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Terrazzo hints for Monday, October 26, 2026
Mosaic № 80. Three hints, from a gentle nudge to the full answer. Open only as many as you need.
Hint 1: what kind of picture is it?
Today's subject comes from art.
The caption reads: “The first modern pigment was made by accident, from blood.”
Hint 2: the Laws, in plain words
You place 7 stones into a frame of 34 cells. Every cell is filled exactly once.
- Kinship. Same-coloured stones that touch make a region. Today: gold forms 4 separate regions of 5, 2, 1, 1; lapis blue forms one region of 6; moss green forms one region of 18; terracotta forms one region of 1.
Start with the largest region the Laws name: it has the fewest ways to fit.
The answer: what the mosaic shows
Prussian Blue
Around 1706 a Berlin colour-maker trying to produce red lake ran short of potash and borrowed some from an alchemist. It was contaminated with animal blood, and the batch came out an intense deep blue instead. Prussian blue was the first synthetic pigment of the modern era — cheap, strong and stable, where the alternative, ultramarine, cost more than gold. It reached Japan by the 1820s, where Hokusai used it for the wave and the many views of Fuji; those prints look the way they do partly because a European accident had made deep blue affordable. It is also, still, a treatment for thallium poisoning.