Foxtrot Sudorku

Today's Foxtrot comic is a real Sudoku. I solved it over coffee this morning. Stop reading right now if you want to try it. I am going to post gratuitious pictures of our Corsica trip last year so that, even on the largest monitor, you won't get an inadvertent peek at a clue. The current Foxtrot comic is posted here. If another comic shows up, try this link.

Another gorgeous coastline.


Another picturesque village hanging on a cliff over the sea. Ho-hum.


Beach-goers from Los Angeles.


Corsica's famous sausages are made with free-range pigs. Be careful when driving! If the Corsican drivers don't get you, the free-range livestock will. Chestnut-infused sausages. Sheep cheese. I am getting hungry.


Back to the Sudoku.
I thought I was so clever because I knew that FF-F8 = F-8. But then I still initially did my hexadecimal math wrong. The mistake was obvious because there couldn't be two 8s in the same row. So I left that square blank until I solved the rest of the puzzle. A maps to 10, not 11. Duh.

More about why we went to Corsica here.
I posted Mark's printable Sudoku template here.

Addendum
I 'talked' to my sister via IM. Funny, she majored in CS and got the hex math right without a hitch. The integral, however, stumped her.

I switched majors from EECS to pure math so the integral was easy for me. I had heard of hexadecimal math (and one of my coworkers said she actually used it for solving a software problem with one of our satellites!), but I had never actually practiced it until last Sunday.

So there you have it. Three women using hex. Call the fetishists. If the math section of the SAT was in hex, maybe women would do better than men.

The shortcut
Did you know that google calculator can do hexadecimal math? Preface your hexadecimal numbers with 0x. E.g. type 0xff - 0xf8 into the google search engine. But try to do it on your own before cheating, OK?

Having trouble understanding text in a foreign language? My sister showed me how we can cut and paste a family newsletter written in chinese into google translator. The translation was not perfect, but we could understand the gist of the letter. I wonder if this will allow me to read and understand Japanese knitting patterns?

Sudoku ate our household

We were blissfully ignorant about Sudoku until Sandra Tsing Loh's NPR piece about it. Why, oh why, didn't we turn off the radio? DH searched through the recycling bin for a puzzle and became hooked immediately; he has an obsessive personality. I looked over his shoulder and helped him fill out a few squares. Fast forward and our marriage suffers as he beats me to the LAT puzzle morning after morning.

For our anniversary, I bought him Will Shortz's Sudoko 2 and asked him not to write the solutions in the book. He saved the marriage by creating a printable blank Sudoko template.