Terrazzo hints for Sunday, October 25, 2026

Today's subject comes from nature.

The caption reads: “An octopus may be looking at the world with its whole body.”

You place 10 stones into a frame of 70 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.

• Kinship. Same-coloured stones that touch make a region. Today: gold forms 3 separate regions of 11, 2, 1; lapis blue forms 4 separate regions of 4, 2, 1, 1; moss green forms 4 separate regions of 14, 13, 2, 1; terracotta forms 5 separate regions of 7, 6, 3, 1, 1.
• Solitude. No two sun cells may touch, not even corner to corner.
• 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.

The Skin That Sees

Octopuses are colour-blind by every measure of their eyes — a single visual pigment — yet they match the colour of their surroundings with uncanny accuracy. Then researchers found opsins, the light-detecting proteins of retinas, distributed across the skin itself, and showed that isolated patches of skin change their chromatophores in response to light with no input from the brain or eyes. The animal may be sampling its environment through its surface, everywhere at once. Whether that constitutes seeing depends on definitions, but it means an octopus can, in some sense, detect light with the same organ it uses to hide.