Invention of the Day: Zen Puzzle.

A group of Russian designers created the most challenging puzzle ever:

The image you need to assemble is pristine white. The team promises you achieve true enlightenment when you solve the puzzle.

Good luck!

Evaluating ideas.

Bill Gross, Idealab's founder and CEO, talks about a way to quickly test ideas (3min video).



This is just a snippet of his talk, his full talk at Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner is about making new ideas succeed in the real world.

tags: innovation, education, information, ideas, business, value

Why quantum mechanics might be hard to learn

From Decarte's Baby, by Paul Bloom:

The developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spelke lists four properties that all humans assume physical objects possess:

1. Cohesion. Objects are connected masses of stuff that move as a whole. If you want to know where the boundaries of an object are, ... grab some portion of stuff and pull -- what comes with what you are pulling belongs to the same object.
2. Solidity. Objects are not easily permeable by other objects;
3. Continuity. Objects move in continuous paths; the travel through space without gaps.
4. Contact. Objects move through contact. The exceptions to this rule are animate creatures.

Looks like a good list of principles to violate in a sci-fi thriller. For example, the main character(MC) encounters a creature whose eye-ears leap through space and suddenly appear in front of MC's face to perform a close-up observation. They sound like hummingbirds and "nest" in the creature's body. While gap hopping, they talk to the creature's brain via a wireless nervous system. Can be shared by a family of creatures and carry tiny but deadly poop charges :) A dragonfly with eye facets that violate principles 1 and 3 would also be a good option.
I believe there was something like that on the Incrediboy's island in the Incredibles movie. But those surveilance devices didn't leap and where clearly delineated as separate entities. Also, Michael Crichton used smart swarms in Prey.
We would need to run Altshuller's fantasy matrix to see if there's anything left to discover.

Interesting links about learning

Math seems to be is better learned in abstract rather than in concrete

How the brain learns to read depenqds on language

both of these link may relate to my previous post about Cerf's article in RTM.

Is interacting with people and content on the net is better than watching tv?

--- what about talking to people or playing a game while watching tv? ;) i often find myself watching sports on TV( on mute) and e-mailing or listening to audio books at the same time.