I'm a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don't feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo's hardware, there's Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.
Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen "games" to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental prowess, including memory, cognitive control, processing speed, and the all-important attention. As you play, your scores are tracked and grouped together in an progress chart that you can dig into and try to figure out what's been improving--or what needs some work. Games will also let you know when you haven't performed as well as you usually do by tracking your historical performance.
You have various games to choose from. Seen here is 'Lost in Migration,' a game that challenges your cognition skills.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Earlier today I started out my brain-training session with a game called Bird Watching. It's meant to track your attention, but it ends up being a very strange mashup of Nintendo's Duck Hunt meets hangman, where the goal is to not only shoot a picture of the bird that pops up on the screen for half a second, but also remember the letter that flashes in the center of the screen. These letters begin to fill out the name of the bird, and it's your job to guess before you've captured all the letters--a process that (hopefully) uses a number of parts of your brain.
'Speed Match' was my favorite game of the bunch, forcing you to remember if what you're looking at is the same as what came before it. (click to enlarge)
Following bird watching my heart rate went up about 30 beats with Speed Match, a game that pits you against a variety of symbols in the hopes of figuring out whether the symbol you're looking at is the same one that came before. To navigate you simply have to use your keyboard's arrow keys. It's quite a bit more fun than Word Bubbles, another game that makes you type words that start with the three letters they give you. Scrabulous players will mop the floor with this one.
The other games were not nearly as memorable, including one that has you type in the direction of the middle bird seen in flying formations (apparently to test reaction time), as well as a mine-sweeper-like game that has you navigate a garden to get to a flower while avoiding space aliens.
The real hook of the service is the stats tracking, which will keep track of your mental scores indefinitely and do analysis of your cognitive prowess based on how you've been scoring in each title. Like Nintendo's Brain Age series, it gives you some of this information in a four-way chart, as well as plenty of line charts that hopefully are getting better each day.
At $80 a year, Lumosity isn't exactly cheap when compared with Nintendo's Brain Age series, but you don't need to buy any extra hardware and the creators continue to add new games. There's also a two-week free trial you can play without entering any credit card information.
We've just witnessed a potentially disturbing marriage of basic street crime and the instant worldwide audience provided by video sharing and social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
Criminals have often recorded their exploits for fun, but the ease of online sharing means that almost everyone can now witness assorted muggings, fights, and robberies from the safety of a laptop screen. At the same time, crimes posted to the Web get instant attention from law enforcement and the press, essentially acting as online wanted posters for the perpetrators. A perfect example is a recent subway attack video first discovered on YouTube on November 7, and since covered by the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Court TV's The Smoking Gun Web site, and other media outlets.
The video, allegedly shot by a New York film student named Kadejra Holmes, shows a group of teenage girls riding New York's A train, arguing with, and eventually attacking, a male passenger. After the incident, Kadejra posted the video on YouTube, naming the clip, "Jump Up to Get Beat Down," after an old Brand Nubians track called "Punks Jump Up to Get Beat Down."
Holmes was soon contacted by The Smoking Gun, and after she denied being part of the group, claiming to be just an innocent bystander with a video camera, she deleted the video from YouTube and took down her MySpace page. But, nothing that's been posted online is ever really gone, and popular blogs such as Gawker as well as the Web sites of New York's daily newspapers have all reposted the video and written about the attack.
In Thursday's New York Post, Holmes' parents claim, "... their daughter did not know the teens involved in the assault and had just captured the incident on camera as she innocently rode the train," but they also admit that she had been arrested back in September for taking part in a separate subway attack.
Police are reportedly trying to identify both the attackers and the victim from the video.
Google Transit has been around since late last year, and as early as this February, public transit stops started to pop up on Google Maps, alongside other landmarks and locations, indicating the service was slowly moving into the mainstream. This morning, Google Transit is alive and kicking as a "graduate" of Google Labs. You'll now find a new link on top of your driving directions in Google Maps to toggle the public transit directions, be it bus, train, or boat--assuming you're in one of the 10 U.S. cities (or Japan) with supported transit systems. You'll get a step-by-step guide of where to catch a ride, where it'll drop you off, and when to get there, complete with bus/train/boat numbers, travel time, alternate routes, and fares.
Also neat is the option to turn on the traffic layer to see if your bus is going to hit major gridlock on the way there--helpful if you're relying on above-ground transportation. My absolute favorite feature, however, is the savings comparison. Google Maps will show you how much money you're saving by using public transportation compared to driving in your car. It gets these numbers by computing the mileage by the standard tax-deductible rate per mile, set by the IRS. Unfortunately it doesn't include things like toll bridges (yet), but it's a good way to eyeball if you're better off hopping in the car for a quick jaunt.
The bottom line is that Google Maps probably offers a better interface than your local transit authority. That coupled with driving directions, food recommendations, and the option to save your commonly used routes to use over and over, make it a more compelling solution. Just be careful though, not every transit system in your city could be included in Google's feeds. In the case of San Francisco, Google integrates Bay Area Rapid Transit just fine, however it ignores the inner-city Muni trains and CalTrans long-haul trains, which could lead you to an unfortunate, and expensive, three-hour bus ride.
Related:
Google Maps boosts public transportation data
Save your legs, social life with Walk Score
Figure out which buses to take, and how much money you could save using Google Maps' updated public transit view.
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