So I have kids and I am constantly looking for fun, educational, entertaining, games for them to play.  I like discovering open source free applications that satisfy this most of all.

Some examples of great programs: tux paint and tux typing.

Phun is different.  Where those two programs excel in teaching kids, Phun is just fun.

It's interactive in a way that not many programs are.  It actually has the playability that feels much like an RTS.  It does what you make it do now.  You add something and the environment acts upon it.

Watch this video.

And it's a toy...except it isn't: 

Radial engine:

Gears:

It's a remarkable achievement.

One big benefit I see in Phun over the other kid applications I've found is that Phun uses an almost standard application user interface.  The user needs to navigate menus and toolbars and context menus.  The other kid apps focus on learning something or doing something.  Phun does that also, but because of its complexity the standard UI is leveraged as the simplest solution.

This is a great side benefit.  Kids get exposure to the standard UI and how applications work.  This has direct impact on any and all other applications they might encounter.

If you have kids go get this program now.  Install it, run it and watch your kids be sucked in for hours.  Heck go do it yourself.  It's really addicting.

Update:  Garrett Lisi is called on the carpet by a fellow physicist Luboš Motl for shoddy work.  Debunked?

Why? Well, we have seen that a completely continuous spectrum of people between serious physicists and manifest crackpots has been created and the recent fashionable trend is to accept an ever broader set of passionate amateurs and undereducated, intellectually challenged loons into the physics circles. [emphasis mine]

But the article is filled with vitriol and me being a layman when it comes to physics of this depth can't make a clear call as of right now as to what is true or false.

Anyways, I'll fall back on the truism, if it looks too good to be true then it probably is.  String theory has years of blackboard chalk and millions of lines of code behind it trying to disprove it and it hasn't been brought down yet.

Hadron collider, tell us what is the truth.

Posted previously:

Garrett Lisi - Surfer...Snowboarder...Supra-Genius!

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

Yes that is Garrett in the middle also.

Einstein for the 21st Century.

From what I gather there has been a breakthrough over the past several years with regards to an elegant geometric pattern named E8. It was first discovered in 1887 but only completely understood this year by mathematicians.

To solve that problem it took a huge effort.

Mathematicians are known for their solitary style of working, but the combined assault on what is described as "one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics" required the effort of 18 mathematicians from America and Europe for an intensive four-year collaboration.

Once the structure of E8 was understood, Garrett Lisi had a basis upon which to build his work.

In fact the article from last March regarding the understanding of E8 Symmetry has a lot of foreshadowing for the discoveries that Garrett has gone on to submit.

"This is an impressive achievement," said Hermann Nicolai, Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany. "While mathematicians have known for a long time about the beauty and the uniqueness of E8, we physicists have come to appreciate its exceptional role only more recently - yet, in our attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces into a consistent theory of quantum gravity, we now encounter it at almost every corner," he said, referring to efforts to combine the theory of the very big (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics). "Thus, understanding the inner workings of E8 is not only a great advance for pure mathematics, but may also help physicists in their quest for a unified theory."

So perhaps the discovery that Garrett made would have been reached soon by other physicists.

But credit needs to be placed where it is due.  For Garrett has a great mind that was able to see a potential answer to one of the great remaining questions in physics and mathematics.