If you are a real vocabulary nerd

[bunnyjadwiga]

Play Free Rice.

Yes, it donates rice to starving people. (No, Juergen I did NOT do 45 minutes of exhaustive searching to make sure this is a charity our family can support.) It is through the United Nations World Food Programme (http://www.wfp.org/english/?n=681), though, so *I'm* pretty comfortable with it.

But it is the coolest, most complex vocabulary quiz EVAR on the net. Have fun.

Comments

[hakerh.livejournal.com]

Plus, it's wicked addictive.

[stefsoap.livejournal.com]

My youngest keeps asking me if we've donated enough rice for a family to eat.

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

This site says that 2000 grains is a typical individual daily portion.

Sounds high to me, but I've never counted.

[cbpotts.livejournal.com]

Sort of off topic, but if anyone would know, it would be you: what is the name of the story about a trickster who wins a bet with a king, and there's a chessboard, and on the first square the king has to put one grain of rice and on the second, two, and on the third, fourth, the amount of rice doubling each time until the entire kingdom is impoverished and sailing ships laden down with rice must be dispatched to pay the king's debt?

(And if there's not a book of this, and I've made this up, I apologize in advance. But I'm pretty sure I read it somewhere. It's not the type of well thought out neat plot I'm capable of creating)

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

Here are two tellings of the fable.
http://mathforum.org/~sanders/geometry/GP11Fable.html
http://www.soylentred.net/2007/03/rice-rice-baby
I have seen it in many places. "The Fable of the Caliph and the Chessboard" is a typical name, but there are many others.

[cbpotts.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[peregrinning.livejournal.com]

I keep topping out at 47, and I'm just headstrong enough to want to get up past 48 at least once... Plus I feel good about doing it.

[hakerh.livejournal.com]

I got to 49 for a little while, but I think that was pure luck. :)

[ladypeyton.livejournal.com]

Heee! They just used one of my favorite words! Foment (to incite)! If it stays as dull and boring here at work as it has been in the past 2 days I think I'll be able to feed a small town! Thanks for the link!

[montuos]

*grin* Master James of Rutland once tossed off a few lines of a filk: "We gather together to foment sedition..." ([Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] can remember more of it than I.) I have wished for well over a decade that he'd ever finished it, but no, it seems to have been an off-the-cuff one-shot, alas.

[amazon-42.livejournal.com]

I heard about the site on the NBC nightly news, so it can't be that awful. Although Juergen's definition of "awful" may be different.

It's not a scam, anyway.

[mjcan.livejournal.com]

love it

[mjcan.livejournal.com]

i think i will give my environmentsal science students extra credit for this. SAT words and feeding people less fortunate. 1 credit for every 1000 grains. added on to the gpa will mean something.

[mistresshuette.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this! It was fun and addictive. I had to stop at 3000 grains of rice. It seems that the highest level you can get is 50, which I had no problem maintaining.