Tag: computers

You can have my Scrabulous when you pry it from my cold dead fingers

Hasbro has sent letters to Facebook asking it to remove Scrabulous, the popular online version of Scrabble. SOS! Save our Scrabulous!

The first sentence I wrote today…

“We’ve got to rescue him,” she said. Words today: 2,984Total thus far: 50,405Percentage complete: 42 A pretty good day: past the 50,000-word mark, and thus 42 percent of the way to 120,000 words (but remember, I’m only contracted for 100,000, and if that’s what my total ends up being, I’m past halfway!). I hope to …

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Blogging!

Today’s Web column for CBC’s Afternoon Edition… *** Over the past few years the growing use of computers and the Internet has contributed a lot of weird new words to our language. People talk about ROM and RAM and “megs of memory,” Googling and websurfing and more. But one of the weirdest words of all …

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The first sentence I wrote today…and a horrible discovery

I’ve fallen down on the “first sentence I wrote today” posts, I admit, but since I need to tuck away a cool 2,000-plus words every day this month to meet my deadline, I think I’d better resume them. So here’s today’s: “Who are you?” Emily click-spoke.Out of context, it sounds like she was sticking a …

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The first sentence I wrote today…and a horrible discovery

I’ve fallen down on the “first sentence I wrote today” posts, I admit, but since I need to tuck away a cool 2,000-plus words every day this month to meet my deadline, I think I’d better resume them. So here’s today’s: “Who are you?” Emily click-spoke.Out of context, it sounds like she was sticking a …

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Cars that drive themselves

This evening in the car my six-year-old daughter, Alice, commented out of the blue that she wished our car could drive itself. “I’d like that, too,” I said, and explained that scientists were, in fact, working on cars that could do exactly that, thinking of the Grand Challenges for driverless cars held by the Defense …

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A digital restoration of the Mona Lisa…

…can be found here. Whether this is a completely accurate representation of Leonardo’s painting as it originally appeared is impossible to know, of course, but one thing is certain: it didn’t always have the dim, yellowish appearance we associate with it today.

Rise of the (giggling, dancing, punning) robots

Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. ***Robots were once science fiction: in fact, the word comes from the Czech word “robota,” meaning work, and originated in Karel Capek’s popular 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R. (for Rossum’s Universal Robots). These days, there are robot vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and dogs, and all …

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Memory? We don’t need no stinkin’ memory!

I’ve occasionally referred to my Pocket PC and, by extension, the Internet, as “my other brain.” Turns out I’m not alone: Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us. And frankly, I kind of like it.Yeah, me too.

Pulp-based computing

In computers, we have software and hardware. Jokingly, the human brain is sometimes called wetware. Up next: pulpware! OK, technically it’s hardware–wires, sensors and computer chips–embedded in paper or cardboard. A spiral of conductive ink can be a speaker, or a touch sensor. Two layers, and a page can tell when it is being bent. …

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The unbeatable checker-playing computer

Computer scientists at the University of Alberta have solved the ancient game of checkers: After 18-and-a-half years and sifting through 500 billion billion (a five followed by 20 zeroes) checkers positions, Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer and colleagues have built a checkers-playing computer program that cannot be beaten. Completed in late April this year, the program, Chinook, …

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From Babel Fish to Woohoo!

Today’s Web column for CBC Saskatchewan’s Afternoon Edition… ********* If you’ve ever watched Star Trek, you’ve heard of the Universal Translator. The Universal Translator is a computer device that is able to instantly translate almost any alien language, no matter how bizarre, into American English. Of course, the Universal Translator doesn’t exist…yet. But all over …

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