I was first inspired to write Paradise Lost while listening to an episode of Desert Island Discs, for which Both Sides Now was one of the selected eight records. Looking back at the archive helpfully posted online by Praful Kapadia, I’ve decided it was the episode featuring The Wire actor Wendell Pierce, although I now learn Joni Mitchell is the 76th most commonly picked artist on the show; her records would accompany 47 guests to their desert island, nine of whom selected Both Sides Now. (That compares to 121 for Bob Dylan, and 1028 for Mozart).

By Oyler

I read that several solvers approached the Areas of Triangles puzzle by seeking out Heronian triples on the Internet and bypassing the intended logical deductions. I feel that this was a shame, but otherwise I have no problem with it. Perhaps this could have been forestalled by withholding Heron’s name in the preamble, but I felt that it would have been wrong to deny him the credit for the formula.

or May A Guest Prelate Indicate an Explanation (of how the puzzle came to be)

I have always enjoyed a game of Boggle. In my family I am banned from using a pencil while playing, because the manic scratching is off-putting to the other players. At a friend’s birthday party a couple of years ago, he asked me to bring a Boggle set and then forced me into taking on all comers throughout the night (I didn’t really need much forcing). Then, when Ned (friend of the Magpie) introduced a few of us to the Squaredle app – basically a Boggle game that has somehow avoided being taken down for copyright violation – it struck me that it would make a fun theme for a puzzle.

I like a meta-puzzle. I think any set of individual puzzles can be immediately improved by the addition of an over-arching meta-puzzle that links them together. This requires co-ordination, but a group of editors can manage that. So the annual Treasure Hunt is our contribution to meta-puzzling, and I’m keen to see it continue.

I suspect I’m far from unique in having thought about QR codes as a possibly useful tool for a thematic crossword. That said, trying to make a crossword that doubled as a QR code initially seemed like a lost cause. After all, the smallest possible normal QR code is 21×21 pixels – too large!

I only came across the Mandelbrot Set a few years ago on the Youtube channel Numberphile, which I find very interesting.

I have been delighted to see the recent increase in the number of blogs on the Magpie site, following my rallying cry earlier in the year. It would be churlish of me not to contribute to their number again – and reiterate my eagerness to read many more – so here are some thoughts on Splitting the Atom, aka my first failure as a setter.

I was sorry that much of the reaction to Irrational concerned the ambiguity surrounding the C and F values. In retrospect this could have been avoided by clarifying in the preamble that √C was a surd and that F had to be a positive integer.