Puzzles:

• Lewis Carroll logic puzzles
• "Traffic Jam" - a truly nasty sliding block puzzle
• The "missing square" puzzle is an old one, but still a good one.
• The vanishing leprechaun is another puzzle in the same spirit.
• Theseus and the Minotaur
• Blue-eyed islanders
• Mixing white sand with black sand
• Classical games, and how AI has fared in solving them.
• Notpron – a sequence of lateral-thinking visual web puzzles
• Funny farm – a word association puzzle
• Self-referential IQ test
• Planarity game – good for developing some abstract math skills
• Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy – classic text adventure, now online and illustrated

Humour:

• Hugh Gallagher's college application essay
• Kangaroos, the Air force, and Object-Oriented programming
• Ban dihydrogen monoxide!
• Stereotypical anthropomorphisations of the three major operating systems.
• Xkcd - romance, sarcasm, math, language

• The difference between scientists and normal people (see also this refinement)

Interesting concepts, phenomena, theories and laws:

• Arrow’s theorem – democratic systems are always susceptible to at least some manipulation.  (See also my short story on the topic, also available in PDF.)
• Baumol's cost disease - Productivity gains are not homogeneous within the economy.  (See also this New Yorker article on the topic.)
• Bell’s inequality – Some experimentally verified predictions of quantum mechanics are incompatible with any classical local explanation. (See also my blog post relating to this topic.)
• Benford’s law – 30% of all numbers start with the digit 1!
• Birthday paradox – coincidences are more frequent than one might naively expect
• Braess’ paradox – increasing capacity can decrease network performance
• Broken window fallacy – The purpose of work is to increase value, not to keep people busy
• Cosmic distance ladder – the quintessential example of iterated indirect measurement.  (See also my slides and blog post on the topic.)
• Diffie-Hellman key exchange – You can communicate securely and secretly with a total stranger on an open network!
• Goodhart's law - metrics become inaccurate once they are used to guide policy.
• Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics – applying the laws of QM literally leads to consistent but unintuitive consequences.  (See also my blog post relating to this topic.)
• Maslow’s pyramid – People seek to satisfy physical needs first, then emotional, then intellectual
• Portfolio theory – The investments with the most return and least risk should occupy the bulk of the portfolio, but not all
• Punctuated equilibrium – evolution can be both stable and sudden
• Ricardo’s law of comparative advantage – regardless of absolute ability, everyone has something to contribute in trade
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – does language control thought?
• Simpson’s paradox – you can have a superior average in every sub-category of activity, but still have an inferior average overall
• Small world phenomenon – six billion people can be connected by only six degrees of separation
• Uncanny Valley – Non-human interfaces are more easily accepted than nearly-human interfaces
• Web 2.0 – Interaction of user-generated content from many different formats
• Zero-knowledge proofs – You can convince someone that you can solve a problem, without revealing anything about the solution!

Misc:

• Evolved Virtual Creatures
• “Nice guys finish first” (W. F. Allman, Science 84, 5(8), October 1984: 24-32).  Unfortunately this excellent article appears to not be available online.
• Visual representation of the US discretionary federal budget – where do the tax dollars go, anyway?
• Virtual slide rule
• "How Americans are living dangerously" (Jeffrey Kluger, TIME, Nov 26, 2006) - a comparison of real and perceived risk
• "Math will rock your world" (Cover story, BusinessWeek, Jan 23, 2006)
• "Pearls before breakfast" (Gene Weingarten, Washington Post, Apr 8 2007) - what happens when a world-class violinist goes busking?
• Scratch - a surprisingly intuitive graphical programming language
• How to evolve a watch

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