Captionistas Wanted: This year's New Yorker cartoon competition, slightly more challenging than last year's is now online, awaiting witty captions until November 20.
posted by MiguelCardoso on Nov 4, 2002 - 48 comments

How much freedom should we trade for our security? That is the title of this years Economist/Shell essay competition. The winner will receive $20,000 as well as inclusion in The Economist: The World in 2003. The closing date is August 15. Anyone feel like entering? If I can learn to write English in time I may submit an essay that takes the form of a discussion between a 68 year old Japanese American ex-internee and a 7 year old Israeli girl.
posted by RobertLoch on Apr 22, 2002 - 14 comments

Remember Zork, Planetfall, and the other creations of late game company Infocom? Well, "interactive fiction," as the format is called, is still alive and well. Every year the IF community -- which is known for releasing work of quality far surpassing even Infocom's masterpieces -- holds a competition for short works, and this year's contestants have been released! Read this post's comments for more info...
posted by tweebiscuit on Sep 30, 2001 - 13 comments

Alberta will face a disastrous competitive and economic disadvantage if Canada signs the Kyoto accord. Meanwhile, this year has been one of the worst for smog in Toronto. Some municipalities in Ontario are voluntarily looking towards alternate energy sources because they feel, in the long run the costs will be lower (lower health costs, avoiding higher fossil fuel costs, etc. - sorry, no link) What do you think? Is it possible to have economically viable alternative energy, and is the US setting a bad example for countries that feel they need to compete?
posted by nprigoda on Jul 24, 2001 - 12 comments

The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other 'millenium prize problems'] the clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M
posted by palegirl on May 24, 2000 - 3 comments

The Great Blog-Off is coming- so far 8 bloggers will be madly competing for 24 hours to find the best links on the web on an as-yet-unknown topic. A lesson in futility or potentially dirty, self-absorbed fun? Discuss amongst yourselves.
posted by wisdom on May 9, 2000 - 5 comments

Saatchi and Saatchi are once again accepting submissions for their innovation in communication awards. The deadline is approaching, and your idea better be revolutionary. Look at some of the past winners (I'd add a direct link here, but it's all flash), there are some amazing innovations there. The site is a little overboard on the flash, I know they won an award for their previous contest site, but the current one is hard to navigate, slow to load, and offers no non-flash alternative. Odd that they want to enhance communication, but their site is kind of hostile to that ideal.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2000 - 1 comment

The finalists for the SXSW web competition have been announced. I'm sad to see that a site I urged the owner to enter, evolt.org, did not make the cut in the online community category. I'll be pulling for a couple cool sites I like and read regularly when I'm at SXSW next month. Do you see any favorites on the finalist list?
posted by mathowie on Feb 5, 2000 - 1 comment