The LA Times has a three-part series on used car dealers who make a great profit on old cars sold at high interest rates to people who can't afford them, but have little choice.

In this little-known but fast-growing corner of the auto market, dealers command premium prices for road-worn vehicles and finance the sales at interest rates that can top 30%.

In a kind of financial alchemy, they have found a way to turn clunkers into cash cows and make money off the least creditworthy customers: the millions of Americans who are stuck in low-paying jobs, saddled with debt and unable to qualify for conventional auto loans.

For most of those people, having a car is the only way to stay employed, and they'll accept almost any terms to get one.

Buy Here Pay Here lots sold nearly 2.4 million cars nationwide last year, up from 1.3 million a decade ago, according to CNW Marketing Research.

The mechanics of the business are laid out in the first part, and there is a link to today's followup, with the conclusion to be posted on Thursday. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Lorena Iñiguez Elebee)

Why do we ignore evidence, play the lottery, distrust people, argue endlessly, and think we have all the answers? Because we are human, and usually not all that logical. Cracked looks at five logical fallacies that make us think we are right when we're not. For example, we often think we are seeking knowledge when what we really want is to bolster the viewpoints we already hold.

It's called the argumentative theory of reasoning, and it says that humans didn't learn to ask questions and offer answers in order to find universal truths. We did it as a way to gain authority over others. That's right -- they think that reason itself evolved to help us bully people into getting what we want. Here's how a proponent puts it:

"'Reasoning doesn't have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,' said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. 'It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.' Truth and accuracy were beside the point."

And as evidence, the researchers point out that after thousands of years of humans sitting around campfires and arguing about issues, these glaring flaws in our logic still exist.

Apparently, being dominant is more adaptive for evolutionary purposes than being open-minded. Link -via Buzzfeed

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An unnamed man went to get some cash from a Caja Madrid bank machine in Llodio, Alava, Spain and saw his cash coming from the slot -plus a snake! Even though the snake lunged toward his hand, he grabbed his money, then summoned the police. A bank manager activated the cash release that had trapped the snake, which was then boxed and taken to an animal shelter. Link -via Arbroath

Geeks Are Sexy asked readers to send in photos of their Halloween costumes to share, and they posted the responses in a gallery today. Here, Suzanne models her 2011 Nyan Cat Halloween costume. It's not the only Nyan Cat costume in the gallery. Check out all the superheroes, TV and movie characters, monsters, zombies, memes, and puns at GAS. Link

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PETMAN is a robot from Boston Dynamics (the company that brought us BigDog). PETMAN was designed to test protective clothing for the U.S. military. Despite not having a real head, he can pretty much move like a real man. Link -via Metafilter

Previously: PETMAN Prototype

PS: Rob at the What Is It? blog suggested an appropriate soundtrack for this video.

Today is Dia De Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead. It has nothing to do with Halloween, and very little to do with All Saints Day. Although the day is usually associated with Mexico, it is also celebrated in Guatemala, Brazil, Spain, and parts of the U.S.

Day of the Dead is a time for friends and family to come together to honor those who have passed away. The holiday dates back to the time of the Aztecs who celebrated a festival dedicated to the "Lady of the Dead." Rituals of celebrating the deaths of ancestors have been observed by these civilizations for at least 3,000 years.

The festival that became the modern Day of the Dead fell in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, about the beginning of August, and was celebrated for an entire month. In modern times, the celebration occurs on November 1 and 2 in connection with the Catholic holidays All Saints' Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls' Day (Nov. 2).

Read about the meaning and traditions of this holiday at IBTraveler. Link -via The Daily What

Every year, the Upton family of Slindon, West Sussex, England displays their crop of gourds by arranging them to make an artwork. It's a tradition that started by accident in the late 1960s. This picture is from 2009. You can see this year's creation and images from other seasons at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer

(Image credit: Flickr user Badly Drawn Dad)

The Science Museum of Minnesota obtained the collection of the Museum of Quackery and Medical Frauds and set it up as the "Questionable Medical Device" collection.

This collection of dubious medical devices reminds us that sometimes, medicine is best left to the doctors. Exhibits on display include a phrenological machine that gauges personality by measuring the size of bumps on the head, a foot-powered breast enlarger, and glasses and soap products designed for weight-loss.

You can still have your phrenology read by the fully functional machine today, and as the machine outlines the bumps on your skull, the phrenology reader "maps" intelligence, morality, and much more. Machines such as these were all the rage at State Fairs of the early 1900s, as were other questionable medical devices. The infomercials of their time, these snake oils and pseudoscience gadgets could cure impotence, tell how smart you were, and make you live forever.

Read more about this strange museum within a museum at Atlas Obscura. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user A.M. Kuchling)

Jen Yates, of the blog Cake Wrecks, published the book Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong in 2009. The response was so great, she and her husband John went to work on a new book. That book, Wreck the Halls is available now. In it, you'll find hundred of holiday cakes, 232 pages of them, that are doubly sweet: you get to laugh at them, and someone got to eat them. Here's a sampling for you. The book begins with just a couple of Halloween cakes, and quickly moves on to Thanksgiving. There's an entire section of turkey cakes, both the feathered kind and the cooked kind, all looking like something besides turkeys. And some are mashed up with other Thanksgiving traditions. But I was particularly drawn to this cornucopia. Maybe because it reminded me of this guy:

It's once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog, and this one is special: it's our 200th such contest! Can you guess what this item is? Can you make up something interesting?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For another picture, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck!

Update: no one knew what the mystery item was (although quite a few came somewhat close). It's a saw oiler. Pulling the trigger released some oil to lubricate the saw. You can see the patent application sketch at the What Is It? blog. The funniest answer submitted was one of those close-but-no-cigar answers, from Randall.

It is a saw handle, useful for handling saws. Before its invention, using saws was very dangerous to the fingers, so people used trained beavers. This little invention put hundreds of beaver trainers out of work, and they congregated in Wisconson, drinking from dusk to midnight, then going out on 'Beaver-runs,' causing untold destruction. Finally, the Wisconson National Guard was called out and the hooliganism ended. Wisconsin is now known for its calmness and cheese.

So Randall wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop!

The world now has seven billion people. A video from NPR helps us to visualize how that happened so quickly. Yeah, you already know how it happens, but this video uses visual metaphors. Link -via I Am Bored

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One-Minute Physics explains how to break the speed of light by pointing a laser at the moon. I think this boils down to appearance vs. reality, but I may be mistaken. Anyway, it sounds fun to try! -via The Daily What Geek

The highest mountain on earth is Mt. Everest in Nepal at 29,029 feet above sea level. However, it not the point on earth that is farthest from the center of the planet. That honor belongs to the volcano called Chimborazo in Ecuador.

The summit of the Chimborazo is the fixed point on Earth which has the utmost distance from the center – because of the modified ball shape of the planet Earth which is "thicker" around the Equator than measured around the poles.[note 3] Chimborazo is one degree south of the Equator and the Earth's diameter at the Equator is greater than at the latitude of Everest (8,848 m (29,029 ft) above sea level), nearly 28° north, with sea level also elevated. Despite being 2,580 m (8,465 ft) lower in elevation above sea level, it is 6,384.4 km (3,967.1 mi) from the Earth's centre, 2,168 m (7,113 ft) or 2.168 km (1.347 mi) farther than the summit of Everest (6,382.3 km (3,965.8 mi) from the Earth's center).[note 4] However, by the criterion of elevation above sea level, Chimborazo is not even the highest peak of the Andes.

Imagine that! Link -via reddit

(Image credit: Flicker user stephanie vacher)

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff

The Ham Sandwich Theorem has been a treat and a spur to mathematicians for more than half a century. It first cropped up in a branch of mathematics called algebraic topology. The theorem describes a particular truth about certain shapes. Most published papers on the topic make a hash of explaining it to anyone who is not an algebraic topologist. But the authors of a 2001 paper called “Leftovers from the Ham Sandwich Theorem” wrapped up an important little leftover: they put the idea into clear language.

“Leftovers from the Ham Sandwich Theorem,” Graham Byrnes, Grant Cairns, and Barry Jessup, The American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 108, no. 3, March 2001, pp. 246-9.

The authors are at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. The Ham Sandwich Theorem, they wrote, “rescues the careless sandwich maker by guaranteeing that it is always possible to slice the sandwich with one cut so that the ham and both slices of bread are each divided into equal halves, no matter how haphazardly the ingredients are arranged.”

For a while, most ham sandwich theorizing dealt with simple cases. A paper called “Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions,” published in 1986, is typical.

[caption id="attachment_55198" align="aligncenter" width="339" caption="Detail from the Edelsbrunner/Waupotitsch study “Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions.”"][/caption]

“Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions,” H. Edelsbrunner and R. Waupotitsch, Journal of Symbolic Computation, vol. 2, no. 2, June 1986, pp. 171–8.

It considered only ham sandwiches that had been flattened flatter than even the chintziest cook would dare devise. Mathematicians often do things this way, first considering the extreme cases, digesting those thoroughly, and only then moving on to more substantial versions. Indeed, the “Computing a Ham-Sandwich Cut in Two Dimensions” paper itself contains a section called “Getting Rid of Degenerate Cases”.

People did solve the mystery of slicing a thick ham sandwich. And inevitably, they developed a hunger for more substantial problems.

Here's an intriguing idea: a fictional tale crafted around a set of microphotographs. The images of things you wouldn't recognize at that scale became fantastic landscapes for the story! Alan Jaras is the artist who makes images he calls "refractographs" by scanning electron photography, and he wrote the science fiction story inspired by them. Get a taste of the strange planet called MicroWorld, where our laws of physics do not apply, at Dark Roasted Blend. Link