Stuff mostly about C++
Over on the (inexplicably login-walled) site "NewEnigma," Keith Austin [writes](https://www.newenigma.com/enigma/view/1277/Colourfields): > Draw a 4-by-4 grid. Colour each square red or blue. Select any square, S, and write 1 in it. > Then write 1 in every square you can reach from S by a series of moves, where each move is from > a square to an adjacent, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally,…
Randall Rothenberg in the _New York Times_ (1988-08-10) writes that although ["Puzzle Makers Exchange Cross Words"](https://archive.is/K2Hw8) about the fall of ERNE and ESNE and the rise of XEROX and PEACE PLAN, one Robert Guilbert Sr. > was ignorant of the dispute two years ago when he developed a competitive crossword game > called Pago Pago and first became aware of crossword fans' passion for…
In “Varaldo’s Shahrazad and Chiti’s Centunesimo Canto” (2025-08-11) I mentioned the existence of a lipogrammatic translation of Canto I of Dante’s Inferno performed by one Kinton Ford (a pseudonym, as far as I know) for Rick Whitaker’s now-defunct literary e-zine Exquisite Pandemic (2020–2021). A year later, seeing it’s still unavailable anywhere else online, I feel justified in preserving that…
From “Topics of the Times,” New York Times of 1924-11-17:
I just finished reading Natan Last's 2025 book _Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle._ It was... fatiguing. Now, I myself am a "discursive" writer, so I'm throwing stones from a glass house here; but it seemed to me that Last's _every_ paragraph consisted of three or four anecdotes halfway told, capped off with some nonsensical simile. Open the book at random…
C++11 introduced std::function as a type-erased callable-object holder. function was badly designed in a few ways: Its rarely used “go fish” API bloats every user; it advertises operator() const even when the controlled object’s operator() is mutating; it handles what should be a precondition violation by throwing an exception, which again bloats every user and means its operator() can never be…
Previously on this blog: “The Book of St Albans (1486)” (2026-05-22), in which I made a table of terms of venery, a.k.a. company terms, e.g. “an exaltation of larks,” as in the eponymous book by James Lipton. I mentioned that the Book of St Albans actually has “an exaltyng of larkis,” and that it’s only in Egerton MS 1995 (circa 1450), according to Lipton, that we find “an exaltacyon of larkys”…
First images of PHerc. 1667. When Vesuvius buried Herculaneum, it turned many papyrus scrolls in the Villa dei Papiri to burnt hunks of carbon without destroying their physical structure. Since the 2010s (or earlier?), people have tried to non-invasively image what remains of the scrolls. In June 2026, the latest “Vesuvius Challenge” prize was awarded to a team who successfully imaged the first…
From Louis Godart’s The Phaistos Disc: The Enigma of an Aegean Script (1994, tr. Alexandra Doumas):
Keenan Horrigan on the std-proposals mailing list pointed out an interesting consequence of C++26 Reflection: it seems to give us “universal template parameters” almost for free.