Mining the Past

The period and not-so period language of Mad Men as analyzed by Benjamin Schmidt using n-grams and big a collection of historical text. See his blog, Sapping Attention, for more interesting historical bits on things such as gender and authorship.

RPS

Alas, another area of unique human endeavor falls to computation. See the Wikipedia entry for details about the remarkably long history of the game.

Lessons in Insurgency

The On the Media blog reports on research into the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War:

A researcher conducted thousands of interviews in the Cambodian countryside with people who’d narrowly survived bombings .... What he found was that the still nascent Khmer Rouge was using the U.S. bombing campaign as a recruitment and incitement tool. A Khmer Rouge representative would show up on your farm just after you’d been bombed by the U.S. and capitalize on your anger to swell their ranks. Our ‘secret’ war inadvertently bolstered the Khmer Rouge which would go on to commit one of the bloodiest genocides in the 20th century.

Emphasis mine. There's a lesson here for the US drone campaign in the Middle East and Africa.