A fascinating piece over at fivethirtyeight describes a recent discovery of plagiarism in the crossword construction world.

(Spoiler alert, despite the title, this post contains no obviously nude images. Sorry!) This week I revisted a mystery that has been bugging me for several years. If you’re a regular reader of this blog you are probably familiar with my study emergent orange, a color that is produced when you make amalgam images by […]

Last April, a friend who knows me too well told me about this new KickStarter for a Cycloid Drawing Machine. I looked at this intriguing adult spyrograph with great wonder, but then moved onto other things. But the machine continued to pique my interest, and every few days I would look at it again, trying […]

I kept myself busy over the Christmas break (when I wasn’t feeding the birds and entertaining my cat) by adding 13 new Interactive Puzzle pages to this website. The puzzles work in modern web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE 9 or later), on iPads, and on some Android tablets . I think these puzzles are […]

For the past few days, I’ve been preparing a wireless carillon that will hang on our Christmas tree this year. The carillon is a set of 9 brass bells, which can play different tunes. It is connected to an Arduino micro-controller that controls the bells. The Arduino receives messages from my desktop computer via an […]

An article about my work with Flickr photographs — in which I noticed that blended digital photos make orange — appeared on The Atlantic website today. If you’re interested in reading my paper on the subject, “Emergent Orange”, you’ll find it in the publications section of this website. For the record, I am a bit […]

Whit McMahon, a puzzle constructor, wrote to me recently to share a new kind of puzzle he created last year called Balance Quest®. In these numeric logic puzzles, you fill in blanks so that the sum of each box is made by adding the numbers in the adjoining half-height boxes. Note that some of these […]

So, as I reported recently on my blog, I discovered recently that a maze that appeared on the back of packages of Kraft SpongeBob Macaroni & Cheese was based on one of my designs. When I notified @kraftfoods of this, via twitter, they put me in touch with Design Partners, an agency in Racine Wisconsin […]

While grocery shopping this evening, I happened to notice a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese that was turned around, with a familiar looking maze on the back. While this maze may look generic to you, it looks quite recognizable to me, because I spent quite a bit of time writing software that produces mazes […]

For the past several days I’ve been enjoying solving successive levels of Euclid the Game, an online set of puzzles based on Euclid’s Elements. You are initially given the equivalent of a stick, a straight edge and a compass (tools for drawing points, lines and circles), and are asked to construct an equilateral triangle. Once […]