Get Your Brain-On

I’m addicted to interactive-ness, particularly things that make my mind work. My wife pokes fun at me every now and then about my perfect day being a day of no interruptions watching the History channel or any one of the Discovery channels. I know TV isn’t necessarily making my mind work but I’m addicted to trivia, how things work, what makes things work and such. I remember taking apart an altimeter that my father brought home once just to see what made it tic. After the springs and screws went everywhere I was addicted to discovering what makes a “thing” a “thing”. One of my favorite shows is “How It’s Made” on The Science Channel. Rather fascinating what goes into making things that we have a tendency to just take for granted in our day to day lives. Course sometimes the show can backfire on me. I’m still trying to convince my wife to buy hotdogs. Ever since seeing how they were made Oscar Meyer has been Persona non Grata on our menu of available munchies. I’m thankful she hasn’t seen the one on Vienna Sausages! Anyways, I digress…back to my posting. Of all the trivia and how things work etc., I really love to get involved with “brain-on” types of things. You know what I mean by brain-on right? Those little elements that make you turn your brain from lazy or stupefied or zoned-out-be-back-later settings to chewing on problem solving. Riddles, puzzles, cryptography/cryptograms (ever wonder where my moniker kryptikos came from?), and thinking games are just down right intriguing to me. I am a believer that your mind is the most powerful creation in the universe. Without it nothing else functions…so better to exercise it just as any other muscle.

I stumbled across this game the other day. It is called Launchball. It is a brain barbell developed for The Science Museum across the pond in London, England. The game is rather simplistic in goal, but the method is what is fun. The goal is to make your ball pop into a little box marked -aptly enough- “goal”. What makes this game fun and puzzling is you get to use different science elements to manipulate the track of the ball to the goal. For instance, let’s say you have a magnate, a power switch, a battery, a fan, a heating element, water and a generator. Your task is to find a correct method to utilize those elements in a fashion that will plop your ball in your goal. You are testing yourself against a clock…not a count down but a count up.

It is rather addictive. If you play it at work you might want to just do a quick scan for where you boss is standing, or have a good excuse for why you are practicing your hand eye coordination. I’ll admit the one puzzle that gave me the most frustration was trying to align a bunch of mirrors to refract a light beam just the right way to hit a solar panel and power up. Either way it is an excellent way to have fun and exercise “your little gray cells Hastings” (bonus points to you if you know where that saying came from).

How fast can you recognize a pattern and deploy your elements? Eye candy always enhances whatever one is talking about so here is a screenshot…click on it and it will take you to the Launchball page. A little something to tie up your weekend. Enjoy!

~Kryptikos

Daniel 2:30 ” As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me, not because I have greater wisdom than other living men, but so that you, O king, may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind.”