I realized with Utter Clarity today that the Thing I Most Want to See is the State of the Union Address as moderated by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew. Somehow, I know that Mike Nelson, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo would make it bearable. I got on this train of thought thinking that there should be something next to the Presidential Podium like the old Colgate Laugh Meter from “Can You Top This?”, calibrated instead to indicate errors, deliberate misinformation (or general Intellectual Dishonesty), and, at the top of the meter, outright Lies.

MST3000 is a more efficient approach.

Reg forwarded a great column from Molly Ivins, about how she will not support Hillary Clinton for president. Me neither. I need someone who will actually take an identifiable stand for or against something … this infinite regress of carefully worded pseudo-statements may be fully defendable in any of the nation’s finest junior high debate forums, but we’re now in a political realm where a trumped-up war in Iraq is responsible for more American dead that al Qaeda accounted for in the destruction of the Towers. That is gross mismanagement. It couldn’t be any clearer what the problem was if Lex Luthor was president.

Clinton will be Kerry all over again, desperately equivocating in the face of any faint possibility of offending somebody, somewhere. That’s not the sort of person you need to fix a problem. You need someone with some ideas that can make a decision. My worry is, who IS that? Nixon put me off Republicans forever, but I’m not seeing the Democrats figuring out this very obvious opportunity to advance an agenda.

I received a very persnickety, if I may use that word, email from another denizen of the UK taking me to task for the sad truth that some of the Sudoku puzzles I am coughing up have multiple solutions. Apparently I have transgressed the unwritten law.

True enough, sometimes they do. My old Sudoku puzzle page, ‘The Sudoku Challenge’ had this problem in a big way, offering puzzles with hundreds of alternative solutions, and it took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure this out. (What finally tipped me off was seeing it propose a puzzle with a single number ‘9′ in the middle of an otherwise empty board.)

My main blind spot was having originally approached Sudoku with an eye to solving the puzzles via computer, which turns out to be extremely easy to do. So easy, in fact, that you don’t realize that a computer program has exactly the sort of mind-numbing persistence that it takes to grind through incredibly abstract boards with dizzying speed.

In practice, I’ve found that the most satisfying Sudoku boards have only one solution, and that solution can be arrived at completely via deduction … that at every step, there is always one square on the board that can take one, and only one, possible value. You can make it a little harder by adding a step along the way where the best you can do is make a guess once during the game (that is, your best opportunity is a square that looks like it will support at least two different numbers). Of course, the moment you introduce that possibility, you also introduce the chance that either number will lead you to a valid solution (which sometimes happens), and the Slough of Despond that Non-Unique Solutions inevitably lead us to.

Boards that require more than one guess are beneath contempt, and a Sign of the End Times, as far as I’m concerned.

On the new puzzle blog, The Puzzle Machine, I offer three Sudoku puzzles a day (and one cryptogram), one requiring no guesses, one requiring one guess, and the third requiring two. My Linux box has solved them all, but I, frankly, never touch those two-guess monstrosities.

You simply have to read this post on Matt Baldwin’s ‘Defective Yeti’ blog (”Xyzzy” … the people who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing that they like). Baldwin is the most consistently funny guy blogging today.

I got an email from a reader that had come across our Sudoku Solver, but found that it choked on the World’s Biggest Sudoku Puzzle created by Sky One in the UK (or most creative Photoshop creation … Guinness Book Record or not, I can’t decide which it is). Most Sudoku boards are considered tough if you have to make a guess for your next move more than a couple of times, but the Sky One puzzle demands a sequence of no less than 10 correct guesses on the way to one of its solutions (there are two).

Our little PHP-based solver gives up when the recursion goes too deep, but it comes from a Perl script we’ve written that has no such qualms. I’ve published a description of this script and the script itself in the article about Tough Sudoku.