On January 16 2026, I played in the MIT Mystery Hunt with team Left Out.

In Minneapolis, federal law enforcement agents were so bad at their jobs that they drove the crime rate up. In Cambridge, nerds gathered to solve puzzles, including about ½ of Left Out. A ways down the San Francisco peninsula, about another ⅓ of Left Out gathered at a big house. I instead was home in my San Francisco apartment. I'd stocked my fridge with pizza and was getting ready to solve "remote," i.e. not with one of the big Left Out gatherings, for the first time.

I hadn't participated in Mystery Hunt since COVID-19 hit the USA. (I was on the running team in 2020 when COVID-19 was news of a new bad SARS variant in China.) I enjoyed getting together with my teammates, but a fresh wave of COVID seemed to hit the SF Bay Area annually around mid-January. Each year, I'd sign up on the team as a "maybe" participant; but then would back off to a "no" when I saw high COVID numbers. Instead of solving with the team, I stayed home kibbitzing on the team chat.

Then for a couple of years COVID seemed to calm down—but then the local COVID reporting statistics paused each January (perhaps when some health-data-scientist academic went on vacation?). For a couple of years I again stayed home and kibbitzed… and then grumbled when the stats refreshed some days later and I saw that gathering around SF would have been pretty safe after all.

As of 2026, California had changed its health stats reporting to auto-update. And, as of early January, the COVID numbers were low! I once again signed up as a "maybe," but in my head it was "this time for sure." A few days later, my laptop broke. By the time a replacement showed up, I knew I wouldn't have time to set it up for hunt. So, new plan: I would solve "remote" at home instead of gathering with my teammates.

I wasn't super-pleased to solve at home. I probably enjoy gathering with teammates more than I enjoy solving puzzles. But after sitting on the "sidelines" for a few years and thinking this year I'd get to play again, I was bound and determined.

And thus at 09:00 Friday morning (12:00 Cambridge time), I sat at home, watching a video in which Cardinality, the running team, presented the start of the game's story. An hour after that, I sat down and started to solve puzzles. I gave a quick look at the web site that Cardinality had set up to present their hunt. There was a web app, a Pokémon-like game in which you could walk a character around a sprawling world and talk to NPCs. That was probably plenty nostalgic for Left Out's 40-something-year-olds, but not so much for this 50-something-year-old. I left main hunt web site to the young sprats and went to Left Out's Jolly Roger server, where we kept track of puzzles that folks on the web site had discovered. I picked a puzzle and went to work.

Here, "went to work" means reading over a puzzle, then switching to look at a shared spreadsheet where other Left Out members and I would enter bits of research, chat about next steps, carry out those next steps. If a couple of people were on a streak, it could be tough to try to follow what they were doing, let alone contribute. It was like watching a school of cartoon pirahna devour a chicken. Often, a couple of people were on a streak. Remember, several members of Left Out are US National Team this or World Record that. I'm not exaggerating. Before this year's Mystery Hunt when lots of Left Out people were idling in a room in Cambridge, Tammy McLeod pressed a few into service as witnesses as she attempted to break some world record or other.

There were a few minutes when I was looking at a puzzle that wasn't being cartoon-pirahna-devoured quite yet. I arrived at one puzzle with just one other person working on it: Eric Prestemon was busy identifying audio tracks of birdsong. That left me to answer some crossword-y clues. Looking for a gimmick, I joked in chat, "Hey wouldn't it be funny if the answer to this one was [SPOILER REDACTED]" and then realized: yes, that joke-y idea was the gimmick. I started filling in answers. The pirahna swarm arrived and the puzzle fell soon after.

I remember I was the first on the team to look at a puzzle titled "Jumping to Conclusions." I got partway through looking up a bunch of [SPOILER REDACTED]s on Wikipedia when the pirahna swarm arrived; by the time I was done looking those things up, folks working in other parts of the puzzle had solved them.

The folks running Hunt restricted us to having eight puzzles open at a time. In hunts with a wider "beam," I might spend more time with a puzzle before a pirahna swarm arrived. But in this hunt, effort stayed intensely focused for those first few hours.

I over-focused.

At 14:00 (17:00 Cambridge time), I looked up from my laptop. I was hunched over. How long had I been sitting hunched over? Not all the time since 10:00; but too much of the time. My neck was sore, and I was stiff. In past years, I'd remembered to stop and stretch occasionally. Apparently in the intervening years I'd lost that useful habit. I'd concentrated too hard on spreadsheets for too long.

I went out for a walk. That helped me unwind, but my muscles were still pretty mad at me. I came back home, looked at my laptop sitting on a chair…and left it there. Maybe four hours was enough.

I stopped trying to solve puzzles; instead, I just kibbitzed on the team chat.

Saturday 03:00, I was back on the laptop. Left Out has a rule: if you play, you have to do "chores." The usual way you do chores is by working a shift at some team job. Since I was playing "remote," not in one of the team's big gathering spots, there was just one job open to me: "Comm Czar," the job formerly known as "Remote Czar." A remote player who has just woken up from a refreshing nap, wanting to re-join the team effort but unsure of a good puzzle to work on, can ask the Remote Czar. The Remote Czar, to provide useful advice, can keep a weather eye on the currently-opened puzzles; or consult with other "Czars" keeping track of the currently-open puzzles. Since there aren't that many remote players re-joining at any given time, the Comm Czar duties are pretty light. While on duty, you can spend most of your time solving puzzles, just taking an occasional break to answer a question.

At 03:00 (06:00 Cambridge time), I was pretty sleepy. I wasn't in a state to solve puzzles. On the other hand, I didn't just want to wander away from my laptop to drowse: if I fell asleep, I might miss a question from a remote solver, sending their morale into a spiral. So I kept myself awake by going over the list of open puzzles and doing some gruntwork. Copy-pasting puzzle content into shared spreadsheets; doing a first pass of internet research on some citrus fruit; fixing some broken permissions. Nobody asked me any questions; if I'd fallen asleep, I would have gotten away with it.

My shift ended. I drowsed. I got up; kibbitzed on the team chat, went out, came back, took a nap, kibbitzed some more. I was hanging out in the team chat when the puzzle "Financial Literacy" came up, with a surprising reference to Curtis Chen, kind of a big deal in the SF Bay Area puzzlehunt scene back in the 'aughts; that was before he moved up to Portland, Oregon and co-founded Puzzled Pint. Probably just a coincidence that he got a mention in Hunt, but it was delightful. Chat lit up for a bit with folks getting caught up on Curtis' recent doings.

Saturday and Sunday I did errands, visited, read my socials; in between I kept up with the team chat. The running team started handing out hints; but not to us, we were still in the running to win. A long time later, we were no longer in the running to win, thus we could have hints. Later still, we heard that Team Providence, from Brown University, had won, had found the coin. Some Left Out team members kept plugging away until early Monday; but even then, they didn't finish.

Things I want to remember:

• Playing "remote" was OK, actually. Yes, face-to-face is nice. OtOH,
• But I gotta remember to look up occasionally.

Permalink

2026-01-26T15:18:39.667845

My Saturday exercise walk took me out to 20th Ave and Irving St, where I saw that the shake-lovin' tricyclist sidewalk chalk art had accumulated more art down the block: a skateboarding Scooby Doo and an ambigram.

Permalink

2026-01-20T16:43:56.070754

Book Report: Frostbite

It's a book about food preservation.

It's mostly about refrigeration; that's because in recent decades, developed countries concentrated on refrigration, setting aside research into other methods. When refrigeration first came along, consumers didn't really trust it: Who would dare to drink old milk just because it'd been stored in one of those newfangled noisy boxes? Generations later, we have the opposite problem. If someone figures out another way to preserve some kind of food, consumers might not trust that food to stay good if it hasn't been kept cold. It doesn't make sense for a grocery store to sell soy milk from its dairy case—until you consider that a considerable fraction of consumers balk at the idea of room-temperature "milk."

Our refrigeration system is pretty impressive. Reefer trucks haul things between refrigerated warehouses. Specialized workers have learned to get things done in cold storage; but not try to do too much as the cold is bad for bodies, bad for brains, bad for reaction time to avoid crashing. Cold is bad for our defenses against disease; our noses don't defend as well against diseases if those noses are nearly freezing.

The book covers a lot of ground. Some bits that struck me:

A lab where they develop suits for working at extreme temperatures.

In a test chamber with us, suspended from a sturdy metal frame, was a life-size gray manikin wearing a black woolen hat, a navy-blue turtleneck, dad jeans, Velcro sneakers, and a pair of mittens.

"Here's one of our thermal sweating manikins," said [North Carolina State Univeristy Thermal Protection Lab deputy director Shawn] Deaton. "This one has a breathing mechanism, so we call him Darth Vader. The other one is Anakin the Manikin, and of course we have Hand Solo for gloves."

(The book didn't explain the difference between a mannequin and a manikin, so I had to look it up. If it's for displaying fancy clothes, it's a mannequin, spelled like "quinceañera gown." If it's in a lab to measure what happens if, say, clothes are set on fire, it's a manikin, spelled like "kindling.")

The logistics of food transport get weird:

In nonpremium brands, a pint of ice cream is, on average 50 percent air. This leads to all sorts of logistical complications. National brands of ice cream have to use different formulations for different regions to take into account the thinner air at higher elevations. "You can't truck it from Washington to Georgia," Espinoza told me. "The Rockies, he explained, shaking his head.

Why do Americans put so much corn syrup/sugar in everything? Probably partly because we drink so many ice-cold beverages.

At least three of our basic taste receptors—sweet, bitter, and umami, or savory—are extremely temperature sensitive. When food or drinks cool the tongue to below fifty-nine degrees, the channels through which these three taste receptors message the brain seem to close up, and the resulting signal is extremely weak. This is why a warm Coca-Cola or a melted ice cream is so sickly sweet: because they're intended to be consumed cold, they have to contain too much sugar to boost the signal and register in our brains as tasting sweet at all. In 1929, the president of Coca-Cola set up the Fountain Training School to ensure the drink was being prepared and served properly: salesmen were told, "It's gotta be cold if it's gonna be sold."

Those gross Jell-O/whipped cream "salads" may have started out as status signifiers, back when household refrigerators were novel.

Why is it a shame that developed countries went whole-hog for refrigeration, while letting other food-preservation methods languish?

Refrigeration contributes to rising greenhouse gas levels in two main ways. Generating the power to run cooling equipment, whether it be elictricity for warehouses or diesel fuel for trucks, already accounts for more than 8 percent of global electricity usage. (Cold-storage companies are currently the third highest industrial consumers of energy.) Using renewable sources to generate that power would help, but solar-, wind-, geothermal-, and hydro-power generation are growing much too slowly to keep pace with demand. …

The other problem is the refrigerants themselves: the chemicals that are evaporated and condensed by compressors in order to remove heat and thus produce cold. Some of that refrigerant leaks into the atmosphere as a gas—either a little (roughly 2 percent a year from thee most up-to-date domestic refrigeratrs) or a lot (a third, on average, from small delivery trucks). Different refrigeration systems use different refrigerants, some of which, like ammonia, have a negligible global-warming impact. Others like the hydrochlorfluorocarbons and hydrofluorocarbons (HCFCs and HFCs) that are popular in the developing world…are known as super-greenhouse gases because they are thousands of times more warming than CO₂.

Before I read this book, I figured the best thing we could do for developing nations was help them set up a cold chain; now I wonder if we should work harder on other ways to preserve food. Pickles are nice. Who doesn't like pickles?

Permalink

2026-01-15T21:06:55.797391

Permalink

2026-01-11T21:27:07.742072

Here are some of my popular posts from 2025. Now I can post a link to this post on the various social networks where I'm 99% dormant so folks can catch up. (If you're wondering about my active socials, that's mostly Mastodon and a little Bluesky.) Anyhow, behold the posts:

• I once again wrote many-many small puzzles during the month of EnigMarch. This one was popular, having a laugh as DOGE made bad budget "cuts" along with typos. (This one was funnier before the reports of the hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from those budget cuts came out, so pretend that news hasn't hit yet when reading): One Money Don't Stop No Show
• I snapped a pic of the building that housed Twitter HQ after they took down the Twitter sign. I guess this one was popular with my former co-workers.
• A short post quoted in its entirety here:

  Still wrapping my head around the new reality: My cousin quit his job with the federal government and went to work at a startup, thus increasing his job security.

  That was before the 1½ month federal government October-November shutdown. My cousin figured out which way the wind was blowing a few months ahead of time.
• I wrote Walkzee, yet another little phone web app to entertain you during walks. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just this year though it feels like forever ago.)
• I took photos around my neighborhood, including one useful for juvenile humor about LLMs: an advertisement for "AI Integrated PoS System."
• I walked around San Francisco on the new Roundabout Trail. (Also, I blogged about it, and the blog post "did numbers," thus reminding me that happened just a few months ago though it feels like forever. Wow, 2025 was a long year.)

Permalink

2026-01-05T14:36:03.415566

Stencil artist Eclair Bandersnatch knows that it pays to increase your word power. Consider phthalates: if these chemicals are good for softening PVC plastic, maybe they can also soften your bones? The best way to find out is through experimentation, perhaps by eating microplastics or absorbing phthalates that are in cosmetics for some weird reason?

Permalink

2026-01-01T14:39:34.048108

I have once again updated the Phraser phrase list and word list. These are big text files that list out some common phrases, along with a hazily-computed score number for each phrase; high-score phrases might be good candidates for puzzle answers; low-score phrases are so-so candidates. If you're a computer programmer and you want to write a little program to find the solution to a word puzzle, these files might come in handy if your logic is too gnarly for nutrimatic.

I gotta keep updating the lists, though. The list I generated six months ago doesn't think labubu is a thing. It acknowledged the existence of demon hunter but not kpop demon hunters. The old list doesn't know paramount skydance, the new list recognizes this modern monument to nepotism. The new list knows about phrases that have trended recently, including such gems as: in july 2025; in september 2025;… (many similar)…; sequel video games. OK, maybe they're not all gems. Anyhow, if you find these files handy for solving and/or designing word puzzles, head on over to the Phraser page and download the new ones.

Permalink

2026-01-01T14:31:25.862171

A couple of weeks back, I once again spent an afternoon helping to playtest the MaPP Challenge '26, a puzzle hunt aimed at math-enthusiastic high school students. When university math outreach nerds run hunt at various cities, hopefully things will go smoothly because dedicated playtesters Dave Moulton and I bumped into all the rough edges so the MaPP people will have a chance to sand those down.

The youth might think it's "sus" that I was playtesting their puzzles: It's been 30+ years since I was a high school student. But it's fine: as a precaution, I forgot all of my university math and most my high school math, too. OK, that's an exaggeration. There were a few times during the playtest when I thought, "Oh, I recognize this! It's a [spoiler redacted]!" But I swear I failed to remember anything about [spoiler redacted] that would actually help solve the puzzle.

When I hauled my phone out of my pocket and ran the ClueKeeper app, it was still showing the MaPP Challenge 2025 playtest, which tells you how many puzzling events I've attended lately. (Zero (0))

Permalink

2026-01-01T14:35:54.792637