Evil syndicate has built a 10 floor pyramid. This pyramid has a lot of empty rooms, while there is one control room, which hosts control machine for the super weapon, which you must destroy. The problem is that you do not exactly know on which floor the control room is. You only have a couple cryptic clues...

Mike Rugnetta and the team behind the PBS Idea Channel each week tackle an interesting idea or question related to the contemporary life. We share their video in which they tackle a question intimately related to the themes covered in Physics of Risk blog - how to control social systems (see related post).

See this SciShow video about why we prefer "pink" noise over "brown" noise. It appears that listening to "pink" noise might also help us concentrate.

Parliament elections are coming to Lithuania and thus we invite our readers to check against being phished. We suggest a TEDx talk by Nobel prize laureate Robert Shiller as a source for mental exercise. In this talk he present the main ideas behind his latest book "Phishing for phools".

Often politicians and other big world "shakers" make obvious or crude choices. Afterwards they are shocked by the unforeseen consequences.

One of the simplest examples is the car pollution problem. We are all well aware that gasoline powered cars produce a lot of CO₂ and that electric cars do not. Thus it appears straightforward to encourage the usage of electric cars. But in some countries this approach does not solve the pollution problem. Why? Because electricity used to charge electric cars is still produced by burning coal, which also produces pollutants. So the pollution problem is simply moved from the transportation sector to the electric power industry.

Mexico city took different approach to the same problem. They banned driving cars with certain plate numbers from driving on certain days of the week. E.g., if your car plate number ends in 3 or 5, then on Tuesday you would be banned to drive it. So the air pollution should decrease by 1/7th, but it did not. In fact the air pollution rose. Why? Because people saw other problem - the plate number. So they solved it by buying cheap old cars, which would have different plate number. Thus these cars served as a replacement for the "main" car on the "banned" days.

These problems could be foreseen by using computer games! Seeing how people act in virtual environments. Understanding what incentives do our regulations create.

We invite you to watch a video by Extra Credits on this topic.