Outboard Brain

Following in the grand tradition of nearly every new technology, nobody started to panic about the potential downsides of cognitive outsourcing until kids starting doing it, and doing it in ways that their parents didn't understand. They type with their thumbs in ugly slang and funny symbols. They have short attention spans. They can't remember their own phone numbers. They spend more time on social media than they did with their friends irl (that's "in real life," my daughter tells me). They...

 Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess

HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player. As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. Pe...

 The Pleasure of Entrainment

If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to contain: the meditative patterns of Tetris; the turn-taking, clacking cadence of Billiards; the rhythmic shooting pattern of Space Invaders; the pulsing flow of cards, hits, and chips ...

 How a Nerd Walks Up the Stairs

Your steps should be in a cycle: short, long, long. Long in this case means a double step. Thus, you will cover five stairs in one short-long-long cycle. In addition, you should always start the first cycle on the same foot. Suppose you start on the left foot, then after two cycles you are back on the left foot, having covered ten stairs. While you are walking the stairs in this way, it is clear where you are in the cycle. By the end of the staircase, you will know the number of stairs modulo...

 Work-Related Prospection to Code Switch Between Work and ...

...people who engage in “work-related prospection”– that is, thinking and planning about the day and week ahead and the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals – tend to weather the stresses of the journey better than people whose minds wander aimlessly. This translated to greater job satisfaction throughout the day. Jachimowicz suspects that these benefits come from the fact that it eases the conflict we feel between our roles at home and our roles at work. After all, yo...

 Game-Based VS Gamified

Broadly speaking, those who advocate for game-based education seek to find ways to integrate specific, preexisting games directly into the curriculum. They want to use games to illustrate specific points or develop specific skills that they believe are uniquely developed by the game in question (Prensky, 2001). There are many fine games that could be incorporated into a host of curricula that would help students learn more and develop more sophisticated skills, and they can be played as is ou...

 Learning Strengths: Map Readers and Explorers

I recognize Map Readers because they often like to work independently, but they are most comfortable when they have specifi c instructions or procedures to follow. Th ey often take more time and work deliberately, showing all their steps on homework or taking detailed notes in class or during group work. Explorers are the students who want to skip the detailed instructions and jump right into fi guring things out by trial and error. Th ese students are not likely to use estimation, even when ...

 Descartes Rules

I thought the following four [rules] would be enough, provided that I made a firm and constant resolution not to fail even once in the observance of them. The first was never to accept anything as true if I had not evident knowledge of its being so; that is, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to embrace in my judgment only what presented itself to my mind SO cleariy and distinctly that I had no occasion to doubt it. The second, to divide each problem I examined into as many ...

 Don't Look at the Whole Universe

It is not therefore the business of philosophy, in our present situation in the universe, to attempt to take in at once, in one view, the whole scheme of nature; but to extend, with great care and circumspection, our knowledge, by just steps, from sensible things, as far as our observations or reasonings from them will carry us, in our enquiries concerning either the greater motions and operations of nature, or her more subtile and hidden works. In this way Sir Isaac Newton proceeded in his d...

 Seeing VS Observing

I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. 'When I hear you give your reasons,' I remarked, 'the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled, until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.' 'Quite so,' he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an arm-chair. 'You see, but you d...