Sexpartite lunette

sexpartite (adj.): Composed of or divided into six parts, as in a sexpartite rib vault.

lunette (n.): Something that has the shape of a crescent or half-moon (especially when referring to an architectural feature)

Latin and French today. Although, 'lunettes' in French does mean glasses, but 'lune' is moon. Actually, glasses (especially in old times) were often crescent-shaped (i.e. "half-moon glasses"), so this isn't too surprising. Anyway, finally some words that aren't biology.

Last post I might have said this post was going to be about lasers, but as usual, that was a complete fabrication. I'll talk about puzzles instead. Japanese puzzles mainly. Especially the puzzle types published by Nikoli, and particularly Nurikabe, which I've recently ordered 5 books of from Japan - they're written in Japanese, but luckily you don't need the words, and the numerals are most likely Arabic, but even if they aren't, learning ten or so Japanese characters won't kill me.

But anyway, what is Nurikabe? Well, it's a Japanese word for "invisible wall randomly in the middle of a road." More relevantly, it's a puzzle type invented by Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, who also brought you Sudoku. A short explanation is basically: you're given a grid with some numbers on it, and you want to fill some squares in black so that the numbers are on white islands with 'number' many white squares. But this flash tutorial will probably be much better at explaining it to you: http://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/nurikabe/. Good quantities of printable puzzles don't seem to be readily available on the web but there are a bunch of online sites that publish a new one every day or so and that you can solve in your browser - just google nurikabe.

I think it's pretty similar to Sudoku in terms of average difficulty. Perhaps it's a bit harder at first, but you get used to it very fast anyway (and sudoku is probably annoying at first too... although I don't even remember when I first saw sudoku). A puzzle that I really find annoying to do are "Paint by Numbers". They're pretty popular - you may have done one or two of them. Unfortunately I never got the hang of them and they take me really long.

Interestingly, Paint by Numbers, Nurikabe, and Sudoku (it's extension to n^2 by n^2 grids) are all NP-complete, which at least means you can take solace in the fact that your computer won't laugh at you any time soon (that said, it could still solve them faster than you could).

Anyway, the Nikoli site has a bunch of other interesting puzzles. Shikaku looks interesting but they only invented it recently so there are practically no available puzzles. There's also puzzles with very funny titles, like "Where is Black Cells".

I think that's all I'll write about puzzles today. Maybe I'll conclude with some random remarks.

I rewatched Goldeneye the other day, and have come to the conclusion that it was the best recent James Bond movie. Perhaps James Bond out of the cold-war era is getting a bit strange now, so people are altering the genre a bit (*cough* Casino Royale *cough*). But whatever.

My friend told me to go get some random "Solar something" RTS game but when I went to the IGN site to look it up I got distracted by: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/852/852953p1.html. It's about time for a new Banjo Kazooie.

This person has a lot of good trance/techno mixes and songs posted. If you like the genre (unlike some people...) you should check it out.

And that's all for now. I could talk about lasers next time, but I'd probably just copy what Munroe said and add something about petawatt lasers... so just go read his blog post! Ciao.

-squidout

By the way, the post is in the above picture. Quality 7.