The new XCOM game is ridiculously addictive. I only managed to break my addiction by setting a sufficiently high difficulty that play became frustrating, and I'm still in danger of relapsing.

You may take this as a recommendation or a caution. :-)

Funny strip about seeing yourself as an NPC.

Since we still don't have a lectures/talks thread I put it here:

http://fora.tv/conference/the_singularity_summit_2012/buy_programs

The Singularity Summit 2012

Content:

• Singularity Summit: Opening Remarks with Nathan Labenz
• Temple Grandin: How Different People Think Differently
• Singularity Summit: Olah, Deming & Other Thiel Fellows
• Julia Galef: Rationality and the Future
• Luke Muehlhauser: The Singularity, Promise and Peril
• Linda Avey: Personal Genomics
• Steven Pinker: A History of Vio
• Ray Kurzweil: How to Create a Mind
• Q&A: Economist Daniel Kahneman, the Pioneer of Heuristics
• Melanie Mitchell: AI and the Barrier of Meaning
• Author Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future
• Robin Hanson: Extraordinary Society of Emulated Minds
• Jaan Tallinn: Why Now? A Quest in Metaphysics
• John Wilbanks: Your Health, Your Data, Your Choices
• Stuart Armstrong: How We're Predicting AI
• Vernor Vinge: Who's Afraid of First Movers?
• Peter Norvig: Channeling the Flood of Data

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments:

http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

If you want a free computer game that is highly delightful and not especially addictive, I recommend Cave Story. (Even in the worst case, if you feel overly compelled to play it, it's an RPG with a finite storyline so its opportunity for damage is pretty limited.)

There really is an art to finding break activities that have a high rejuvenation rate per minute but can also be put down easily...

I am terribly amused by the parody Nate Silver twitter feed:

A man boasts to me of Momentum, his greatest invention. "To victory," he cries, taking flight. I light a candle from the wax of his wings.

Go to the ocean. Cup your hands and drink its salty foam. This is your sample size. What lurks within its abyssal depths?

Lloyd, A Turing Test for Free Will:

Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This paper investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and computation in free will. Although quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds randomness only to decision-making processes, not freedom. By contrast, the theory of computation implies that, even when our decisions arise from a completely deterministic decision-making process, the outcomes of that process can be intrinsically unpredictable, even to—especially to—ourselves. I argue that this intrinsic computational unpredictability of the decision-making process is what gives rise to our impression that we possess free will. Finally, I propose a ‘Turing test’ for free will: a decision-maker who passes this test will tend to believe that he, she, or it possesses free will, whether the world is deterministic or not.

Glitch is an excellent infinite peaceful MMORPG that involves harvesting from egg plants and making cheese from butterfly butter. After two days I vowed never to play it again lest I become addicted and die.