One of my favorite puzzle books as a kid was Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers, by Martin Gardner. It had fun "real life" type problems (how can you drive an 11-foot-9 truck under a bridge with 11-foot-8 clearance?) and it introduced me to palindromes ("Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.")
Here's another "real life" puzzle: a person brings four pieces of a broken bracelet to a jeweler and asks him to repair it. The jeweler says he charges $1 for each link he cuts apart and welds together again. "Since I have to cut and weld four links, the job will cost you four dollars." But the customer correctly tells the jeweler he can make the bracelet by cutting and welding only three links. How?
Martin Raynsford makes beautiful and intricate wooden puzzles with space-filling fractal curves and is kickstartering a set of four. The pattern is a single line that crosses all of the two dimensional space without ever repeating. The puzzles follow these simple rules to break the line into multiple pieces that are almost identical but are […]
Here are three two lateral thinking puzzles that were new to me. They’re from the book, Lateral Thinking Puzzles (1991), by Paul Sloane. Death in the Field A man is lying dead in the field. Next to him is an unopened package. There is no other creature in the field. How did he die? Death in Rome […]
I’ve been reading a 1978 book called The Art of Problem Solving, by Russell L. Ackoff. (Used copies sell for $7 including shipping on Amazon). At the beginning of the book, Ackoff tells about the time his school-age daughter came home with a familiar puzzle. On a piece of paper, there are nine dots arranged […]
If you’re going to pursue a career in graphic design, videography or web development, there are some essential tools you need to have – and all of them are included in the Adobe Creative Cloud. And whether you need to brush up on Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign – or are a beginner to them all […]
Got a vision to put on film? The Film & Cinematography Mastery Bundle shows you how to put it there, with classes covering gear, lighting, production – even marketing. Even in this age of indie cinema, filmmaking can seem like an exclusive world for the chosen few. But with the right eye – and the […]
If you’re into tech at all, you should definitely consider unleashing your inner tinkerer on a Raspberry Pi board. If you’re intimidated, don’t be. It’s a statistical probability that people half your age have created cooler things than you can imagine with the versatile kit. Not sure where to start? The Complete Raspberry Pi 3B+ […]
