Category: Education

It sometimes happens that a certain word eludes me. I know it exists, I even know what it sounds like or how it begins or ends -- but for the life of me, I can't recall what the exact word is. For situations like these, Tip of My Tongue can come in very handy. To find the word "download," I only had to tell it that it starts and ends with D, has W somewhere in the middle, and means ...

Google Sky Map for Android has just been updated to bring us the exciting features of multi-touch pinch-to-zoom and Time Travel! The official site hasn't been updated yet, but you can definitely pick it up from the Android Market on your phone -- the QR code is included after the break. While pinch-to-zoom is nice, the Time Travel feature is something that Sky Map users have long been clamoring ...

Language is a living thing. As the world changes, new words are invented, and older ones fade away and go out of circulation. Some would say that's the nature of the Universe. But do all of these words really have to die? After all, it's fun to use a unique word every now and then – it keeps your text from becoming too vappous. Save The Words is a project that's related to Oxford ...

For programmers and other nerds, reading computer books is kind of like eating your greens: it's often no fun, but it is important. If you code for a living, you may already have a corporate subscription to Safari Books Online. But even with the incredible selection you can find on Safari Books, it's not always convenient to have to be online while reading. Granted, you can download some of the ...

I know the screenshot doesn't look like much. Wow, a bunch of dots – how exciting is that? But in Gravity, it's not what the dots look like – it's how they move. You see, each of these little dots is a virtual particle with its own "mass." The larger dots have significantly more mass than the tiny ones – more than just the visual difference. They seem to be about three times as ...

So, the other day I wrote about a website that helps you figure out whether or not it's raining somewhere. It turns out that this is a whole category of websites, but I think I just found the most useful "minimalistic information" website yet: It's called Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet, and seeks to answer just that question. At the time of writing, the answer is "Nope" ...

Most commercial products run a fairly set course; you get Microsoft Office 1.5, then 1.6, 3.0, 4.0, all the way up to office 2010 (For Windows, at least). It's a fairly orderly progression, with version numbers rising over time – pretty easy to follow. Open-source projects are a different beast, however. When enough developers don't like the direction a project is going, they sometimes just ...

Intellectual property is one of the most hotly debated subjects online. Should there be patents or not? And what can be patented? And once you have a patent, when is it fair to protect it? But to argue about these things, everyone should have the terminology down. What exactly is a patent? And what's a registered trademark? And what, then, is a registered design (which I did not know)? Sprocket ...

I love learning new words. However, when I just read what a word means, more often than not I soon forget the definition. If I use the word in a number of sentences, though, it's easier for me to retain it – especially if the sentences are meaningful. Phrays is a nifty little Web application built on this exact principle. You're supposed to go there once a day and check out the word of the ...

Here's something that I do all the time: when I want to know how to use a certain word or phrase, I just google it. And when I'm trying to decide on one of two options, I just google them both and see which one is more common, or how it works in a sentence. I use it a lot when I translate ("do people really say that?"), but I also use it when I just write in English. And now, Phras.in lets me do ...

I've always wanted to do something musical. But having received no musical education and not coming from a musically-inclined family, I find myself dreading the subject and feeling that it's all a bit too much for me. I'm speaking mainly of the theoretical side of it, which has to do with figuring out all of those scales and then telling them apart. Theta Music Trainer has shown me that I might ...

Wolfram Alpha is fantastic, but it has one big problem: it's not intuitive. I mean, the interface is intuitive enough – it's a Google-esque single text field where you type anything you want. However, the average Web user has become so conditioned to search engines that what Alpha does is not always fully apparent. After all, when you search for something in Alpha you don't get a page with ...

Show World (actually written with an inexplicable (R) mark in the middle) is a world map with a twist: you choose a metric, and the Flash-based map twists and morphs to reflect it. The screenshot above shows a world map, as you've probably recognized. But the reason the map looks so weird is that the size of each country reflects the amount of poultry that it raises. When you mouse over a ...

Last year, big G launched its 'Go Google' ad campaign promoting its Google Apps service to both individuals and businesses. Using a community map, tweets, and photos, people around the world shared their Google Apps stories (sounds riveting). Over the year, the Google Apps user base has grown from two to three million businesses, servicing more than 30 million users. To continue the upward ...

When I wrote about Word Domination, several Download Squad readers commented and proposed WHATSTHISW?RD as a possible alternative. It's as plain as can be: you write an English word with question marks in place of the letters you don't know, and it comes up with a number of alternatives. It does not support multi-letter wildcards (like d*squad); it only supports single characters. That makes ...