The development of Quantum Game v2.0 is already in full swing, and we’d like for you to meet our team — Philippe Cochin, Chiara Decaroli (who kindly drew the illustrations you’ll see), Klem Jankiewicz, Ivana Kurecic, and Piotr Migdał.
Philippe Cochin is our lead programmer — he attended Ecole Boulle to study jewelry design, studied philosophy, was once a boxing and chess champion (sadly not a chess boxing champion), co-founded an NGO that builds hospitals, and participated in dozens of humanitarian missions in Southeast Asia. In his free time Philippe watches birds, studies quantum physics, sails, and free dives.
If you’ve played the original Quantum Game with Photons, this will be fantastic news! And if you haven’t, what are you waiting for? It’s an in-browser puzzle with real-world quantum physics, where all the power lies in your hands: shoot lasers, trigger photon detectors, save the world.
Several months ago, Artur Ekert of the Center for Quantum Technologies in Singapore reached out to us with one request:
“All I want is the coolest quantum game in the known multiverse, please!”
So that’s what we’re making!
Version 2.0 will include all the coolest and greatest from the original Quantum Game, but…
Another 5 sketches with take-home messages from some fascinating scientific papers!
One pound of lead feels heavier than one pound of feathers (if in boxes of the same size) because psychology!
(Some of these make me cringe, but there’s only one way to get better this. 🙂)
What matters more when you’re enjoying a music performance — sight or sound? Sight, by a large margin! Hearing professionals perform doesn’t help you guess who won the competition, but when you see them (without sound!), you can guess! Tricky, tricky.
(Source.)
You’ve picked out something you want to get great at and you’re practicing diligently? … You’re sure you know what you’re doing?
Taking a peek at the science of deliberate practice might help you not fail miserably!
Repetitio est mater stagni
Learning a skill should be easy:
- identify what you want to learn
- choose an exercise to practice it
- repeat ad infinitum
- ???
- profit.
This is the exact approach a lot of us take when deciding to learn to play a musical instrument, get better at a sport, become efficient in our chosen profession, or even just type faster — if we keep doing…
Narcissism is one of those epithets nobody wants to earn — it’s a character trait highly associated with vanity and egoism, brandished by the people we tell ourselves we would never think to consider as friends. But what does the observer know about the experiment they’re in?
It turns out narcissists are able to charm the socks off of anyone they meet — if they feel like it — but not more than that. Stick around for an overview of the narcissists’ arsenal and the scientific observation of how nice guys — spoiler alert — really finish first.
What’s a narcissist?
What we know as human society is held together by interpersonal relationships - on one hand, it’s the give-and-take equilibria between persons or social groups and the expectations of reciprocally beneficial behavior, and on the other, the feelings of closeness, trust, and personalistic self-disclosure.
The study I’m about to present to you is something you have probably already seen floating around the internet, said to hold the key to forming close personal relationships in a few dozen carefully designed discussion questions. Let’s start with the basics. Is it overblown? Yes and no. The study I’m referring to is the Experimental…
The debate on the business of citation accumulation in scientific publishing is long and deep-rooted, but the science of citation accumulation — not so much. In this little post, I’m summarizing some of the interesting research done on the effect that titles have on the number of citations a scientific piece of text receives. This might be a good place to start the next time you’re sending off your literary work of art into the world.
Title type
An analysis (Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations; H. R. Jamali, 2011) that looked into the effect…
Here we go again, it’s that time of the year for the northern hemisphere — summer. Eternal sunshine. Blistering heat and daily temperatures reaching the heights needed to melt thoughts. Good news? It’s done in a few months, and then we can all complain about the cold and rain again. Bad news? It’s not just the weather that’s being horrible — it’s everyone around you, too.
A recent paper, Exploring the impact of ambient temperature on helping (Belkin & Kouchaki, 2017), takes a look at the mechanism by which uncomfortably warm environments change your behavior.
Let’s be clear, individual helpful…
I’ve heard you need clickbait titles to catch the interest of internet strangers, and this one is right on the money.
So hello there, let me tell you about how country music is going to kill you.
There’s a short and sweet paper from the early nineties that has played with the problematic of the link between country music and suicide rates (The Effect of Country Music on Suicide by S. Stack and J. Gundlach; 1992), and it tells you exactly what you’d expect to hear — repetitively being told that life is misery, your woman has left you, and…
Ivana Kurecic
I summarize scientific research on amusing and smirk-worthy topics for your convenience and sense of intellectual superiority. ♪ happyturtlethings.net ♪
