The Frequency of Wars

Wars are increasingly frequent, and the trend has been steadily upward since 1870.The main tradition of Western political and philosophical thought suggests that extensive economic globalization and democratization over this period should have reduced appetites for war far below their current level. This view is clearly incomplete: at best, confounding factors are at work. Here, we explore the capacity to wage war. Most fundamentally, the growing number of sovereign states has been closely associated with the spread of democracy and increasing commercial openness, as well as the number of bilateral conflicts. Trade and democracy are traditionally thought of as goods, both in themselves, and because they reduce the willingness to go to war, conditional on the national capacity to do so. But the same factors may also have been increasing the capacity for war, and so its frequency. We need better understanding of how to promote these goods without incurring adverse side-effects on world peacewars, state capacity, democracy, trade

Video games as American popular culture

Video games have moved, possibly surpassing even movies, into a central role in American popular culture in a relatively short time, and today there is increasing evidence that the video game console –to some extent, as much as the personal computer– has emerged as a central media device through which “convergence culture” is taking place. In the world of massively multiplayer online games, new (and very real) economies and cultures have evolved with striking rapidity, while on a very different scale we see casual games like Angry Birds (2009) and Candy Crush (2012) increasingly becoming integrated into the rhythms of everyday life. Perhaps more than any other aspect of popular culture, video games have blurred the distinction between work and play; the games we play (and work at) tell us about American popular culture and where it is going

The experience and exploration of worlds in single-player video games

The author indicates a few of the most common experiences that are encountered, particularly in single-player open-world games where exploration of the world plays a large part of the enjoyment of a game. The experiences mentioned in the essay are: arrival in the world, the gaining of an objective, the revelation of the expansiveness of the world, the first contact with the world’s residents, world routines, travel to the world’s boundaries, and the completist’s exhaustion of the world when one has seen and experienced everything.The author indicates a few of the most common experiences that are encountered, particularly in single-player open-world games where exploration of the world plays a large part of the enjoyment of a game. The experiences mentioned in the essay are: arrival in the world, the gaining of an objective, the revelation of the expansiveness of the world, the first contact with the world’s residents, world routines, travel to the world’s boundaries, and the completist’s exhaustion of the world when one has seen and experienced everything

Anagram Crossword Logic Puzzle

Most words in this crossword puzzle are anagrams of other words in the puzzle, such that definitions can refer to each other in such a way as to make the whole puzzle a logic puzzle in addition to being a crossword puzzle. Using the clues below, figure out what the words are, and solve the puzzle

Elemental Crossword

With a little bit of imagination, the Periodic Table of Elements can be seen as a rather strange and inelegant crossword puzzle, which is asymmetrical in form and contains such bizarre words like RbSrYZrNbMoTcRuRhPd and HLiNaKCuRbAgCaAuFr . After major readjustments, here is a crossword puzzle that solves some of those problems. Each square of the solution contains an element, which, when combined, completes a real word. Some elements are used more often than others, of course, and some are not used at all. One of the interesting things about this crossword is that it is not always clear from the boxes how many letters are in any given word, since most elements contain two letters. The same word, for example, can be constructed in more than one way, or even appear in different lengths (for example, catches could be Ca-Tc-He-S , Ca-Tc-H-Es , C-At-C-He-S , or C-At-C-H-Es ). In case you don\u27t have a Periodic Table of Elements handy, here are all 103 named elements, in order, over half of which appear in the puzzle

Word Worm Maze

Starting with the A in the upper left-hand corner, find a word by moving adjacently letter to letter, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, one letter at a time. When you reach the last letter of the word, move to an adjacent letter and start the next word, and continue doing so until you reach a word ending in Z in the lower right-hand corner