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First time accepted submitter briglass writes “Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It’s been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility

via ThisIsWhyImBroke.com The Internet Box

Dilbert readers – Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

via Dilbert Daily Strip Comic for August 11, 2013

A study published last week in the New England Journal suggests that blood sugar levels may be a more important indicator than previously realized for non-diabetics: high blood sugar levels were linked by the study’s authors with increased risk of dementia (summary free; full article paywalled). The study followed more than 2,000 elderly participants, and found a positive correlation between blood glucose levels and development of dementia, both for patients with and without diabetes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via Slashdot Study Ties High Blood Sugar To Dementia

via How to Carve Roast Unicorn WOLVERINE, PREDATOR, THOR & MORE! YAY, IT’S FRIDAY!

Johnny Cash gives James Bond a new sort of soul with “Thunderball,” the theme song for the eponymous spy flick. This is the harpoon-laced opening sequence to the 1965 adaptation, with the lyrics of the song describing the film’s story.

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via Gizmodo Johnny Cash: Thunderball

If you work with command line and know your SQL, q a great tool to use:
q allows you to query your text files or standard input with SQL. You can:
SELECT c1, COUNT(*) FROM /home/shlomi/tmp/my_file.csv GROUP BY c1
And you can:
SELECT all.c2 FROM /tmp/all_engines.txt AS all LEFT JOIN /tmp/innodb_engines.txt AS inno USING (c1, c2) WHERE inno.c3 IS NULL
And you can also combine with your favourite shell commands and tools:
grep “my_term” /tmp/my_file.txt | q “SELECT c4 FROM – JOIN /home/shlomi/static.txt USING (c1)” | xargs touch
Some of q’s functionality (and indeed, SQL functionality) can be found in command line tools. You can use grep for pseudo WHERE filtering, or cut for projecting, but you can only get so far with cat my_file.csv | sort | uniq -c | sort -n. SQL is way more powerful for working with tabulated data, and so q makes for a great addition into one’s toolbox.
The tool is authored by my colleague Harel Ben-Attia, and is in daily use over at our company (it is in fact installed on all production servers).
It is of course free and open source (get it on GitHub, where you can also find documentation), and very easy to setup. Enjoy!

via Planet MySQL Tool of the day: q

It seems as though every day we read (and write) about another amazing new breakthrough, be it medical, technological, epicurean, or other. And then we wait… and wait… and wait… and… hey, just a minute. Where’d that quantum computer go?

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via Gizmodo Where Do All Those Amazing Discoveries Go, Anyway?

Humans have long wished to see through the eyes of other animals—like Bran Stark’s Warg ability, say—but so far the best we’ve achieved is mounting GoPros on them. One Harvard research team, though, has just brought us a step closer to that goal with a prototype noninvasive brain-to-brain interface allowing test subjects to control a rat’s tail with nothing more than their thoughts.

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via Gizmodo Harvard Scientists Have Just Invented Human-Rat Telepathy

WordPress keeps being the favorite content management system for startups. This has many reasons, not the least because it is a robust and easy to handle system. Also, you can show your content in a very elegant way with low or no budget required. No wonder, this sounds appealing to a lot of people. With more and more websites being powered by WordPress, theme developers go pedal to the metal to satisfy the needs even of those not easily satisfied in terms of design. Here are the new entries in the WordPress theme arena from the month of July 2013. Enjoy!

via noupe 20 Fresh WordPress Themes: Edition July 2013