Researchers studying the behavior of software agents set up a test, called the “minority game,” where agents are competing for limited resources. In each round, the agents make choices, attempting to wind up in the successful minority. When the researchers added the ability for agents to communicate

Link: The Ultimate Travel Toolkit Link broken? Try the Wayback Machine.

Paul Graham, in What the Bubble Got Right: “someone who doesn’t expend any effort on marketing himself. A nerd, in other words, is someone who concentrates on substance.”

Dutch artist Theo Jansen makes gigantic, wind-powered, walking “animals” out of steel and polyester sheeting, such as this 2-ton Animalis Rhinoceros Transport. (via Engadget)

I can’t figure this out. With crude oil prices almost at a record-high $50/barrel, you’d think gasoline prices would be shooting up, too. But they’re not. In fact, the price of gasoline remains at historically low levels, when adjusted for inflation. (See graph of gas prices). The Big Picture explai

The molecules making up microtubules, the protein filaments that form the internal “scaffolding” of your body’s cells, are replaced every 10 minutes. Actin filaments in the dendrites of your neurons are recycled even quicker: every 40 seconds. In fact, the entire brain’s composition turns over every

I have to admit I’m insanely jealous: The multitalented Xeni Jardin will be flying on one of Zero-G’s first commercial zero-gravity air flights, 32,000 feet up. NASA has used parabolic flight trajectories to train astronauts in weightlessness for years. Now, Zero-G will begin selling these flights —

Police in Paris discovered a fully equipped movie theater in a large and previously uncharted part of Les Catacombes, underneath the 16th arondissement. A smaller cave next door had been turned into a restaurant and bar. When police returned a few days later, the secret theater’s power and phone lin

Want to know what happened on a particular day in history? dMarie’s Time Capsuler will tell you: Just enter a date and it gives you the top headlines, songs, and more. Very fun!

Most messenger bags fall into one of two camps: gigantic shapeless sacks on the one hand and precious, overorganized, zipper-encrusted man-purses on the other. Spire’s Nova bag is neither: It provides plenty of carrying capacity and organizing space in a shoulder bag that looks professional. As a bo

The first thing you need to know about the Iomega REV 35GB/90GB drive is that its name is a lie. The REV is an external hard drive with removable 35GB hard-disk cartridges, plain and simple. The “90GB” part of its name refers to the amount of data you could, in theory, store on each cartridge […]

If you put your ear up close to the speaker grille on the Olympus DS-660 Digital Voice Recorder, you can hear the faint, distant screams of agonized microcassette manufacturers. For years, portable audio recording meant fumbling with these infernal tapes, which often broke, tangled, got demagnetized