I just finished going through my archives and changing the userpics on some of the entries, not to mention removing the links from my Photobucket images. I may do this again with a different userpic. Anyway, this post is an entry to a contest for the comic Saiko and Lavender. And I can't believe I only just realized that the first name is pronounced like "psycho." While not a precise description of the bunny girl, this homophone fits the tone of the comic.

Anyway, here's my entry for the contest. It features a couple of characters that appeared briefly, on pages 18-22 of Issue 1. ( Wide-ish image )

I recently looked for a minimal greatest-cover of the alphabet using chemical symbols. More specifically, since J and Q are not part of any element's symbol (although Jl was proposed for element 105, dubnium, when it was called "joliotium"), I wanted to find a set of symbols that used each of the other 24 letters (hence "greatest-cover") with as few duplicates as possible (hence "minimal").

As it turns out, I found a cover that used exactly 24 letters rather easily by going through the alphabet in order, so I put a couple more constraints on the challenge. I've found several solutions with 13 symbols, for example. Solutions that minimize the sum or product of the corresponding atomic numbers are also preferable, but I've put this under "open" and not "math" because I think you don't need to optimize either of those unless you have both spare time and programming experience.

It is 12:30 in the morning, and the Word of the Day is dysphemism. Merriam-Webster defines it as

the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one; also: an expression so substituted.

For example, somebody may say "This is some great s***!" Clearly, the speaker thinks highly of whatever was referred to as "s***," despite referring to it as such.
Let's see what spell-check says!

Edit: Hmm. That's never happened before. Spell-check picked up only on "dysphemism," but didn't have any suggestions for fixing the word.
Edit 2: Ha! For "Hmm," it has the suggestions HM, Hm, MM, Mm, HMO, Ham, H'm, Hem, Him, Hum, HMS, and Hm's.

It was nice to see a skateboard chase scene on "Numb3rs" last Friday, though I don't quite see how Sinclair was able to outrun that kid. On an unrelated note, Sacha Baron Cohen's first name is apparently pronounced "Sasha."

All right, here's a new puzzle. Put the following words and phrases, currently alphabetized, into the proper order: condense, enthusiast, event horizons, height, thrown in, Turkish firs. Hint: I doubt this list can be "complete," for two reasons.

Oh, I almost forgot! Something was just revealed in "The Order of the Stick," but no one on the message boards noticed! Look at the eighth panel here; the audience was left in the dark about Miko's parentage. This inspired a couple of speculatory threads, but there wasn't enough data to draw any conclusion (preliminary or otherwise). Now check out today's comic, first panel. It's buried in the middle, but now we know Miko is the "daughter of Eyko!" That means... OK, not much, but I can reasonably say that "Eyko" hasn't appeared in the comic (barring a surprise twist) and may be female. On the other hand, we now know the previous speculation was to no avail! Eh? Eh? I feel so smart!

(Why does spell-check pick up "href" and "speculatory," but not "Sacha"?)

Occasionally, such as now, I will pose problems to which I don't have answers. Depending on my resources, I might give out prizes for the first or best answer. Anyway here we go!

Is it possible to arrange the names of the musical notes into a word square?

The names I'm talking about, of course, are DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, TI, and DO again. The word square I'm looking for is 4x4, no larger and no smaller, with four-letter words reading down the four columns and left to right along the four rows. An appropriate arrangement will include DO twice and each other name once, and the letters of the respective names will be orthogonally adjacent- you know, like dominoes.

To be sure you understand, here's an example that has words reading across, but not down. The "dominoes" here are all horizontal, but I fully expect some to be vertical in a full solution.

ALIT
SOFA
MIRE
DODO

With minimal effort, too!

A self-descriptive ambigram that hasn't been done yet is one of the more sought-after prizes of the ambigrammist. --Kevin Pease

With that, I present to you Rot13!



This is quite an appropriate subject, since both Rot13 and 180-degree rotation are their own inverses. (Funny, I was just complaining about invertability this morning.)

To be sure, I'm not limiting myself to number puzzles; I have a few word puzzles that may interest you. Here's one I created a long time ago.

I know a word of six letters with the property that removing one letter and reversing the order of the remaining letters results in a different word. What's more, performing these actions on the resultant five-letter word gives a four-letter word, and repeating this will eventually yield a one-letter word. What's the six-letter word?

I was planning for my third entry to be my fourth entry. I mean, my fourth entry was going to be my third entry, but my third entry is this instead.

Anyway, I want to clear up any misconceptions from my second entry. (While nobody seems to be reading this blog yet, I want to attract readers, including those who read archives.) First of all, I'm not really sure I have phobias-- they're more like aversions. I'll pick up a penny from about anywhere, for one thing. Second, "genophobia" wasn't a correction for "germophobia." (Suggestions from spell-check for "germophobic" are "homophobic," "geomorphology," "comeback," "giveback," and "camouflage," in that order. It doesn't recognize "blog" either.) And that's about it, really.

Oh, and Lassiter is poking out into two-dimensionality.