David Merrill: Siftables, the toy blocks that think

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

"A Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie.... They can sense their movement and they can sense each other. They have a screen and a wireless radio," Merrill explains on the video.

These Siftables are paintbuckets of color, which can mix colors on the blank block merely by touching a paint color to it.

Merrill also shows the blocks doing arithmetic, serving as a cross between Scrabble and Boggle, and playing music. While these are simple examples, the ways in which they embody and deliver concepts suggest this is only the beginning of what they could do.

Thanks for the pointer to Marshall Votta of Greenville, who's aggregating a Red Sox Report on Twitter.

Oldie but goodie: Venice from Above. Wonderful bird's-eye views of the city's islands from the Denver Post photo blog.