Boing Boing posted this puzzle (have a look or the rest of this post will be meaningless). Being lazy I wrote a little program to determine all the possible solutions to the equation a.b.c = 225 expecting to be given a single answer, unfortunately that didn’t happen and six possible solution sets were returned.

Of all 6 solutions these first three seem most likely :
ages[1,3,75] house number = 79
ages[1,5,45] house number = 51
ages[1,9,25] house number = 35
these next 3 solutions seem less likely as the olddest person in the house would normally be an adult :
ages[1,15,15] house number = 31
ages[3,5,15] house number = 23
ages[5,5,9] house number = 19

Can anyone see what I’m missing in the question which would allow the census taker to know with absolute certainty their ages? Obviously he has the advantage of knowing the house number and being able to make a good guess at the age of the door answerer but beyond that I’m stumped.

Or any other IM service, I don’t care, it’s just that Google are big and open protocol and have a nice clean interface, as Nick said, ‘this is like msn yonks ago - it’s great’…

• RSS/ATOM to IM client, I think Miranda might do this allready but I’ve never got that to work.
• The Guardian’s over by over cricket coverage delivered straight to my IM client along with one line ball by ball score updates.

Straight outta Hong Kong, Electroplankton arrived at the Harlsden DHS depot on Monday .Despite the fact that I tend to pay extra to get these things delivered properly, rather than rely on the chronically untrackable Royal Mail/international equivalent, I always end up cycling to Harlsden to pick the parcel up because they only deliver at stupid times (i.e. when I’m at work, the only times when I’ve not been at work is when they deliver it at 7:30 on Saturday morning and I have a terrible hangover) and refuse to consider giving a more accurate time for redelivery than “sometime between 7:00 and 18:00. The worst time was when I got the train thinking it would be quicker and I ended up having to run all the way from Wilsden Junction to the depot so I could get my XBox home and get to my DnD game on time.

Anyway the ‘game’ is great. In case you don’t know, what you do is manipualte various species of electroplankton which make simple noises according to simple rules. The results are hypnotic, often beautiful and occasionally a horrible mess but all these are equally valid outcomes, the software doesn’t judge you.

In the setup shown above you bounce little fish off leaves, the angle of which you can adjust, and the position hit the leaf determines the pitch of the note they produce (I think), you can also cause flowers to bloom by getting all the leaves to turn red. It’s very reminiscent of the wonderful ball droppings.

Remember when Brian Eno was allways going on about generative music but never really came up with the goods? Well Toshio Iwai’s Electroplankton is the goods, a commercial generative music album; you can put it in performance mode and have a perfectly passable ambient record generated for you on the fly, sound wise think Warp’s Artificial Inteligence compilations, or you can play (with) the music yourself (some of the setups really do feel like otherworldly musical instruments) manipulating the algorithms through a simple user interface.

So is it a game? Is it art? Yeah I think it probably is both, it makes you realise that playing instruments and doodling and generally the act of creation is also a game, which when you think about it seems obvious I suppose.