Two surprises-

Dave Schappell (Teach Street) authors a "reader blog" at the Seattle PI).

He covered Roy Leban's Puzzazz web site (started at the Google AppEngine Hack-a-thon this summer).

Roy's new puzzle-a-day site.

Quoted: Puzzazz provides a quick, fun puzzle of the day each and every day. Invite your friends for friendly competition. Whether you're a casual puzzler or a serious puzzle addict, Puzzazz can fill the bill.

Zach's greatly improved the look of this sample app - and now the Save dialog comes up when you try to create a save (you need to fill in username, password, and email address to create an account).

Roy Leban did puzzle #16 in this crossword collection from the New York Times.

Quoted: Amazon.com: The New York Times Will Shortz Presents I Love Crosswords: From the Pages of The New York Times (Will Shortz Presents...): The New York Times, Will Shortz: Books

There are only 5 billion essentially distinct Sudoku puzzles (solutions) (proof here using Group Theory and Burnside's Lemma).

Interesting article on rating the difficulty of Sudoku's and various solving methods (including a short backtracking program written in Ruby).

Really interesting problem in recreational mathematics - try to reverse a unit line segment via translations/rotations - but in doing so sweep out a minimal area.

PI/4 is the obvious minimum - but it turns out you can do so in an arbitrarily small area.

What's odd to me, is that any combinations of moves that are either a) rotations about the center and b) translations, CAN NOT achieve an area less than PI/4; so it's counter-intuitive that you can do better than that.

What kind of hutzpah do you have to have to release "Scrabulous" which is a direct rip-off of Scrabble (same tile distribution, same board layout, same dictionary).

I don't know which of these components are are protected by copyright law - it seems reasonable to me that Scrabulous has violated not only copyright but also the trade mark of Hasbro.

Hasbro cannot protect the "idea" of an anagramming word game. This is an opening to create a "open source game design". We just need a group to create the following components and license under an open source license:

- Board design
- Tile distribution
- Word list
- Scoring rules

I recently did an analysis of the tile distribution of Scrabble as compared to a standard corpus of English words. I found these major differences. Of the 98 tiles in Scrabble, it has:

- Too few H's (should have 6 instead of 2).
- Too many I's (should have 7 instead of 9).
- Too few S's (should have 6 instead of 4).
- Too few T's (should have 9 instead of 6).