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Ask Massively: Feeds and faceplustweets
Google Reader might be on its way out, but old-school RSS is here to stay. If you haven't jumped to Feedly or some other RSS platform yet, July 1st is your doomsday. How is this relevant to your interests and why am I telling you this in Ask Massively? Well, many of you readers probably don't camp our front page, and if you're not into social media and the latest faceplustweet craze, RSS can help you keep up with the parts of Massively you want to read (and avoid the ones you don't).
Google offers free online course to turn you into a 'power searcher'
If you're game for learning some new search tricks, they may as well come from the hive mind itself. Mountain View is currently accepting registrations for "Power Searching with Google," a free-of-charge virtual course which will start on July 10th and involve six 50-minute interactive classes spread over two weeks. In addition to plugging Google+ at every opportunity, it promises to explain how to "solve real, everyday problems" using advanced search features -- and there's even a certificate at the end of it. Sign up at the course homepage linked below.
Scientists: 'Games are hard'
While we've been telling jaded partners and family members for ages, it looks like there's some -- slightly obscure -- proof. The researchers reconstructed their own levels, forcing gamers to choose between one of two paths, with a mix of power-ups, health items and enemies that created a "logical statement". If you can complete the level with that particular combination, then it would resolve the Boolean satisfiability problem -- a logic puzzle that squares variables against whether a statement is true, and whether the same can be said of all similarly composed statements. While the theory sounds trickier than the first stage of Mario, Nintendo's flagship title -- as well as Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid and the Pokémon series -- were categorized as NP-hard. This means deciding if a player can solve a certain part of the game is at least as hard as the most difficult problems in NP; a classification that involves easy-to-check, difficult-to-solve propositions. While you figure out what that means, we're hitting up Nintendogs 3D. Because we like a challenge.
Spotlaser: Reinterface with Spotlight
Several folks in our most recent Ask TUAW post were complaining about Spotlight's interface, so it's rather serendipitous that today I ran across Spotlaser. This app provides a much more useful search interface to Spotlight by making it easier both to run searches by allowing boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT), wildcards, and more. And even better, the results are displayed as a Smart Folder in a Finder window (above) rather than Spotlight's default, hard-to-use list. For those of you fed up with trying to use Spotlight, give Spotlaser a whirl and see if it makes your searching go better.Spotlaser is a free download, but the developer requests donations.[Via MacApper]
Microfluidic computer runs on bubbles, deals in chemical analysis
Flipping over to alternate energy sources isn't just the rage in vehicles, as we've seen steam-powered and string-powered computers already, and now we're witnessing an oddity that's actually energized by bubbles. The "microfluidic" computer performs calculations by squeezing bubbles through tiny channels etched into a chip, and although it runs around 1,000 times slower than you're average desktop today and takes up quite a bit more room, no AC outlet is required to churn out chemical analysis. Manu Prakash and Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms created the devices by "etching channels about one micron wide into silicon, and then using nitrogen bubbles contained in water to represent bits of information flowing through these channels." The computer utilizes Boolean logic functions to carry out its work, and the researchers are already envisioning it carrying bubbles of molecules or individual cells to "conduct diagnostics or detect pathogens." We'll admit, a bubble-powered PC ain't too shabby, but even proponents fessed up that such a snail isn't putting modern day machine vendors out of business anytime soon.
