Ben Chaffin's Home Page

Projects

- A Google Maps scavenger hunt – for my exchange gift for the seventh Gathering for Gardner (G4G7) I created a puzzle-solving scavenger hunt based around Google maps.

- No-Three-In-Line – a fun combinatorial problem: how many points can you place on an NxN grid so that no three of them are in a straight line?

- Paterson’s Worms – A tiny number of simple rules for walking around a triangular grid can produce some surprisingly complex and beautiful behavior.

- Making movies out of individual frames – this is not as easy as it sounds. Here’s my method, and links to the tools I found.

- My ancient senior thesis on aperiodic tiling.

Word and Language Resources

- Wordsmith’s word of the day:

· This is also the home of the Internet Anagram Server and the A.Word.A.Day mailing list.

- The Dict Development Group: allows regular expression searches. Its main resource is the Webster’s Revised Unabridged 1913 dictionary, but it also contains a number of other smaller databases.

- Merriam Webster Online: your basic dictionary and thesaurus.

- Rhymezone rhyming dictionary: essential when wrestling with a would-be-clever turn of phrase.

Other Links

• I'm on the Anniemaniacs dragonboat team – you may have heard us. Check out our photos and videos from 2006 and 2007 too.

You can find me at chaffin@gmail.com.