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Rob Beschizza at 7:14 am • 
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You know how some media love "he said, she said" journalism? The kind in which any issue, no matter the facts or relative degrees of extremism, is narrated in perfect equilibrium between two opposed, yet indistinguishably-intractable sides. Doesn't that stuff suck? OK! Cool.
Moving on, Slate's Daniel Engber has an interesting article up today about how Democrats and Republicans all hate science just as much as one another: "Willful ignorance of science is a bipartisan value."
Mark Frauenfelder at 5:55 pm • •
Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik shows how to turn old car parts into a video game controller.
The idea came to me while adjusting the mirrors in a car, and realizing that the little mirror-control joystick was better than many video game joysticks I used. I then had a waking dream of the grand possibilities of playing old videogames with control pads sourced from cars. The dream was a beautiful, fantastical vision of a world we could all achieve. I woke up hours later behind a CVS, and headed straight to a junkyard to make this dream real.
Super-sleuth readers may note that in the final project I used a seat control panel instead of a mirror controller. There's a reason for that. When I got the mirror control pads and joysticks home and tested them, I uncovered one of the auto industry's darkest secrets: the "up" and "left" directions on mirror controllers are THE SAME DAMN THING. They're wired together! Think of all the times you've thought you were adjusting your mirror up, not left, thinking you were hot shit? IT'S ALL BEEN A FILTHY LIE. So I soon learned to look elsewhere. Luckily, 70s-80s American cars provided the solution, since they're full of funny little chrome joysticks for seat controls and other various duties.
Cory Doctorow at 7:26 am • •
Rob Beschizza at 6:39 pm • •
At Macworld, Lex Friedman looks at recent reports of hacked iTunes accounts, where hundreds of users say gift card credit was wiped out by purchases made without their permission. Apple is issuing refunds, but is otherwise mostly silent on the matter.
This is a mystery story, but it’s not a great one. A great mystery generally involves a detective who gathers the evidence, performs an investigation, and finally issues the spectacular reveal: the motive, the guilty party, and—if all goes well—the punishment. In the mystery of the Towson Hack, unfortunately, we’ve got a crime, evidence, and a motive, but no justice, and no real resolution. Consider yourself warned.
Rob Beschizza at 6:00 pm • •
Many social games have measures to prevent cheating by mucking around with the date settings. But kids are too smart to be stopped that easily. PC Magazine's Sara Yin reports on a brilliant exploit discovered by CyFi, a 10 year-old Girl Scout who presented her findings at Defcon.
She began tinkering with the code after growing impatient with the game's slow place, and discovered that by disconnecting her phone from Wi-Fi and re-setting the clock forward in small increments, she could fast-forward many of the actions in the game, "a new class of vulnerabilities" she dubbed "TimeTraveler."
