Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy: New Research Says #42 Really Is Our Number

Just 11 months before his death in 2001, famous author Douglas Adams answered questions from Slashdot readers. And Slashdot reader Informativity still remembers how Adams (also a Doctor Who script editor) had included a supercomputer named Deep Thought in his first book which spent 7.5 million years to determine that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and…

Who Will Be the First Guest Host of Jeopardy, Alex?

thomst writes: Variety is reporting that uber-champion Ken Jennings will be the first of a series of guest hosts to substitute for the late, great Alex Trebek on trivia-maven game show Jeopardy! Executive Producer Mike Richards revealed that, when production resumes on November 30, Jennings will be the first of a series of guest hosts of the program, as the show…

EA Releases Source Code and 4K Remasters For Two ‘Command and Conquer’ Games

EA Games has just released The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection on Steam, described by Hot Hardware as two of the ’90s-era real-time strategy games that “were incredibly popular in their day and are still popular with retro gamers today…” “Gamers can change between legacy and remastered 4K graphics in real-time when playing solo mode,” they note, adding that “deep support…

Coronavirus quarantine useful lessons for future space travel?

Understanding isolation’s effects on regular people, rather than those certified to have ‘the right stuff,’ will help prepare us for the future, whether another pandemic or interplanetary space travel. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/coronavirus-quarantine-useful-lessons-for-future-space-travel…

HQ Trivia, the Once-Popular Mobile Game, Is Shutting Down

CNN Business has learned that the once-popular live mobile trivia game “HQ Trivia” is shutting down. From the report: When HQ launched in 2017, its first game HQ Trivia quickly attracted millions of people across the world who stopped whatever they were doing twice a day to play the game on their smartphones. The company was profiled by The New York…

Robot Analysts Outwit Humans on Investment Picks, Study Shows

They beat us at chess and trivia, supplant jobs by the thousands, and are about to be let loose on highways and roads as chauffeurs and couriers. Now, fresh signs of robot supremacy are emerging on Wall Street in the form of machine stock analysts that make more profitable investment choices than humans. From a report: At least, that’s the upshot…

Cranberries: More than a holiday side dish

Fun facts about this floating fruit, the blueberry’s bitter cousin. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/lifeform-of-the-week-cranberries-at-their-bitter-best…

Why Aren’t We Curious About the Things We Want To Be Curious About?

Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, writes: You can learn anything on the internet, so why do I so often learn things I don’t want to know? When I’m surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe’s political history or the nature of quasars, but I end up reading trivia like a…

Celebrating the 28th Anniversary of the Linux Kernel

Exactly 28 years ago today, a 21-year-old student named Linus Torvalds made a fateful announcement on the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix. i-Programmer commemorates today’s anniversary with some interesting trivia: Back in 1991 the fledgling operating system didn’t have a name, according to Joey Sneddon’s 27 Interesting Facts about Linux: Linux very nearly wasn’t called Linux! Linus wanted to call his “hobby” project…