I sent my friend this sudoku puzzle, billed as the world’s hardest. I didn’t tell him where I got it from, figuring I’d reveal it once he was stumped.

Today he sent me back the solution. When I asked him how he’d found it, he said he solved the first half while sitting on the toilet, and the second half amidst work. It’d taken him just 30 minutes!

Update: Well, one of sharper eyed friends noticed that the puzzle illustrating the USA Today story isn’t the one the story’s about. Shame on me for not reading the fine text. This takes the oomph out of the whole thing.

So you think you can tell Arial from Helvetica?. I got 18/20. There’s one which is really hard, and one that I just don’t see.

Iglesia Maradoniana on Wikipedia: “Supporters of the Maradonian Church, supposedly from all parts of the world, count the years since Maradona’s birth in 1960. It is popular among the followers of this religion, and also among other football fans, to use the neo-Tetragrammaton ‘D10S’ as one of the names of Maradona. D10S is a portmanteau word which fuses Maradona’s shirt number (10) and Dios, the Spanish word for God.”

Following trails of hyperlinks can be fun. When looking up some javascript type comparison details, I had the good fortune of stumbling onto another, unrelated trail of links; one that I thought I’d share with you.

It all started with an entry in Eric Lippert’s Fabulous Adventures In Coding blog. The fun part (at least for me, I have a penchant for reading semi-diaristic details of complete strangers’ lives) came in the end, filed under “other news”.

Follow the link, read the entry. Eric’s funny — which is to say that he writes nicely and elicits laughter. But not only that (another link, here), he’s an internationally recognized expert on getting boys to like you, and, as the entry clearly shows, a nice guy to beat.

Do note that in the end of this third entry, there are links to parts two and three of his answers for searchers.

Oh, would that Alejandro Jodorowsky could have made his version of the Dune movie. From Dune’s Wikipedia entry:

In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Orson Welles, Dan O’Bannon, Salvador Dalí, Gloria Swanson, Hervé Villechaize and others (whom he nicknamed his “seven samurais”). The music would be composed by Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction periodicals, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger. Moebius began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss was brought in to design the film’s space ships and hardware. Giger began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius’ storyboards, and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour.

Mental Floss: The men behind you favorite liquors. “One morning in 1911 [Jack] Daniel showed up for work early and couldn’t get his safe open. He flew off the handle and kicked the offending strongbox. The kick was so ferocious that Daniel injured his toe, which then became infected. The infection soon became the blood poisoning that killed the whiskey mogul.”

“joe biden is thom yorke’s old american uncle.”

— A comment on Daily Intel

Ever wonder how to garden, drive a car, or write a letter while high on salvia? Well, here are some educational videos: driving on salvia, gardening on salvia, and writing a letter to Congress on salvia.

Funny, and probably very true.

Kipein adressi ikinä.

Hikipediassa on sivu, jossa naureskellaan adressien tehottomuudelle. Huvittava lisä on tietysti se, että ainakin yksi väitteistä ei pidä paikaansa*, ja että kohdan muokkaa-linkin takaa löytyy kommentti “älä lisää tähän” mitään.

Stumbling upon some books on Amazon is like getting lost within some strange alternate universe. Witness the art of Ben Mezrich: Rigged (The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai), Ugly Americans (The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions), Breaking Las Vegas, Busting Vegas (The MIT Whiz Kid Who Brought the Casinos to Their Knees), Bringing Down the House (The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions).