Terrazzo hints for Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Today's subject comes from science.

The caption reads: “A rock that already knew where north was.”

You place 8 stones into a frame of 38 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.

• The Vein. The vein cells must form one unbroken path between the frame's two notches, with no branches and no loops.

Start with the largest region the Laws name: it has the fewest ways to fit.

Lodestone

Magnetite is common; lodestone — magnetite that is permanently magnetised — is rare, and the leading explanation is lightning. A strike's enormous transient field aligns the domains in a surface outcrop and freezes them that way. The Han Chinese used lodestone spoons for divination before anyone thought to use them for travel. By the eleventh century the Chinese were navigating with magnetised needles; the technology reached Europe a hundred years later. For centuries nobody knew why it worked — sailors debated whether the needle pointed to the pole star or to a magnetic mountain at the top of the world. It was the world itself.