"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." -The Red Queen

Chess is beautifully and almost infinitely complex.  When you play, you have to visualize where the pieces on the board can move and then extrapolate out, imagining where they might move one, two, three, or more moves down the line.  You have to anticipate where your opponent might move and how you can react.

Usually, this all happens in your head.  But now there's a chess program, Thinking Machine 4, that allows you to see the strength of different moves and the lines of attack and defense as the game unfolds.  It's designed as an art project, but I think it has a lot of potential as a chess training tool.  At the moment, the computer isn't a terribly good player and the abstract pieces are simply annoying.  Still, if you combined the idea with a decent chess program like Shredder you could have a powerful learning tool.

"Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine."

Latitude and Longitude

Google Latitude

New Google mobile app lets you track yourself and your friends with a GPS enabled phone.  My phone is about 10 years old, so I can't say whether I like it or not, but I can see how it'd be handy, especially as Wi-Fi and GPS/Skyhook coverage expands.

Privacy issues will always plague this sort of application, but it's voluntary, so I really don't see the problem.  If I want to broadcast my location, that's up to me.

Total Recall

Body Armor Recalled by Army

"Army Secretary Pete Geren has ordered the recall of more than 16,000 sets of body armor following an audit that concluded the bullet-blocking plates in the vests failed testing and may not provide Soldiers with adequate protection."

We've come a long way from Ned Kelly's improvised body armor (in the picture above), but it's disgraceful that we'd send soldiers into the field with poorly tested armor.

Black Sheep

Borrowed Gene Blackens Wolves -- Pennisi 2009 (205): 4 -- ScienceNOW

Turns out North American wolves interbred with domestic dogs thousands of years ago:

"Black wolves are quite rare outside North America. So Barsh and his colleagues think that more than 10,000 years ago, black dogs migrating with people heading across the Bering Strait into North American interbred with wolves, introducing the K locus variant. "Typically, hybridization is thought to retard adaptation. However, every once in a while, [a variant] is introduced from one species into a second and is advantageous," says Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. "This is really an exceptional finding.""

Ferrofluids

A lot of people are familar with these already, but the Creative Commons photos on Wikipedia are just too impressive not to share.  The ability to visualize the otherwise invisible:

"Ferrofluids are tiny iron particles covered with a liquid coating, also surfactant that are then added to water or oil, which gives them their liquid properties. Ferrofluids are colloidal suspensions -- materials with properties of more than one state of matter. In this case, the two states of matter are the solid metal and liquid it is in."

Ooblek 2.0

LiveLeak.com - Cornstarch Monster on a Speaker

Non-Newtonian fluids are a staple in elementary (and high-shool) science classrooms.  I think one of the driving forces behind good science is a child-like (but not childish) wonder at the world.  It's a desire to tinker and experiment and get your hands dirty.  And it's an appreciation of counter-intuitive things that just look cool.

Also worth taking a look at ferrofluids. You can see a video here.

And at surface tension in oil streams.

"Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."

1-Ton Snakes Once Slithered In The Tropics : NPR

The loss of megafauna weighs heavy on my heart.  The world would be a more exciting and interesting place with wooly mammoths, giant sloths, saber-tooth tigers, and 1-ton snakes.

Having owned and travelled in a school bus for a time, it's especially evocative to hear that Titanoboa cerrejonensis grew as long as a school bus and ate crocodiles whole.  Of course, this doesn't always end well for the snake.

The Internet

Visualizing data and mapping the internet.  Take a look here for more.

"Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:

• Dark blue: net, ca, us
• Green: com, org
• Red: mil, gov, edu
• Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
• Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
• Gold: br, kr, nl
• White: unknown"

The biggest event you've never heard of

TED: Ideas worth spreading

The TED conference slides under the mainstream radar every year.  I honestly can't understand why, because it brings together some of the more brilliant people alive today and gives them a chance to say something interesting in a short presentation. 

Note of caution: you can easily get drawn into watching one video after another and find yourself half way through next week, unable to decide whether to spend your life pursuing statistics, development work, fine art, or engineering.

I wrote a short piece about the conference last year for NPR's Intern Edition.

Skyhook or Skynet?

Skyhook Wireless - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Researching digital media and came across an MIT paper about innovation that describes the development of GPS (hard to believe the final Air Force GPS satellite went into orbit in 1993).  Skyhook has received plenty of publicity and it's a great idea, but I can't help but laugh at the name and the story.

"As long as most Wi-Fi users haven't turned off their access points (or moved, or bought new ones), Skyhook delivers an address more reliably than the Pentagon, and with more precision."

We've gone from guiding ICBMs to Moscow to BMWs to Starbucks in 10 years.