Vocabularice

I finally got around to visiting freerice.com, a vocabulary game that lets you "win" donations of rice for needy countries. (Yes, it's like the SAT, but some of us find that kind of thing fun.) The words start off easy, but ramp up to a pleasing level of difficulty; I played for about ten minutes and hovered around a score of 50, peaking at 52.

How does it work? Advertisers pay per click, and the rice is purchased (mostly in Pakistan and Japan) and distributed by the United Nations' World Food Program. This story describes how the program is helping refugees in Bangladesh; 20 grains of rice per word doesn't seem like much, but the quanta really do add up to something meaningful.

The site got some heavy media promotion in the fall, and an average of half a million people a day have clicked through since its launch in October. According to Freerice's data, donations peaked in December (almost 7 B grains), but January declined to November's levels (about 4.5 B grains). So this is a good time to see if we (and a few hundred thousand friends) can bump February's total back up! Of course, if anything remotely resembling the SAT makes you hyperventilate, a donation of $16 buys an entire sack of rice. If only expanding one's vocabulary were so easy.

Kudos to programmer John Breen for creating this uber-simple opportunity for altruism!