GPS has all but done away with the physical map, and pre-trip planning for that matter. While GPS screens are less dangerous to look at than, say, a full-sized map, they still take your eyes away from the road, and that perceived ease of the glance probably discourages people from letting their copilot navigate, as they might otherwise. All that said, GPS probably contributes to more on-road distraction than you might think. Some are aiming to turn the windshield into a screen, but AT&T Labs is trying to change up the whole game by eliminating the screen entirely and relying instead on a haptic steering wheel.

There’s something Internet-y about dubstep. There’s also something Internet-y about needless excess, like mashing up 19 Skrillex songs with no pitch shifting, and playing 11 of them simultaneously just because you can. The result is, astonishingly, not mind-numbingly horrible; I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to what that says about dubstep on the whole. That said, the only thing missing from this video is maybe a cat – no — recursive cats. Now that would be a Frankenstein’s mash-up worth writing home about.

Educational video games are an important part of video gaming history. I mean, how many of us grew up without playing a little Math Blaster, or Reader Rabbit, or OutNumbered!? Of course, these are generally aimed at children, but with Rock Band and Rocksmith endeavoring to teach people of all ages to actually play instruments, we’re seeing the educational spectrum really open up. What better time for Code Hero, a game that strives to teach you to code video games, and does that from inside a video game. [Obligatory "yo dawg."]

Up until now, Facebook has been pretty quietly anti-SOPA. Sure, they’ve been anti-SOPA from the start, but in a very reserved, quietly private way. They wouldn’t just up and tell you; you’d have to look into yourself. For instance, they were one of the Internet giants who took out that full page ad, and one of the ones who wrote that letter. They were even one of the companies reportedly considering the nuclear option. Nonetheless, they hadn’t public addressed users, until today.

Just in time for the new year, Google will be rolling out a series of improvements to its social network Google+. None of the changes are particularly earth-shattering, but they seem to be the kind of usability fixes that will greatly benefit the people who use those features a lot. Though none of these will draw people to the site, they should make the people who are there happy, which seems to be Google’s primary goal so far. They include the new ability to give different circles different “volumes” in your feed, improved notifications, improvements to Google Pages, and an improved Lightbox for photo viewing.

When Indian snake charmer Hakkul found that a plot of land he was promised was being held from him unless he bribed certain officials, he protested by leaving a writhing mass of snakes in a tax office in Uttar Pradesh, as one does. Hakkul needed the land to care for his writhing mass of snakes and apparently would have gotten it if not for corrupt officials. Among his writhing mass were several venomous cobras. Reportedly, no one was hurt during the protest.

According to a recent study published in Circulation Research, scientists have found that the time of day during which a heart attack occurs is related to the amount of damage it causes. If you’re going to have a heart attack, you don’t want to have it between 1 and 5 a.m. as this period of time is associated with particularly large amounts of tissue death. Tissue death, as you might be able to guess, is not a good thing.

There are plenty of ways to spice up your Minecraft experience. You can check out the prereleases, install a texture pack, play some adventure maps, install a few mods, try out hardcore mode (which I heartily recommend), or you can replace all the in-game sound effects with your own personal imitations of them and then release it as a mod. That’s what redditor and YouTuber R2Bl3nd decided to do, and the results are pretty awesome. The video’s a bit long, but it’s worth seeing the progression of pretty realistic block-smashing noises all the way to pigs that just straight up say “oink.”

As you may or may not know, the U.S. Navy has a prototype electromagnetic railgun. Sound a little futuristic? It is, and that’s why the 1,000 test-shot landmark is such a big deal. If these things are every going to go into wide use, they need to be proven to be reliable first, and this prototype is well on its way to doing that. As for powerful? It has already proven that. It has been testing with around 1.5 megajoule launch energy. How much is that? We’ll let the Navy handle that one. From the press release: “a one-ton vehicle moving at 100 mph has approximately one megajoule of kinetic energy.” Yeah.

Word on the street has it that Apple, in a bid to make their retail experience a little more streamlined, is planning to introduce self-checkout through their iOS retail store app. All the details aren’t out yet, but it seems that the purchase would go to the buyer’s iTunes account and the buyer would be emailed a receipt (promptly I would hope) that they can use to show that they aren’t just walking out with merchandise.

Of course, it’s not like this is something you can use to buy an iPhone, considering that all of the high value merchandise is locked away, and rightly so. But for anyone who’s looking to just drop by the Apple store and pick up their accessories there, it should remove the “wait around for someone to check you out and then ultimately leave without purchasing because you get sick of waiting” aspect of shopping with Apple.