David Millar, of the excellent puzzle site The Griddle, has launched a new collaborative puzzle site called Perplexible. The intent is to provide a forum for diverse puzzle authors to post new creations. I’ve posted an unusual Slitherlink there, and hope to post more unique puzzles, in the future. I occasionally get emails from puzzle […]

Happy National Puzzle Day! The Jerry Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection is now online, featuring images from the collection of over 34,000 mechanical puzzles. This Dutch puzzle shoe from 1790 contains a hidden snuff compartment. via MetaFilter

The science journal Nature reports that a mathematician has proven that it takes 17 clues to make a Sudoku. Gary McGuire of University College Dublin showed this in a proof posted online on January 1st (apparently he wasn’t partying on new year’s eve). This means that sudoku puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not […]

This is a Visualization of traffic on my Wheel of Lunch website. The wheel is often accessed around lunch time in the US, to find local restaurants. It only works in the US because it was easy to get working with ZIP codes, and I’m lazy. This visualization shows the ZIP Codes that are being […]

I just found a book in the Kindle bookstore that (incompetently) rips off some of my sudoku puzzles. The book is called “The Most Difficult and Hardest Sudoku Puzzles” and is “copyrighted” by one Johnny Cohen. Here’s the cover: The cover helpfully informs you that the book is a BEST SELLER. Here’s a sample of […]

Campanello from David Watson on Vimeo. Todd Kurt sent me the link to this very nice electro-mechanical doorbell, designed by David Watson. He provides detailed instructions on his website, along with a few other interesting projects. I’m currently fascinated with such mechanisms, and hope to build something similar using a set of tuned desk bells […]

Chris Harrison, a PH.D. student at Carnegie Mellon, has put together a really nice set of visualizations, often involving words, such as the color flower shown here. The rest of his website is full of some very cool research/fun projects as well. link

Th new mobile app Astro Cantus plays the stars like a music-box, much like my own 2009 piece, Wheel of Stars. There are a few differences, however (I don’t doubt that it was conceived independently). Astro Cantus classifies the stars into 7 discrete pitch classes (based on spectral type), which gives the music a more […]