Free Rice

The idea behind Free Rice is to convince people to donate a little time, and some clicks, to feeding people.

I'm all for it. The GDP of the world last year was enough to give everyone on the planet 10,000 USD (hat-tip to willshetterly for the info, y'all might want to read his blog). Most of that ended up in a very small number of pockets.

But Free Rice convinced some of those pockets to kick in a penny or two, for every correctly answered question on vocabulary. They start at level "40" and adjust based on the answers. The more people who answer a word correctly, the lower the level of that word gets.

I'm hovering around 49, with the intermittent rise to 50. It's not trivially easy, but if one has a good vocabulary, and is able to tease out the way the words are built, it's possible to see words; absent context, which one has never seen before, and get them right.

So you learn something, and you help someone.

So far, I've been correct often enough to send 5,000 grains of rice.

Go thou and do likewise.

Bare ruined choirs

I ramble too and fro in the web (mosty using Google as a card catalogue when I'm trying to look up something trivial).

Today I found a great comment on making fudge. I was going to say, "This guy has a great blog." I can't do that, since the last entry (the one on fudge) was more than a year ago. Experience tells me the odds of new posts is slim.

But, the post on Fudge, Fortune, and Phase Transitions is worth a moment of your time, as is the post below that (on the same page).

This what mental coercion is

There are lines one doesn't cross. Some of them are fuzzy, and staying on the right side of them is something each person who interrogates has to do on her own.

But coercion is verboten, per Geneva. It's also a bad idea from a practical standpoint.

See if you can spot the problems in this story

A precis. Right after That Tuesday a guy is arrested when a radio which allows one to speak to airplanes is found in the closet. He protests his innocence, but is told that unless he confesses, his family will be tortured in Egypt. So he gives in and tells them he was complicit.

Only he wasn't and the pilot, who actually owned the radio; and had left it behind, came to ask for it.

That's bad enough (though there are those who will say that such tricks aren't torture; that telling people their families will be turned over to people who are willing to tape themselves raping a kidnapped, 13 year-old boy isn't a big deal), but when the court decision was released, and the details of what was done were public, in black and white they contacted them and asked them to take it down, so the only version available would be redacted.

Happily, there are links to be found which have the original opinion.