Spring fireworks
 

I recently starting listening to the NPR Sunday Puzzle podcast. I started listening to the oldest one I had from Jan 7. It had a challenge to find a 4x4 grid of 16 different letters, making four, four letter words across and four, four letter words down. As a hint the listener was told that the second row is the word 'ruly'. I worked on it briefly by hand and then decided to write a program to do it instead.

The code is basically a brute force search with a couple of short-circuits. I came up with a list of four letter words by taking a word list, grepping out all the four letter words, then adding all the three letter words with an 's' added (except the ones that ended in 's'). Not perfect, but close enough.

Python source: sundaypuzzle2007-01-07.py.txt
List of four letter words: four.txt

My answer below (select text to see):

bash
ruly
item
gown

gash
ruly
item
down


My answer matches the answer given in the Jan 21 show.

Blue skies, briefly
 

More signs of spring
 

No longer a puppy.