Dots: a Simple Game That May be Harder Than it Looks

Dots
Athey Educational, U.K.

"Connect the dots and try to make more boxes than the computer."

I lost my first game, 49-0.

"Dots" is, as far as I can tell, the same as a pencil-and-paper game my wife taught our kids. I asked her, just now, what it was called. She shrugged her shoulders and told me it was "a dot-to-dot game," but she didn't have a name for it.

Despite my first encounter's outcome, I think this Dots game is fun.

Online Color Wheel: Dial Your Own Color Scheme

Color Scheme Designer
colorschemedesigner.com
2002–2009 © Petr Stanicek • Version 3.0

Mostly, this website is fun.

You can use the interactive page to create a color scheme with one color, complimentary colors, a triad, a tetrad, analogous colors, or an "accented analogic" scheme. Sounds complicated, but all there is to it is dialing around a color wheel - with the option of making a few adjustments.

You can look at light and dark web page mockup of the scheme you make.

And, what makes this something more than a toy, it's possible to export information about the scheme you come up with.

This won't put professional artists and Web designers out of business: but it's fun, and potentially useful for someone who needs to design a color scheme.

Exoplanets With Water: Blue Clue

"New Technique Could Reveal Exoplanets with Water"
Space.com (June 1, 2009)

"When it comes to life as we know it, nothing is more important than liquid water. Now scientists have devised a way to spot water on distant planets that can only barely be seen now, which in turn could reveal whether they might be able to support life.

"In the past two decades, astronomers have detected more than 300 planets orbiting alien stars. Although most of these exoplanets are gas giants similar to Jupiter, powerful space telescopes such as the one aboard NASA's recently launched Kepler Mission will make it easier to detect smaller rocky exoplanets similar to Earth...."

The article describes, briefly, how scientists had NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft take two pictures of Earth at two different times, from millions of miles away. Reducing each picture to a single pixel, which is about as big an image of Earth as we're likely to get at this point, they analyzed the color of the pixel.

At one-pixel resolution, Earth is mostly gray. There's a bit of blue, and a bit of red, though: and how much changes, depending on where clouds are - and aren't.

Other chemicals are mostly blue, too: like Neptune's methane. But in Neptune's case, it's equally blue, day in and day out.

Earth's blueness varies with its rotation and cloud cover. So, presumably, would another planet with big patches of water on its surface. And, a planet with that much liquid water might also have life.

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Related posts, at

• "A Serious Search for Other Worlds, Life, and - Maybe - Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"