Word: Lapidary

Wednesday's word is...

...lapidary.

noun

1. One who cuts, polishes, or engraves gems.
2. A dealer in precious or semiprecious stones.

adjective
1. Of or relating to precious stones or the art of working with them.
2. Engraved in stone.
3. Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression.
4. Sharply or finely delineated.

I found it in a book I just finished: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sideny Mintz: But we have already seen how sucrose, this "favored child of capitalism"--Fernando Ortiz lapidary phrase--epitomized the transition from one kind of society to another.

The Lizzardo Museum of Lapidary Art

Puzzle Day!

It's National Puzzle Day in the US!

Lots of puzzle lovers commented on their favorite kinds of puzzles in my Snowflake post.

My jigsaw offering is a map of Scotland. 1000 pieces by Birlinn



Brands of puzzles: Re-marks, Cavalli [often sold in cylinders], maps of the London Underground here, Michael Storrings [which I have done a lot of], and I like Charles Wysocki puzzles from Buffalo Games.

There are online jigsaw puzzles at https://thejigsawpuzzles.com/

So there are traditional crossword puzzles as well as online word games.

Waffle: https://wafflegame.net/daily
Wordle: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
Yeardle: https://histordle.com/yeardle/ [guessing the year]

Let's not forget number games like Sudoku. And yesterday I learned about variant Sudoku.

Here's a video of British champions doing The Miracle Sudoku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4

And this is called Rat Maze Sudoku: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dedVIa0-gSA&list=PLK-l8O0YikOmTo_9JS-8mhPe0ikw4IDms

And let's not forget about escape rooms and their home game equivalents:

I am actually tempted to try this EXIT game with the boys and their father (especially now that we have more time on our hands) https://store.thamesandkosmos.com/collections/exit-the-game

Online games such as Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection [link to Google Play store: here) which are little games (one is called Black Box - find the hidden balls in the box by bouncing laser beams off them.)

Jigsaw adjacent are penrose tiling sets. More:

A Penrose tiling is an example of an aperiodic tiling. Here, a tiling is a covering of the plane by non-overlapping polygons or other shapes, and a tiling is aperiodic if it does not contain arbitrarily large periodic regions or patches. However, despite their lack of translational symmetry, Penrose tilings may have both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose tilings are named after mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose, who investigated them in the 1970s. So like this: