Language Lover's Puzzle Book

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1. sargstuffJan 2023
   Well never seems to dry up when topic(s) revolve around philosopher George Santayana's “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

   Dropping the "more impractical the topic" time frame dependency:

   Now that there's GPT3 with google glasses, "Conquer Logical Fallacies: 28 Nuggets Of Knowledge To Nurture Your Reasoning Skills (Critical Thinking & Logic Mastery)" might seem impractical, unless viewed with a blue background.

   "The Cathedral & The Bazaar" by Eric S Raymond

   "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution " by Steven Levy

   "The Soul of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

   "Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science" by Harry Lewis

   "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" Charles Pezold

   "The Gödelian Puzzle Book: Puzzles, Paradoxes and Proofs (Dover Math Games & Puzzles) " Raymond Smullyan

   "UDEXIA: Interactive Escape Room Book - Puzzle Game Book - Play with Friends, Family or by Yourself" by RIDL

   "Daedalian Depths: Unravel the clues and escape the labyrinth " by Raml Hansenne

   "One Two Three . . . Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science (Dover Books on Mathematics) " George Gamow

   "The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz

   "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadtler

   "The Annotated Gödel: A Reader's Guide to his Classic Paper on Logic and Incompleteness" by Hal Prince

   "The Language Lover's Puzzle Book : A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books) "

   "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan

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2. enkidJan 2022
   If you like these types of puzzles, I'd suggest getting The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is a very accessible curated collection of ILO problems.
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3. lordgrenvilleNov 2020
   I started looking this up after reading this puzzle [0] in The Economist (itself taken from the beginning of Alex Bellos' The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book [1]):

   > Now consider this problem, derived from these Japanese phrases: boru niko (two balls), tsuna nihon (two ropes), uma nito (two horses), kami nimai (two sheets of paper), ashi gohon (five legs), ringo goko (five apples), sara gomai (five plates) and kaba goto (five hippos). How do you say “nine cucumbers”? Kyuri kyuhon, kyuri kyuko, kyuri kyuhiki or kyuri kyuto?

   [0] https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/10/31/a-tantal...

   [1] https://guardianbookshop.com/the-language-lover-s-puzzle-boo...

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