The Spinning Oracle is a magic trick derived from my Wheel of Lunch project that wlil give you about 60 seconds of amusement.
The effectiveness of magic is greatly reduced when tricks are performed more than once — so try to resist the temptation to view the trick twice. Instead, share it with a friend!

You may notice in the blog articles below, a little “W” icon next to some of the Wikipedia links, and a little film-strip icon next to some YouTube links. Those are placed by Apture, a blog-annotation service I’m beta-testing that allows you to preview that content without leaving the blog.
I kind of like [...]

If you have a myspace account, you’ll want to check out the app I’ve been working on this week, Y! Music Videos.
This OpenSocial app displays a list of music videos, which are selected based on the information you have put in your myspace profile (specifically, your “favorite music”).
So if you’ve listed Beatles and Bjork, as [...]

I made this mosaic today. It’s Gene Simmons, made of kittens.

The photos were recent additions to Flickr that had the tag “kittens”. Not all of them are actually of kittens. There’s a cool photo in the upper middle showing recent “top searches”, and a few burlesque dancers mixed in with the kitties.
My [...]

If you’re interested in the puzzles on this website, and would like to learn more about what goes into making them, you may enjoy the article I wrote for this month’s Mung Being magazine, where I am the resident puzzle constructor.
The article amounts to a FAQ, or IAQ (infrequently asked questions) for the puzzle section. [...]

About 18 months ago, I was contacted by a publisher, Ulysses press, that wanted to put out some Kakuro books, and I provided enough puzzles for three books.
Like most small publishers, Ulysses was blindsided when the Sudoku craze hit, and didn’t manage to get any books in the pipeline before the market was glutted with [...]

Here are some new puzzles I’m working on.
These twelve Slitherlink puzzles use the aperiodic five-fold tiling discovered by Sir Roger Penrose. Not only are the puzzles pretty, but the tiling creates a variety of intersections, which makes the puzzles more interesting.
Download ‘em here…
Thanks to Craig Kaplan for providing the dataset for the tiles!

I’ve been enjoying Slitherlink puzzles lately, and thinking about publishing some variations. Below is a Slitherlink puzzle on a Hexagonal grid I made recently. This tiling makes it more complex in some ways, and easier in others.
More importantly, from my point of view, it’s round. Always a good thing in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]