Fun Research

Thrombosis and haemostasis research: stimulating, hard work and fun.

Thromb Haemost 2007; 98: 8–15 To do research is to be inquisitive, to be prepared to set out in unexpected directions in response to new findings – be they negative or positive. Research is like an incurable infectious disease – once you’ve got it, you’ve got it for life. A negative result or a result that contradicts what you previously believed often leads to new ideas and inventions. Researc...

The Biology of Fun and the Fun of Biology

Biology is known for is being rather unpredictable; people often tell us we are a bit 'quirky', and they generally mean this as a compliment. This likely relates to the 'pleasure of novelty': it is a common experience that when something, even a great work of art, is experienced too often within a short period of time, the pleasure evoked strongly diminishes. The idea of 'fun' in work does not ...

Artificial Fun: Mapping Minds to the Space of Fun

Yampolskiy and others have shown that the space of possible minds is vast, actually infinite (Yampolskiy, 2015). A question of interest is “Which activities can minds perform during their lifetime?” This question is very broad, thus in this article restricted to “Which non-boring activities can minds perform?” The space of potential non-boring activities has been called by Yudkowsky “fun space”...

Inverting Onto Fun tions

Exploiting BitTorrent For Fun

This paper assesses BitTorrent’s robustness against selfish peers, who try to download more than their fair share by abusing existing protocol mechanisms. We design and implement three selfish-peer exploits and evaluate their effectiveness on public and private torrents. In practice, BitTorrent appears quite robust against this kind of exploit: selfish peers can sometimes obtain more bandwidth,...