Our dear friends, Kimberly and her son Cris from Florida, are great puzzle lovers and collectors and have attended several puzzle parties. Here are the "three musketeers" on the boat as one evening's entertainment included a candelight dinner cruise around windy Boston harbor:

Cris, Kim and Kate enjoying dinner cruise in Boston harbor.
 

Other excursions around Boston and Salem involved visits to museums that displayed puzzles and math-related toys. The exquisite ivory carvings below are in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, ancient Chinese handiwork of geometric precision, a tribute to what glorious feats the mind is capable of. Also in Salem we looked at a few witch-hunt and witch-trial historical enactments for gruesome implication of what the dark side of the mind is capable of.

The Peabody Essex Museum management had heard that a contingent of math and puzzle lovers were gathered and were going to visit, so they made some very special treasures available for our viewing pleasure. Among the most famous are the Chinese ivory puzzle boxes, containing a cross-section of classic brain teasers, like tangrams, Chinese rings, interlocking burrs, star puzzle, jumping puzzles, disentanglement string puzzles, and a few we weren't sure about. A dexterity puzzle is in the front box — a tube with a ball on a string, and the trick is to catch the ball on the end of the tube.

Antique Chinese puzzle box with classic assortment of puzzles

Intricately carved ivory boat with most delicate detail.
Note the small die at left for scale.

This one you would have to see to believe. One piece of ivory has been carved with interior layers of concentric lacy lattices, and decorated around the exterior with exquisitely sculptured flowers. It sits on a pedestal that itself looks like an intertwined puzzle.

Ivory ball carved inside and out with miniature details

And for the final mindblower there was an enormous tusk — do they actually have elephants that huge? — carved over every millimeter of its surface with the tiniest details of people's lives and activities: little figures going about their daily duties, with houses and pagodas clinging to the walls here and there, and animals and trees and flowers. All three-dimensional! The dense detailing one can only try to imagine a human being working out and then working on for however long it took to complete. A craftsman beyond compare. And see below a close-up of a minuscule portion.

Enormous tusk carved profusely with 3-D depictions of village life.

Detail from tusk carving, with close-ups of buildings and people.

Did you notice the reflection in the glass behind the tusk? It's a small inkling of what a maze of bridges, walkways, galleries and balustrades the architect contrived to link between sections of the museum. Transcendental.

Over at the Boston Museum of Science we were grooving on interactive science toys and a whole wall tracing the evolution of math through the centuries via the contributions of famous mathematicians, when someone came up and told us there was a Kadon display in another room. Unbelievable. We followed the labyrinthine instructions and found it in the mellow lighting of a display case. A customer must have contributed the pattern showing a sampling of Penrose diamonds in their capacity for infinite tiling. Other intriguing geometric puzzles share the showcase space. What a thrill to see our name on the sign! Thank you, kind spirit in Boston.

Kate enjoying display of Kadon-made Penrose tiling

An artistic tiling with Kadon-made pieces;
the sign says, "Infinite Tiling with Penrose Tiles,"
and below it in small print, "Kadon Enterprises, Inc., Pasadena, MD"
 

All photographs by Dick Jones, who therefore never gets to be in the pictures.