Scott Blomquist

Both v1 and v3.764 have some fun challenges to offer.

http://nocircles.com/index.php?boyhave=flash

I just watched the movie "Cellular". It was a pretty fun little thriller involving a kidnapping and a poor dude who gets sucked in to the whole deal just because he answered his cellular phone. Makes me even less interested than ever in answering the phone when it’s a number that I don’t already know. At any rate, the phone guy ends up pulling a Jack Bauer and taking the law into his own hands. William H. Macy plays a slightly kooky cop (kooky in the way William H. Macy’s characters are always kooky), and there’s one other character in the movie that provides better than great comic relief. For now, we’ll just call him "the Porsche-driving attorney". Watch it just for him if no other reason. 4/5 stars.

Ever had a TV show that’s so well done and suspenseful that you just can’t wait for its day of the week to roll around so you can see the next episode (24‘s first and second seasons were like that for me–it’s still good, but not as good)?

Well, Planetarium is like that, only it’s an online puzzle. It takes 12 weeks for you to get every installment of the puzzle complete with intriguing revelations along the way, and by then you will hopefully have solved enough of the puzzles to reach the final answer, which is rather artfully chosen. (There are three puzzles each week–one number, one word, and one other one that I don’t remember what they call it.)

I played through it back in college (probably 1998), and am considering playing through again. Maybe I’ll meet up with you in the xiii Forum.

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3445734

The Dark Room is a great collection of opaque puzzles of varying difficulty bundled up neatly together over on http://www.woolythinking.com. They even have a save & continue feature that’ll work as long as you didn’t disable Flash’s Local Shared Object store out of fear of supercookies. (I’m a cookie whore–I’m sure I’m set to accept all first-party cookies, and I can’t remember the last time I cleared my cookie cache.)

I had a great meeting on Tuesday with some gentlemen representing a tech company based in Taipei, Taiwan. One of the slides in their presentation completely surprised me. It was a map of the globe centered on the North Pole and looking down. It had China front and center on the bottom part of the map. But its most jarring feature was that North and South America were standing on their head toward the top of the map.

I had simply never seen such a thing–certainly not presented seriously as a map of the globe. In fact, someone in the meeting had the nuts to declare "certainly an interesting map!". The presenter defended it by pointing out that "it’s the most fair because it centers on the North Pole". Seems to me there’s still some room for picking an "unfair" map even given that view, but it’s not like global-projection-choice-fairness is something that I spend time fretting over.

I spent some time looking around to find the projection that was used so I could share it with the two of you who read this, and I’ve decided that it was based on a gnomonic projection onto a flattened tetrahedron. I say based on becuse the fragmented Antarctica was missing entirely, and concentric perfect circles and radial lines centered on the North Pole were substituted for the true grid lines. (The 108k PDF rotated 30 degrees clockwise is the one that most closely resembles what I saw.)

This got me to thinking about how pretty much everyone’s ideal map is the one that puts their home in some visually significant place. Seems to me that our usual view of the globe (northwestern hemisphere in the upper left quadrant) evolved naturally as maps of Europe, Asia, and Africa were augmented by new discoveries to the west during The Age of Exploration. Europe’s happy because it was a natural progression. We’re happy because we have prime real estate on the map, and pretty much everyone else feels shafted. This leads to Australians using 180 degree rotations of our map (partially in jest), and to Taiwanese businessmen using gomonic projections and flattened tetrahedra.

I really do like their map, though. I’ve already printed a copy and plan to hang it outside my office at work.

4d Rubik’s cube: http://www.plunk.org/~hatch/MagicCube4dApplet/

Another opaque puzzle (i.e. first, figure out what to do and then do it): http://www.deviantart.com/view/14864502/
I know of at least four solutions.

http://www.koreus.com/files/200501/proximity.html

Hexagonal grid, numbered tiles, interesting atack-and-defend mechanism. The AI seems good, but beatable with some practice.

http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/~xsvobod4/amanita/samorost/intro.html