Flour Power

In today’s xkcd comic, Randall Munroe explores the future using Google’s top search results for queries like “by the year <year>”, “in the year <year>” and “in year <year>, * will”. It’s a nice and easy way to have a quick snapshot of what is being written around the web about the future.

This is not the first time Randall has used Google search results as the basis of his comics. Also worth checking are Google results for various phrases, frequency of strip versions of various games, and the trochee chart.

I got a nice surprise from Radiohead when I checked my email this morning. It was a message thanking the fans who bought their latest album – The King of Limbs – and giving away the two tracks from Radiohead’s Record Store Day 12” Supercollider/The Butcher that was released over the weekend.

So if you’ve ordered the Newspaper Album/Digital Album you should head over to your Order Tracking page at the official King Of Limbs store for this little bonus.

Our beloved Pac-Man just got an upgrade. The World’s Biggest Pac-Man is a patchwork quilt of user-generated levels, featuring 4794 mazes at the time of writing. Every maze has an exit point on each of its four sides, leading to its neighbours. It’s a virtually endless Pac-Man game. I pity those with gaming OCD…

Anyone can log in using Facebook and design their own levels, or just play for fun.

The game was unveiled at Microsoft’s MIX11 developer conference as a way to promote Internet Exporer 9 and its support of HTML5, but it should run well in any browser that supports the new standard, like Chrome and Firefox.

Computer-related algorithms can be quite hard to understand, and in some cases a simple visual demonstration makes it so much easier. The IT people in the audience might have seen a few of them, but I’m pretty sure none was quite as peculiar as this.

AlgoRythmics, a folk-dancing group from Romania’s Sapientia University, decided to show how data sorting algorithms work by showing them as dances. Bizarre, right? But strangely mesmerizing, and it sure does the trick of explaining how they work. Until now they did insert-sort, bubble-sort, select-sort and shell-sort. I hear that merge-sort and quick-sort are coming soon.

Check the AlgoRythmics’ Youtube channel for all their videos, and go and support them in their Facebook page. Because they’re just awesome.

(via TheNextWeb)