Slitherlink is an addictive logic puzzle that was first published by Nikoli in Japan. The puzzle consists of a grid of dots, with some clue cells containing numbers. You connect horizontally or vertically adjacent dots to form a meandering path that forms a single loop or “Slitherlink.” The loop must not have any branches and must not cross itself. The clue numbers indicate how many lines surround the cell. Empty cells may be surrounded by any number of lines (from 0 to 3).

Now you can find hundreds of free Slitherlink puzzles on my puzzle pages.

If you’re looking for some tactics to help you get started solving these, check out this wikipedia tutorial.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Simon Tatham and Mike Pinna, whose source code I tweaked to generate these puzzles.

I’m working on some new puzzles and thought I’d give you a preview…

For the kids, I’m adding a new collection of mazes in a variety of animal shapes, such as this elephant.

For the non-kids, I’m adding some new logic puzzles, based on my favorites from Nikoli, the Japanese publisher that popularized Sudoku. One of those favorites is Slitherlink, which you can read more about, on Wikipedia.

Some of the software I’m using to generate these puzzles is based on Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection, which contains a number of Nikoli puzzles. I modified Mike Pinna’s Slitherlink algorithm to produce symmetrical puzzles, which I prefer, and to minimize the number of clues per puzzle.

Sample Elephant Maze

Sample Slitherlink puzzles.

I was alerted to this group via Laughing Squid.

Faces in Places is an awesome flickr group that collects photosgraphs of those serendipitous faces that pop out at you from the world of inanimate objects.

I made a mosaic of all the images in the group, shown above. You can play with the interactive version over at my coverpop website.

While you’re there, you might enjoy the mosaics of Stick Figures in Peril and Spirals, among others.

Via BoingBoing, MissMonster demonstrates how she made this excellent werewolf costume, using a lot of fake fur, hot glue, old gloves, and other stuff.

Check out MissMonster’s website to see some of her other great costumes & creations, as well.

A few recent excerpts from “The Daily Word,” a feature which I’ve been publishing the past few weeks mash.yahoo.com (in the module of the same name). Most of these were written by Mike Davis, who has an innate talent for lexicognition..

Craig Kaplan wrote to tell me about some newly available high-res scans of seven complete works of (my hero/obsession) Athanasius Kircher, made available by the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuttel.

UPDATE: I’ve corrected the above since my first post. The Bibliothek site is posting seven complete works, not just the illustrations excerpted on the bibliodyssey blog. You’ll find links to the complete works on the bottom of the post. The same blog earlier pointed to a complete scan of “Musurgia Universalis” at the University of Strasbourg.

I had a great time seeing Max Maven last night at the Center for Inquiry West.

Maven is one of the rare performing magicians who bills himself as a mentalist, a once common specialty that has vanished in recent decades. An intimidating presence in black suit and goatee, Maven is a master of the eye roll, the raised eyebrow and the withering glare, particularly when his audience members reveal ignorance of the names of Hungarian mathematicians and other obscure references. He performed a series of increasingly baffling mind-reading effects, all as part of a larger narrative in which he stressed the importance of not knowing in making our lives meaningful and wondrous.

You can see Max Maven on Saturday Nights at CFI, in Hollywood for the next three weeks.

Via Drawn!, David at Ironic Sans, demonstrates an amusing technique of embedding images, such as skylines, in the images histogram, so that when you view the levels in Photoshop, or similar software, you get a big surprise!

I like to do crossword & sudoku puzzles, but I have this odd notion that puzzles which are printed in today’s paper are more fun than puzzles which are collected in books. I don’t know why.

I thought other people might suffer from this same ailment, so I set up a Daily Sudoku page, where you can download a fresh set of eight puzzles that have today’s date printed on ’em.

The puzzles are guaranteed to have been constructed on the date they were issued, which means they are highly topical. Or at least as topical as I can make a numeric logic puzzle…

Enjoy :)

Here’s Yahoo!’s Ian Rogers lecturing some music industry folks about the problems that plague online music distribution. My favorite quote:

…If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB?