possible. During our conversation, her voice would occasionally get cracked and raspy if I got too close with my audio recorder. In the five years since she’s moved to the Radio Quiet Zone, she hasn't left once."

Despite consternation from locals, sufferers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) have begun moving to the town of Green Bank, West Virginia, to live in the U.S. National Radio Quiet Zone, an area established to minimize interference with radio astronomy.
comment posted at 6:59 PM on Apr-13-13

The new James Joyce commemorative coin has a typo. "While the error is regretted, it should be noted that the coin is an artistic representation of the author and text and not intended as a literal representation."
comment posted at 8:31 PM on Apr-12-13

After a decade or so of legal back-and-forth between Utah-based Myriad Genetics and medical researchers, the ACLU, and the Public Patent Forum, the US Supreme Court will hear a case next week which attempts to address whether genes — isolated (derivative) or original — can be patented. The stakes are high on both sides: opponents use Myriad's actions to argue that giving short-term monopoly control over humanity's genetic constituency is not in the public interest, while proponents defend the use of patents to spur private research in biotech, alternative energy and other nascent industries.
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