Thinking Machine Plays Chess (and shows its thought processes to you) 

If you like chess, or just cool websites, here is one for ya.

From the website:

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.

Check this out whether you fancy yourself a proficient chess player or not. It's really cool!

Just got done moving the site to a new web host. You shouldn't notice ANYTHING, but I was a wee bit concerned about it. The site is growing daily and I didn't want any serious downtime. We were outgrowing the storage and the bandwidth of the old site. And they wanted an arm and a leg to get up to snuff. It was a relatively painless move so we'll get back to posting regularly. Thanks for your patience.

Please tell your friends about the Cool Stuff on thisBlog at thisDomain.com!

Math really can be fun! 

I first learned about the special properties of the number "9" when I was a small boy. I remember thinking how incredibly COOL it was that I could check whether ANY number was divisible by 9 simply by adding up the digits until I ended up with a one or two digit number...and seeing if that result was divisible by 9.

For example, is the number 8,847 divisible by 9? Well let's see. First add up the digits in the number to get what is called the "unitate." The digits are 8, 8, 4 and 7. So 8 + 8 + 4 + 7 = 27. Go ahead and add up the digits of the answer and you get 2 + 7 =9. Since 9 is certainly divisible by 9, so is the original number, 8,847. To see if this trick really works, let's get a calculator.

OK, I got my calculator. Punching in the numbers and dividing by 9 I get the answer 983, with no remainder. So I guess it worked!

How about other tricks like ways to easily multiply any number by 11? or ANY two numbers up to 20 x 20?

There are dozens of these kinds of math tricks out there, and although few people will want to take the time to learn (and practice) them all, I'll just bet you will find a few that you will want to take to heart. And if you have kids, you might want to introduce a few of these tricks to them as well...it just might change the way they feel about math. Math really can be fun!

Here are a few links to some good sites I found...if you search on "mental math" or "cool math tricks" you will find tons more:

http://www.angelfire.com/me/marmalade/mathtips.html

http://wildaboutmath.com/2007/11/11/impress-your-friends-with-mental-math-tricks/

http://ezinearticles.com/?Math-Shortcuts-To-Amaze-Your-Friends&id=423451

A really great book that is chock-full of secrets that will help you and your kids be able to get the right answer faster is Secrets of Mental Math, by Arthur Benjamin. Written by teachers, this book shows you great ways to impress people with your mental mathemagical acuity, but more importantly, it makes math fun. It's a great book to give to your kids to try and get them more interested in math.

How Cool is This? 

Now here is something you don't see every day. But I bet you will start to see it more and more! Whoever came up with this idea was thinking. A battery with built-in usb charging connector. They call the "USBCells." And they are currently available only in AA size, but isn't that the one you use the most anyway?

These batteries are a bit pricey, though. Two of them cost a whopping $19.95. I'm sure that price will come down as popularity goes up and the word gets out.

Touted as a "green revolution," these batteries will actually help save the Earth a little, as they don't have to go straight to the landfill when depleted (recharge them over and over again) and they don't contain cadmium, so they are safer when they finally are disposed of.

The USBCells are NiMH type batteries, so you don't have to drain them all the way and give them a full charge each time in order to keep them working properly. If you need just one more photo from that digital camera, it's ok to give these just a little booster charge and snap away!

Available from the InnovaToys website. Cool batteries!

So would you pay twenty bucks for a pair of these to be the first on your block? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Mosio. What does it mean? What is it?

Well, first of all you could ask that question at mosio.com and you would certainly get an answer. Probably in a few seconds to a couple of minutes. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

According to the FAQ, Mosio is a play on the word "Mociology", a mash up of "mobile" and "sociology", which is defined as "the study of human behaviour in a mobile world and the study of mobile device/phone lifestyles."

So...what is it?

Mosio is a community of people who love to help others. If you have a question about something, and perhaps you're standing in line at a restaurant, or sitting in a theater waiting on the movie to start, and you aren't in front of a computer, or you are trying to settle a bar bet, you can get the answer almost instantly. All you need is a phone with email or SMS text capability.

Text your question to Mosio and a huge community of people who are near a computer, or may happen to know the answer to your question, will bust their keyboards trying to be the first to provide the right answer to your question, which will immediately be sent by email, text or IM to your phone.

Mosio says Answer a serious question with a serious answer. Answer a smart aleck question with a smart aleck answer.

Give this a try. You just might get hooked. It's cool stuff. Look for me and join my "Qniverse."

Ask Mosio to:

• Settle a bet at the bar.
• Get helpful info about restaurants, shops, products or services.
• Answer literally any question: fact, fiction or straight up silly.
• Ask Mosio anything!

Being a Scout leader or team manager/coach is lots of fun, but can also be frustrating and time-consuming, especially in the area of communication with parents and members.

teamr.com has created a very cool online web-management system that you can use for free to help make this process easier. If you are volunteering your time to help a group of kids, there is no reason it should hard for you. This software makes it a lot easier. Imagine being a couple of hours away from an important practice and looking at the sky, which is about to fall, and wishing you had a way to contact everyone at once to postpone the practice. With teamr, you can. And that is only the beginning.

The software, which you can access from any browser including your Blackberry or other web-enabled phone, keeps track of your roster game, meeting and practice schedules and fees. It also offers automated reminders for anything you can think of.

I have been using the Scout version for about a year now and it has improved with age. There have been numerous features I have wished the program had, and several of those have already been added, some at my direct request.

Perhaps the best thing of all is that the parents absolutely love it! They don't want to miss any Scouting events, but keeping up with all the meetings as well as sports, school, and church functions can be a daunting task for any mom or dad. With MyScoutLink, they know that the six-day-ahead email, the two-day-ahead reminder and the two-hour-ahead SMS text reminders will always be there. They are like clockwork.

With the year I've had (ten Webelos I Scouts) I don't know if I could have done it without MyScoutLink. Check it out. This is really cool!

Here's a cool site that is appropriate for this time of year.

An Easter Egg means one thing to kids at Easter. It means something entirely different to certain computer geeks. Often, software programmers will build into their code some special, hidden functionality that can only be seen when certain key combinations or character strings are entered into the program. The Easter Egg Archive is the definitive repository for all things Easter Egg.

Video games, productivity software, even hardware, movies, books, art...almost anything created by an artist or programmer can have hidden Easter eggs.

Some of my favorites are the pinball game in Microsoft Word (97 version), and the bouncing balls in Adobe Audition 1.5.

Happy Easter everyone!

Here is a cool site that shows what might happen to our planet/solar system/galaxy over the next few billion years. Not sure how accurate the science is, and there are lots of variables, but it's cool to see. I haven't figured out the underlying website yet (You're The Man Now Dog).

I love optical illusions. I had a friend once who insisted on calling them optical "delusions." In any case, I wanted to post a site called Mighty Optical Illusions  that has the best optical illusions I have ever seen. A new one is posted just about every day, and the site has a great Random Illusion feature if you just want to sit and scroll through dozens of them and try to figure them out.

Below left is an example of an "impossible structure." On the right is "The Haunted Forest." How many different creatures can you find in the forest?

The site offers widgets that you can download to get the Optical Illusion of the Day delivered right to your desktop. I am running the Vista widget on my computer at home.

I placed this blog entry in the "Traditional Marketing" category, but it is really anything but. Most of the photos on this website depict out-of-the-box thinking, but use traditional forms of advertising media.

Please take the time to visit the website, which I found through StumbleUpon, and view all of the ads there. There are truly some creative minds in the world of advertising around the world. It's been a while since I have seen something this creative around here.

Below are just a couple of the really cool ad photos from this phenomenal website:

"Hey, City That Never Sleeps. Wake up." from Folgers.

Hometown Boy Scout Makes Good (Eagle Scout Project) 

This is a cool story. Boy Scouts have to plan and carry out a major community project as the last step of earning their Eagle rank, the highest rank in Boy Scouts and a major lifetime coup.

These projects have to be community-oriented, and the boy must not do it all himself. He must solicit donations, if money is required, and assistance from other Scouts, friends and citizens of the local and world community. In short, he is learning project management, something that all teenage boys could benefit from.

Here is a story about a boy that had a rather unique idea for his project, and he pulled it off.

Scour [skou^uhr, skou-er]

- verb.

...to clear or rid of what is undesirable

...to search through or over thoroughly

Scour takes your search terms and retrieves the best results from all three of the major search engines...Yahoo, Google and MSN. So what's so cool about that? Well, nothing if that was all there was. But there's more.

For those of us that spend a lot of time searching the internet for all kinds of weird and wonderful things, a search engine that actually pays you to search is a veritable goldmine. Scour does just that.

For each search you do, and when you vote and/or comment on the vaildity of your results, you earn points. Set Scour as your home page in all your browsers, log in and have it save your login. Then just do the things you normally do. The upper right corner of your page shows a running total of your search points.

When you get enough points, simply cash out and you will receive a gift card you can use anywhere.

You can also refer your friends to Scour and earn points on their searches. So if you click on the links in this post, I will earn a few points for your searches. I think that's pretty cool. What do you think?