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Archive for 2014

Wireless Carillon Project

Tuesday, November 4th, 2014

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 […]

Everything is Orange

Wednesday, August 20th, 2014

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 […]

Balance Quest Puzzles

Monday, August 4th, 2014

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 […]

About that Mac & Cheese maze

Friday, July 18th, 2014

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 […]

Hmm, this maze looks familiar

Sunday, July 13th, 2014

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 […]

Euclid the Game

Monday, June 23rd, 2014

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 […]

Benjamin Franklin “Holograph”

Sunday, May 11th, 2014

This is a new demonstration I’ve prepared of my Mirror Morph technique, discussed previously. It’s a simple 2D trick that can make still images look three dimensional. Here’s a GIF version.

Masyu puzzles are here!

Friday, May 9th, 2014

I occasionally get requests to add new puzzle varieties to the collection. I have to ignore a lot of these, because there are 24 hours in a day. However, the last request I received, for Masyu puzzles, was hard to ignore, since I’ve enjoyed solving these myself for the past few years, and I’d love […]

BaffleDazzle – an interesting kickstarter for puzzle people

Thursday, April 24th, 2014

Cool music visualizer with flames

Friday, April 18th, 2014