This weekend, I counted all the words on Project Gutenberg. This has been done before, notably, here. My script crawled most of the English language books on Project Gutenberg (about 20,000 titles), and counted how often each word appears, and how many books each word appears in. The script ran for about 20 hours. You […]

[NOTE: I’ve posted some recent developments at the bottom. ] I’ve been blatantly cheating at foursquare for the past week. I didn’t mean to start the week this way. Most of my friends know me as a responsible father who occasionally plays piano at local open mics, and makes puzzles. Last Sunday, while checking into […]

The Griddle is a beautifully designed puzzle site by David Millar. It will especially appeal to more advanced solvers who are bored with the same-old same-old. You’ll find a new puzzle variety, in PDF format, nearly every day, including some interesting variants on Sudoku, Kakuro and Slitherlink. Check it out!

I received some interesting hand-made Crossfigure puzzles from Israeli puzzle constructor Yochanan. He says he learned the technique of making these puzzles when he was “still a fairly young man, about seventy or so,” from L.G. Horsefield. These numeric crosswords are similar to Kakuro and KenKen puzzles, but have greater variety in the clues. Here’s […]

via Laughing Squid, which eulogized Art Clokey today

I was quoted in today’s Roanoke times, in an article on computer-generated puzzles. Roanoke Times Link For more information about algorithmic puzzle construction, check out this article I wrote for MungBeing magazine.

An oldie-but-goodie – the film “Powers of Ten” by Charles and Ray Eames.

A Whitney Music Box mathematical mash-up from Daniel Piker. He describes it as follows: “Take 1 large ‘Whitney Music Box’ and whisk together with ‘Mobius transformations revealed’. Add a sprinkle of ‘Indras Pearls’, the juice of a fresh Riemann Sphere, and stereographically project at 200C until crispy…” link

A remarkable choir from Slovenia.

From Marc Andreessen comes this excellent short guide to personal productivity. Following Mark’s advice, I’m buying one of those cool fisher space pens right now, as a form of structured procrastination. Oh, I love that term.