geekosystem

There's nothing quite like parody covers of Disney songs. Especially when the video is choreographed in an amusing manner. Add a humorous conceit and you've basically got internet gold. Todrick Hall, a former American Idol contestant, is behind the ghetto-inspired parody "Beauty and the BEAT!" that stars a variety of known YouTube personalities. That includes, but is not limited to, a small cameo from Antoine Dodson himself. The song is based on Beauty and the Beast's opening number and is quite well-fashioned. Personally, I'm hoping the next one to crop up is a version of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin. Regardless, I'm all for more comedic musicals of all shapes and sizes.

The 9 most unnecessary gadgets money can buy (Cracked) 20 of the most intense photos from yesterday’s storms (BuzzFeed) 100 worthwhile DOS games of the 90s (Geeks Are Sexy) Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus (Ars Technica) Office 2013 icon leak shows Metro is here to stay (The Verge) Top 10 clever [...]

Apparently, prison can be pretty boring. That's on top of it being, well, prison. Plus you've got all that potential labor just sitting around doing nothing terribly productive. Why not utilize it? That's what Santa Rita do Sapucaí prison in Brazil is doing. For every 16 hours prisoners put in on a set of special bicycles, they will remove a day from their sentence. You see, these bikes are charging batteries from the effort. So they're trading hard time for the most literal form of manpower in existence.

We have two major ways of measuring time: Atomic clocks provide the standard and then there's the Coordinated Universal Time system. Before the advent of the atomic clock, we based our measurements of time on the rotation of the Earth. What the atomic clock does is measure time based on atoms and is therefore much more refined and accurate. The Earth's rotation isn't as consistent and it's for this reason we must every so often add a second to our clocks to make sure everything doesn't come crashing down. Today is one of those days.

There's nothing quite like corporate campaigns meant to harness social media being taken by the reins and subverted. The latest hijink comes courtesy of the unsuspecting marketing people behind Walmart and Pitbull, the hip-hop star that will shill out for just about anything. That includes Energy Sheets, which is the brand oddly paired with sending Pitbull to whatever Walmart has the most "Likes" on Facebook by July 15th. So now the collective will of the internet is sending him to Kodiak, Alaska.

It's hard to say what's worse: Closing a developer not long after they've put out a new game or significantly reducing their staff to the point where they only serve to help with projects headed by other studios. Either way, Radical Entertainment -- the folks behind the Prototype franchise -- will no longer have work on games of their own. As of yesterday, they are effectively shuttered by their parent company Activision and another one bites the dust.

They're not necessarily "games," as daytime talkshow guests and online dating site profiles like to call them, but when dating, there are certainly quite a bit of common and even expected behaviors either one of the parties involved have to deal with. SEGERtube shows us what it'd be like if people were completely honest while dating, though still unable to avoid all of those common behaviors. Emma Koenig and David Serger play out this scenario, and it's something you've almost certainly experienced at least once in your life.

1. Virgin Mobile gets the iPhone (Engadget)
2. China's first space station crew returns to Earth (Universe Today)
3. Why did people ever wear powdered wigs? (Mental Floss)
4. 10 bad habits of tech users, and how to break them (GeekSugar)
5. Can electric shock therapy be used to treat snakebites? (Environmental Graffiti)
6. YouTube launches an official comedy channel (The Daily Dot)
7. DJ dancing robot, you dig? (The Week)

(title pic via reddit)

This week in Editors' Picks: The global tweet button. It's not exactly what it sounds like, but it's about as awesome as what it sounds like. Drive proving that fellas, it's okay for you to love Ryan Gosling too. I promise. And a video so tangentially related to Thomas Pynchon's work that it can actually make a little bit of sense.

The GoVacuum GV62711 24k Gold Plated Vacuum Cleaner is now on sale for $1 off its original $1,000,000 when you enter Item Code GV62711, and it comes with free shipping and free customizable engraving. Oh joy!

Saturn's moon Titan just keeps getting more and more interesting. A few weeks ago, we wrote about how NASA scientists discovered large methane lakes along the moon's equator -- exactly where our understanding of the moon says that they should not be. Now, new analysis of data from the Cassini probe suggests that there's even more going on below the moon's surface: A global ocean of liquid water.

Originally announced back in 2008, the directorial debut of popular rapper, producer, CEO, multi-instrumentalist, RZA has been a long time coming. Called The Man With the Iron Fists, the kung-fu film boasts a strong ensemble cast, pretty kick-ass looking visuals, Eli Roth with a writing and producing credit, and Quentin Tarantino is attached somehow. Anyway, a dude gets his eye punched out. See the video, after the break.

Nvidia's refusal to cooperate with the Linux platform is costing them way more than bad press; it is also costing them a lot of money. The Chinese government dropped their order of 10 million Nvidia GPUs because the drivers were incompatible with their system architecture. This could easily be solved if Nvidia would just release the source code, but as usual, they refused. The order went to AMD instead.

When the Supreme Court issued its decision on the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, it was kind of a big deal. As with all big deals, people immediately took to Twitter and started yammering about it. Not only was the court's decision a bit contentious depending on your particular political leanings, but CNN and Fox News actually misreported the "Constitutional" ruling as "Unconstitutional," which just added conversational fuel to the fire. All told, the tweeting topped out at around 13,000 tweets per minute, or roughly 216 per second, practically nothing compared to current record holders.

Graphene. It can be stronger than steel and thinner than paper. It can generate electricity when struck by light. It can be used in thin, flexible supercapacitors that are up to 20 times more powerful than the ones we use right now and can be made in a DVD burner. It's already got an impressive track record, but does it have any more tricks up its sleeve? Apparently, yes. According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude. Seriously, what can't this stuff do?