Muninn has made my Pinyin Tone Tool into something more useful– an OS X dashboard widget!
I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and [...]

Juan Enriquez is the founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, a widely published expert on topics from the technical (global nucleotide data flow) to the sociological (gene research and national competitiveness), a former member of Celera Genomics founder Craig Venter’s marine-based genetic data collection team, and former CEO of Mexico [...]

This is a demonstration of David’s new Adsotrans plugin. Below is a copy of 85度C’s drink menu. Click on any Chinese words you can’t read to see a popup with both pinyin and an English translation. You can also edit translations. I’m interested in hearing how you like these popups compared [...]

From the first time I played Super Mario Bros., I’ve always loved platform games. Unfortunately, the genre has been pretty dead ever since Gex. Fez, from Montreal-based start-up Kokoromi, looks ready to change that. The game is so creative that words just don’t do it justice.

Related: Lead designer, Phil Fish gives an [...]

Matt has republished some of our best iDrone posts:
Writing an accumulator generating function in Ruby (Mark Wilbur)
Thoughts on the Subset Sum Problem (Matt Ball)
On Google’s Evilness (John Pasden)
The Perfect Programming Language (Matt Ball)
We had some serious geekery going there while it lasted.

Wayne sprung this question on me yesterday. I swear he should have been a CS major.

The Hundred Hatted Prisoners
There are a hundred prisoners in a dungeon, sentenced to be executed the next morning. Fortunately for them, the king of the land is eccentric and offers them a chance to survive. He tells [...]

The votes from Friday’s Simple Probability Puzzle are in. Here was the question:
Imagine there’s a completely random event with two outcomes, say flipping a coin. Each flip has an equal probability of landing heads or tails. Now imagine that we’re interested in seeing how long it takes to get a certain sequence of outcomes.
Pattern [...]

Ever wonder why so many expert witnesses lead juries astray due to mathematical errors? Or why so many gamblers and investors are so bad at assessing relatively simple probability questions? First imagine that you consider yourself an expert (at something other than math), and then you encounter a question like this…
Imagine there’s a [...]

I’ve been interested in the Vancouver-based startup D-Wave for over a year now. They make quantum computers. And, unlike any other company in the world, they’ve actually made working ones. This week they’re demoing a pattern recognition test that’s very difficult for traditional computers– scanning pictures and quickly identifying which ones are [...]

Last week, I saw Stephen Petranek give an interesting talk in the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences. It was from a presentation he gave in 2002, titled 10 ways the world could end. He takes a rational, scientific look at ten of the most underestimated threats humanity faces and proposes solutions for each.

One thing [...]