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mental_floss Blog - Oct 6, 2008
Darwin@Home is a computer program created by Gerald de Jong to model evolution. While it aspires to be a general-purpose evolution platform, at the moment it does something pretty remarkable: it takes virtual creatures …
Also tagged: technology, blogs, science, computers, math
mental_floss Blog - Aug 29, 2008
Peter Donnelly is a statistician with a sense of humor. He starts his talk with a classic statistician joke: “How do you tell an introverted statistician from an extroverted statistician? The extrovert is the one who …
Also tagged: blogs, math, psychology
mental_floss Blog - Aug 19, 2008
Let’s say you’re a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you …
Also tagged: space, blogs, science, astronomy, physics, math
mental_floss Blog - Jun 25, 2008
Remember that old paper-tape calculator your folks used to do their taxes? Or the crazy beige 70’s calculator your high school math teacher insisted on using? Well, those look positively modern compared to what you’ll …
Also tagged: technology, blogs, computers, math
mental_floss Blog - Jun 24, 2008
I’ve wanted to play Will Wright’s next game, Spore, for years. I first wrote about Spore way back in February 2007, proudly and naively stating that “our wait will soon be over.” Well, I was right if by “soon” I meant …
Also tagged: games, technology, blogs, science, computers, math
mental_floss Blog - Jun 23, 2008
There’s a special place in my heart for weird Garfield parodies, but today’s subject really raises the bar for weirdness. The Garkov comic strip activates my Nerdy Spidey Sense, as it uses a Markov chain process to …
Also tagged: art, blogs, humor, linguistics, pop culture, bizarro, math
mental_floss Blog - Jun 20, 2008
George Dyson returns to TED with a seventeen-minute talk explaining the origins of the digital computer — in hilarious style. Briefly starting with Leibniz’s machine-based calculus proposal from 1679, Dyson takes us on …
Also tagged: technology, blogs, history, science, computers, math, antiquity
mental_floss Blog - Jun 12, 2008
I’ve never solved a Rubik’s Cube. I’m that guy who takes the stickers off puts them where I want them in order to get it over with. (Much to the consternation of any legitimate puzzle-solver who might try to use my …
mental_floss Blog - Jun 5, 2008
Danny Hillis is best known for his Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer that led to breakthroughs in computational science and parallel computing. (It also was the subject of Hillis’s book The …
Also tagged: technology, blogs, science, computers, physics, math, inventions
mental_floss Blog - Mar 28, 2008
It was about four years ago when I first saw a 20Q ball. The tiny handheld device scrolled text across its meager one-line screen, inviting me to challenge it in a game of 20 Questions. I immediately thought of an …
Also tagged: games, technology, blogs, computers, toys, inventions