It snowed at my place the night of October 29, 2023. The next day I saw the most Colorado thing possible.

Possibly the worst booze I’ve ever had.

My roomba, Dobby, got stuck again.

This is from the Daily Coding Problem email list. The owners of that list haven’t sent out a problem that caught my imagination in quite a while.

Daily Coding Problem: Problem #1553 [Hard]

This problem was asked by Airbnb.

You come across a dictionary of sorted words in a language you’ve never seen before. Write a program that returns the correct order of letters in this language.

For example, given ['xww', 'wxyz', 'wxyw', 'ywx', 'ywz'], you should return ['x', 'z', 'w', 'y'].

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Github repo for my solution. Feel free to look it over, try it and email me (bediger8@gmail.com) if you notice anything.

Oh look! A knights and knaves puzzle in a low rent kid’s funny papers strip. Can we solve this puzzle with the method of Raymond Smullyan’s Og and Bog problem? Let’s find out.

As a kid, there was absolutely nothing better than convincing my mom to buy some Lucky Charms brand frosted toasted oat cereal & marshmallows.

Conquest of the Moon (Viking Press, 1953, Wernher von Braun, Willy Ley, Fred Whipple) describes a lunar expedition that could be accomplished with the technology of 1950.

Von Braun and company left no detail unexamined. One of the less obvious categories that they put a lot of effort into is navigation, or in this context, astrogation.

I just read a short note, Earliest Triassic ichthyosaur fossils push back oceanic reptile origins, from Current Biology 33:159-179, March 2023, Benjamin Kear, Victoria Engelschion, Oyvind Hammer, Aubrey Roberts, Jorn Hurum.

Back when my kids were still young and innocent enough to want to go trick-or-treating, for a few years we went to some suburban friends cul-de-sac-filled neighborhood.