a picture is worth a thousand wordles

The following image is a "wordle" which was created based on the frequency of words in the posts below this one:

Go ahead, try one with your own text at wordle.net.  It's addictive!

fun and games

I recently discovered Indigo Puzzles, a great site to play Sudoku as well as other logic puzzles: Hashi, Hitori, and Kakuro.  A free account gets you 12 new puzzles a day, in varying levels of difficulty, which can be printed or solved online.  You can save partially-completed puzzles and return to play them at a later date, or play puzzles from previous days out of the vault.  But the best part about the site is its interactive assistant for solving each type of puzzle.  If you get stuck, you can click the Advice button, and get not only a hint for your next move, but an explanation of why the move is possible.  This means you can attempt puzzles at a higher difficulty than you're used to, or learn a new puzzle type.  I came there enjoying Sudoku but new to Hashi and just learning about Hitori.  The assistant helped with understanding techniques of solving Hitori, a sort of checkerboard game of black and white squares, and gave me tips on Hashi, the addictive puzzle of islands and bridges, so now I can solve harder versions of both on my own.

It seems like the site's motto, "Proudly destroying productivity since 2005," is accurate!

Two other good sites with thousands of free logic puzzle games to print or play online are Web Sudoku and Vegard Hanssen's site for Hashi, Hitori, and more.

i'd rather be rich than stupid

Here are my top 11 favorite "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey," as seen on SNL. (Why 11? Well, it's kind of like 10, but better.)

11. To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography and the dancers hit each other.

10. Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.

9. I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.

8. Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.

7. How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn't have that dangerous beak.

6. The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

5. If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

4. The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.

3. As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way.

2. It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money.

1. Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself. MANKIND. Basically, it's made up of two separate words "mank" and "ind." What do these words mean? It's a mystery and that's why so is mankind.

Here are a couple of other "Deep Thoughts" lists.
And the official site.

plane and simple

Math buffs beware! Planarity is a simple but addictive puzzle game where you attempt to arrange the vertices of a graph so that no edges intersect. In graph theory, this is called a planar graph. I've gone up through level 24.

i hope i'll be safe at home

One of my favorite monologues is George Carlin's "Baseball and Football".

You know the one:

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who's up? Are you up? I'm not up.

A transcript is at Baseball Almanac. Video is below.



The only part that makes no sense to me is this:

In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there's kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there's not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game, in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you're capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.

Apparently he's never been to a Red Sox/yankees game...

But apart from that, it's one of my all-time favorite bits.

ministry of silly flash animation

Click the image below to see this silly walk in action, or generate your own at the Silly Walks Generator. (Click the image, click "Click to Begin", then click "Play this walk".)


Important advisory: This silly walk was performed by a professional cartoon lumberjack. Do not attempt.