A New Scientist article refers to a study that claims Manfred von Richthofen’s, aka the Red Baron’s, legendary achievements to be largely thanks to luck. According to the study, statistically at least one German WW1 pilot ought to have won around 80 aerial victories in a row by pure chance.

This, of course, is not much of news, as it is well known by people interested in WW1 aerial combat (perhaps via the old Sierra computer game Red Baron) that Red Baron wasn’t a particularly skilled pilot. He was, however, very good at avoiding problems, and strictly followed a set of flight rules. He was, apparently, also quite good at shooting things.

The title of this entry, by the way, comes from a Tori Amos song of the same name.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine discusses illiteracy in the United States, pointing out that 12%, or roughly one in eight adult Americans have “below basic document literacy”, meaning that they cannot read transportation schedules, TV schedules, food labels, or other basic texts. 22% (one in 4.5), meanwhile, have “below basic quantative literacy”, which is to say that they have serious problems with maths.

This didn’t come as a great surprise to me, though, remembering a literacy campaign in Devon, UK, a few years back. Back then, local buses were filled with posters claiming that one in five Britons cannot read, and that one in four cannot count, and that something ought to be done about it.

It would be interesting to have some worldwide comparisons in literacy rates. Unfortunately, all that I have been able to find are ones that calculate very basic literacy skills, meaning that despite a significant pecentage of the population in countries like the UK and the US not being able to read much more than their names, the literacy rates of those countries are still reported as 99.9%.

New Scientist reports about a study that suggests sharing a bed is not such a good idea if you want to be cognitively in top form the next day.

I don’t really know in what way this could be news, but here it goes: “a cloned human would probably consider themselves to be an individual“.

More interesting than the claim, which I personally take to be a no-brainer (but what do I know?), is the way we have a singular “a cloned human”, which is used as the reference to the plural “themselves”. The marvels of language.

In a bid to come up with an experimental method which stands to scientific scrutiny, scientists at the University of Manchester have created a virtual computer world to test telepathic ability. Many, if not most, of the previous studies in telepathy and ESP in general have had major flaws in their methods, so it will be interesting to see how this one will ultimately be commented upon.

Last night I was bored, not at all sleepy and had a total inertia against doing anything useful. So, I did what every normal person would do: I browsed the web. And lo and behold, I came across something very interesting.

The first thing I found (by explicitly searching for it) was an online version of Hamurabi, which was one of the first computer games ever made. It is an extremely simple text-based strategy game where you run a small nation by making decisions about land trade, feeding people and harvests. I think I have actually twice written an advanced Hamurabi clone myself, although I don’t have the source codes anymore. One was with Turbo Pascal, I think, and another with Visual Basic 5.0, if I remember correctly.

After having some fun with Hamurabi I started thinking that maybe they have some other big favourites of mine available Online. So, the next search was for Alter Ego, and there it was an online version of Alter Ego. Now, this 1986 game must be one of the most brilliant pieces of software ever. In it, you take the role of a person literally from birth onwards, and “live” as that person by making a series of decisions. If you have never experienced Alter Ego, you really ought to. I have spent countless of hours with it.

Finally, I started wondering how much interactive fiction there is available online. Turns out, rather much. The most interesting place I found has got to be this website where you can play Infocom’s adventure titles online. Infocom, of course, made the best Interactive Fiction titles. Planetfall and Stationfall are my favourites, although Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (written by Douglas Adams himself) is definitely worth a try. It is totally impossible to solve the game, of course, but it’s fun nevertheless. Too bad the website doesn’t have Adams’s other interactive fiction title available, the 1987 game Bureaucracy. Maybe I will search for it later on.