I've never been able to solve a Rubik's Cube. It's a personal failing I chalk up to mild ADD, horrible spatial organization skills, and the desire to not get beaten up in middle school. Somehow, none of that gets in the way of my interest in reading a 10-page paper proving that all formations of a Rubik's Cube can be solved in 25 moves or less.
Ah, for the salad days of hiding my nerdery.
Continue reading 'Rubik's Cubes just got a whole lot easier - by one move' >
Sandia National Labs and and BBN Technologies predict that 20,000 soldiers a year may soon be trained in nonkinetic strategies (read: negotiation and cultural awareness) in a game developed by Sandia scientist Dr. Elaine M. Raybourn. "We have a multi-player game and we have a methodology that is designed to help people see the same problem from different perspectives," explained Raybourn. "We're trying to work with the assumptions our trainees bring. We're trying to change that."
Continue reading 'Training 20,000 soldiers to negotiate with games' >
Admit it: You always thought there wasn't any value to having a healthy vocabulary. "I needs me some threadz" and "Pardon me, good sir, prithy tell canst thou locate a haberdashery" pretty much mean the same thing. But now your vocabulary prowess has high stakes attached to it: The non-profit organization FreeRice has established an online word game where every word you guess correctly donates 20 grains of rice to a needy country.
When you get a vocabulary word correct, FreeRice uses advertising dollars on the site to buy 20 grains of rice; the hard-won rice is then distributed by the United Nations World Food Program to 75 countries. The site launched on Oct. 7 and has since donated 5,773,015,170 grains of rice. That may not seem like much, but that works out to about 199,069 1-lb. bags of super-tasty rice.
