Stephen Wolfram recently gave a talk about his efforts to understand the universe around us through computation.  He’s the CEO and founder of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica, and author of A New Kind of Science.  Wolfram recently launches his computational knowledge engine, Wolfram|Alpha (I wrote a post about its launch some time back…). 
Here’s the video of his talk, given at a recent TED conference…

Watch and learn!

Just in case you didn’t have enough geeky devices to help you with gaming strategies, here’s a glove that allows you to play rock-paper-scissors against a computerized opponent.
Also called ro-sham-bo (the phonetic French expression of “rock-paper-scissors”), there are some people who take this WAY too seriously.  There are actually roshambo tournaments, and it even has been expanded to include five symbols (as seen in the 2008 “The Lizard-Spock Expansion” episode of The Big Bang Theory).
One can apply game theory to figure out the optimal winning strategy to rock-paper-scissors.  In order to …

Last week, Nancy Atkinson posted on Universe Today that astronomers are now understanding why they’ve missed 90% of the observable galaxies, and, with new tools, are now able to see them.
Here’s a paragraph from Atkinson’s article:
“Astronomers have long known that many surveys of distant galaxies miss 90% of their targets, but they didn’t know why. Now, astronomers have determined that a large fraction of galaxies whose light took 10 billion years to reach us have gone undiscovered. This was found with an extremely deep survey using two of the four …