chess

A conversation about the upcoming French Open between three tennis fans: Sydneysider Lucy Perkins, New Yorker Asad Raza, and Ecuadorian-North Carolinian Juan José Vallejo.
Asad Raza: Hey guys, thanks for coming aboard the 3quarksdaily raft.  So here we are at Roland Garros time, again, where for the last several years Rafa Nadal has been the bear that eats Roger Federer.  J.J., you have the best account of the state of their rivalry I've heard.  Care to run through it?

It answers challenging questions and competes against humans on a television game show. "What is IBM's Watson technology?"

Engineers at Big Blue have developed a question-and-answer system dubbed Watson, and the company believes it can challenge and win against contestants on Jeopardy, a television game show produced by Sony Pictures Television and shown by CBS Television Distribution.

On “the sequencing of the mathematical genome”
Mathematics is funnier than it gets credit for, and the best laugh I ever had about math involved a friend in college and a course so intimidating he almost quit his mathematics major after hearing the name. “Advanced Calculus—A rigorous approach,” it was called, a title that betrayed a martinet attitude. Whereas your average multivariable calc class was flabby and slack-ass, here you’d finally get some goddamn discipline, boy. You will throw up.