Big Mac Index

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index#Manipulation

The big mac index is a quick attempt at explaining purchasing power parity.  The idea being that simply knowing the exchange rate is not enough to know how valuable your money from one country will actually be when you try to purchase actual goods there.

Here is the fun part though:

Critics of the presidency of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and many economists believe that the government has for years falsified consumer price data to understate the country's true inflation rate. The Economist stated in January 2011 that Big Mac index "does support claims that Argentina’s government is cooking the books. The gap between its average annual rate of burger inflation (19%) and its official rate (10%) is far bigger than in any other country." That year the press began reporting on unusual behavior by the more than 200 Argentinean McDonald's restaurants. They no longer prominently advertised Big Macs for sale and the sandwich, both individually and as part of value meals, was being sold for an unusually low price compared to other items. Guillermo Moreno, Secretary of Commerce in the Kirchner government, reportedly forced McDonald's to sell the Big Mac at an artificially low price to manipulate the country's performance on the Big Mac index. In June 2012, the price of the Big Mac value meal suddenly rose by 26%, closer to that of other meals, after The Economist, The New York Times, and other media reported on the unusual pricing. A Buenos Aires newspaper stated "Moreno loses the battle".

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/

For the most common strength of Diffie-Hellman (1024 bits), it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a machine, based on special purpose hardware, that would be able to crack one Diffie-Hellman prime every year.

Would this be worth it for an intelligence agency? Since a handful of primes are so widely reused, the payoff, in terms of connections they could decrypt, would be enormous. Breaking a single, common 1024-bit prime would allow NSA to passively decrypt connections to two-thirds of VPNs and a quarter of all SSH servers globally. Breaking a second 1024-bit prime would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to nearly 20% of the top million HTTPS websites. In other words, a one-time investment in massive computation would make it possible to eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/supreme-court-justices-get-more-liberal-as-they-get-older/

Accuracy takes power: one man’s 3GHz quest to build a perfect SNES emulator

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator/

Raccoons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBXbfpP2vDM

https://www.reddit.com/r/raccoongifs

Volkswagen's Clean Diesel

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9365667/volkswagen-clean-diesel-recall-passenger-cars

Since 2009, we now know, Volkswagen had been inserting intricate code in its vehicle software that tracked steering and pedal movements. When those movements suggested that the car was being tested for nitrogen-oxide emissions in a lab, the car automatically turned its pollution controls on. The rest of the time, the pollution controls switched off.

This is old hat by now, but I thought this article did a good job of giving a bit more detail about the specifics of what actually happened.

HTTP Status Cats API

https://http.cat/

Three years ago, I called out the proposed new TLDs as stupid. Today, I formally withdraw my oppositionIt turns out .cat is not one of the new TLDs so my opposition has been reinstated.

Uber gutted Carnegie Mellon’s top robotics lab to build self-driving cars

http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber-self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached

Dolphins

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

How "oldschool" graphics worked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k