Maths
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Here’s how to deal with those badly written equations you find online
It's an easy social media trick, and one you can avoid with some high school math.
The After Math: Fun and games
Google's DeepMind AI bested a Go Grand Master, but it's not over yet -- and it doesn't mean you can't still enjoy a game or two. If black and white counters don't thrill you, Nintendo had a surprisingly bountiful Direct broadcast this week, announcing the return of several hits from those golden SNES days, while Gears of War has claimed voice actors for its next iteration. At the same time, Intel just bought a company on the strength of its 360-degree video chops. And if the robots get ideas above their station, just poke 'em with a stick.
EVE Evolved: New Ancillary Armor Repairers aren't up to the task
EVE Online's Retribution 1.1 patch went live this week, overhauling armour tanking and rebalancing some ships that traditionally fit armour tanks. Last week I looked at why people usually choose passive buffer tanks for PvP over active tanks and how the Ancillary Shield Boosters changed all that by giving shield users a huge free burst tank that can often outperform a front-loaded buffer tank. The new Ancillary Armor Repairers look similarly amazing on paper with their ability to consume nanite repair paste to triple repair output, but how do they stack up against their shield-based counterparts? Now that the patch is out and I've finally got my hands on the Ancillary Armor Repairers, I'm not sure they're any good. They're limited to one per ship even though most active armour tanking ships use dual or triple repairer setups, and they can run for only eight repair cycles before running out of paste. They're also only 68.75% more effective than tech 2 repairers and still require the same amount of capacitor. Ancillary Shield Boosters may provide a slightly smaller 63.33% repair boost over tech 2 boosters, but they can cycle at double the rate of Ancillary Armor Repairers and don't require any capacitor. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at what makes Ancillary Shield Boosters a strong contender in PvP and show that the new Ancillary Armor Repairers just aren't up to the task.
Five Diablo III Wizard myths tested and debunked
When building your Diablo III Wizard, you have two main schools of thought on weapon type: use a high-damage two handed weapon with low attack speed or use a one-handed weapon and offhand and stack as much attack speed as possible. Items with increased attack speed on them greatly increase damage per second on paper, but there is some confusion in the Wizard community as to which spells are affected by it. Some players contend that Blizzard and Hydra are unaffected by attack speed; others report that channeled spells ignore both critical hit chance and attack speed. To find out the truth, I bought a two-handed weapon with 0.9 attack speed and a one-handed weapon with 1.6, both with the same rated damage per second. I then tested every spell on the zombies at the start of Act 1 in hell mode dozens of times and checked the damage difference, finally adding attack speed rings and amulets and re-testing both weapons. For almost every spell, the one-handed setup dealt lower damage but hit more frequently, averaging to the same damage per second. But the story was a little different for Hydra, Blizzard, and channeled spells. In this guide, I put five popular Diablo III Wizard myths to the test and discover the inner workings of Energy Armour, Hydra, Blizzard, Critical Mass, and other abilities.
Google hides mathematical puzzle in Cr-48 video, rewards its solver with a laptop
Watching Google destroy Cr-48 laptops for fun can't have been easy for any of you, but it turns out that the wily geeks of Mountain View had a clandestine purpose to their malevolence after all. An equation, scribbled out in old school chalk in the background of one scene, attracted the attention of a Sylvain Zimmer, who, together with a group of like-minded geeks, set about trying to solve it and discover its meaning. A full day's worth of cryptographic work later, Sylvain was left with a set of numbers he was able to convert into letters, which in turned spelled out "speed and destroy." Appending goo.gl, Google's URL shortener, to the front of those words got him to a screen congratulating him for being "first to figure out our MENSA-certified puzzle" and promising to send him a Cr-48 laptop as his prize. Kudos to Sylvain... and to Google for being such irrepressible geeks.
Apple engineer uses Lego to rebuild ancient Greek mechanism, will surely try to patent it (video)
The Antikythera Mechanism is what you call truly old school technology. Argued to be the world's oldest known computer, this ancient Greek invention was used some time circa 100BC to calculate and "predict celestial events and eclipses with unprecedented accuracy." Skipping past the two millennia in which it lay lost on a sea floor somewhere, the Mechanism has now been recreated by an Apple software engineer by the name of Andrew Carol, who has lovingly pieced 1,500 Lego Technic blocks together, creating 110 gears and four gearboxes in total. Each box is responsible for performing one piece of arithmetic, and when the resulting machine is fed with appropriate calendar data, it spits out a (hopefully accurate) prediction for the next time a solar eclipse should occur. All well and good, but we're really just amazed by the beauty of those gears working. Check them out after the break.
I'm learnding -- UK school picks up the DS
Awright, what's all this then? Clunbury Primary School in merry old England has brought on a fleet of DS Lites to help combat stupidity in children. It's safe to say the kids aren't sitting around playing Mario Kart, but instead picking up any one of the maths, language or brain games available.It's not just one tyke campaigning for Ninteducational powers. Head teacher Andrew Davies said using DS software is an "exciting and alternative way of approaching education." Capital idea, old bean. Just make sure this mother's kid doesn't enrol at your school anytime soon.Clunbury was voted as the top Information and Communications Technology (ICT) school in England, using mp3 recorders, blogs and podcasts to teach the tots. Where was all the awesome technology when this blogger was battling with the Commodore 64?
