Potential Puzzle Hunters are everywhere, even St Louis

While I was in St Louis to volunteer for DASH, I did some shoe-leather investigation in search of potential puzzlehunters. I had a lot of fun helping at DASH... but we only had two teams this year. Those folks had only found out about DASH because I happened to know Prof Bryan Clair, who passed along word to some SLU faculty and students. Us organizers had tried some other publicity things, but they hadn't borne fruit.

So I tried wandering around a couple of other St Louis school campuses in search of recreational math clubs and such. This isn't necessarily a smart way to go about finding potential puzzlehunters, but it's what I thought of.

MU-StL has a Math/CS department with some kind of Math Club. In my wanderings, I didn't see much sign of it or find someone to talk to. If I found the departmental office (which, depending on what sign you read is in room 303 or 311), then there was a lady in it who was on the phone the whole time I was wandering the halls. One room in their area had a sign out front labeled 'Math Club / "ACM"' Why was ACM in quotes? I don't know. So if I wanted to track down a math club in MU-StL, I'd start by calling up the math department on the phone. I dunno how useful it'd be, but it's at least as useful as wandering around lost on campus.

Wandering around lost the fifth floor of WUStL's Lapota hall (an engineering building) was more promising. I saw signs for events organized by ACM. And a big ACM banner hangs over a lounge area; so the ACM seems capable of organizing gatherings and such. Looking up the WUStL branch of the ACM on the internets, we can see they are sufficiently puzzle-y to have their own puzzle trail, in which I failed to solve so much as the first puzzle but let's not hold that against them. (Am I supposed to recognize an ASCII cow saying "phizzbuzz" from somewhere? I've heard of fizzbuzz. I know about a dogcow that says "moof". But that's as close as I get.)

I found the WUStL math department office and asked the nice student behind the desk if there was a local organization who was into "recreational math, puzzles, that sort of thing." He said that sounded like the Math Club, who was faculty-sponsored (or something) by this guy, Professor Chi.

After I told Prof. Clair of my investigations, he pointed out, "You could have just asked me; we St Louis math people talk to each other about stuff from time to time." So of course, that would be an important question for anyone you do manage to get interested: who else should I tell?

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If I win my bet, then these guys have to poke around in wolf poop. Or something like that. Petridish.org is like Kickstarter for science instead of art.

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Link: Ranking Wikipedia Pages

This puzzle nerd has ideas on how to rank Wikipedia pages for notable-ness. Similar goals to Nutrimatic, but taking advantage of more data. Some of you folks might have some good ideas on things he could try.

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Link: Going Cardboard

I enjoyed this documentary about boardgames and boardgamers, Going Cardboard. If you don't already think boardgames are fun, this movie probably won't convince you otherwise. But I think they're fun and I enjoyed this movie. I'm not even that into boardgames, and I still enjoyed this movie. Heck, maybe that boosted my enjoyment. For example, I'm probably never going to travel to Essen just to see the huuuuuge gaming convention there, but it was fun to watch a few minutes of video footage about it. There are interviews with boardgame designers and folks who build up the boardgamer community; there are some big names... uhm, big in the context of boardgaming. They're interesting if you're into game design or promoting game communities.

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I annotated a geographical location in Pinwheel.com. It might or might not be a good way to pass information for games that happen out in the world. It's new, so I'm sure it will change. For now, just trying it out.

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Nice writeup of Shinteki Disneyland in Wired http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/02/shinteki-disneyland/

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animated gif zombocom logo

The internet is not yet complete; there are still gaps. For example, today I tried to find an animated GIF of the zombo.com animated "flower" logo and couldn't find it. So I made one (with some blank space above and below for handy placement of caption text). Unfortunately, I'm a slowpoke at constructing animated GIFs, so I can no longer remember what I wanted this for. But if I ever remember, by golly it will be available.

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Even SF Japantown

Who else wants to play @realegame? It's ~1.5 hours long with about an hour of team puzzling in SF Japantown. They're running a few sessions, so you can choose when you want to play. Most of those sessions overlap with the first running of the Dr When game, but not the ones the Friday evening before (Mar 23rd @ 6pm, 9pm). It might be fun to try to pack those sessions with local Gamists (and maybe even out-of-towners in town for Dr When).

I'm not 100% sure that Friday night is the best idea, though. Getting into SF on a Friday night's not so easy—folks who live on the peninsula or the East Bay might not think the drive is worth it for just one hour's puzzling; folks who aren't playing Dr When's first weekend might prefer to play this Real Escape Game during the weekend proper. I dunno. What do you think?

official web site, video which gives flavor of event

(Thanks to @gfilpus for the pointer!)

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Book Report: Hackerspaces: the Beginning

Oh, I heard a mouse chewing above my head. I sure hope it doesn't figure out how to get into my apartment from my neighbors' apartment and... uhm, but I didn't want to talk about gnawing-spaces, I wanted to talk about Hackerspaces

It's a free book in which folks who participate in Hackerspaces write about their organizations and their spaces. Hackerspaces are tangled up with the Maker movement: folks who chip in to form a space in which they can make stuff. They need to get organized. They need equipment. They need projects and people enthusiastic to work on those projects. They learn from each other, they collaborate, they make things better than they could have on their own. It doesn't always go well; organizations fall apart, spaces are ruined. But it goes well some of the time, and that's a good thing. You might learn something by reading essays from folks who have tried to make it work.

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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even inside Puzzle Hunts

The MIT Hunt had an amazing recursive puzzle. @Prestemon blogged his solve so you can experience the majesty without having to bust your own personal brain for eight hours. (Well, as I post this, he hadn't posted a completed solve yet. But maybe by the time you see this.) (The Mystery Hunt, of course had many many awesome puzzles. I'm just mentioning this one because the next time someone asks me what I mean by "recursion" in a puzzle, I'm trotting this one out as the $&#*ing epitome.)

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More Tyro Crossword Construction ramblings

Some days ago, I posted some noobish thoughts about crossoword construction. I'd figured out that Nutrimatic's default word lists were good for Nutrimatic's use case, but not so great for a list of candidate words for an automatic crossword grid-filler program. I got comments from some smart people on that post.

Tinhorn pointed me at the Collaborative Word List Project. This is a big word list that's maintained by a bunch of puzzle creators. Once I heard about this, I knew it was going to be an awesome thing. I sent off for it right away. It took a while for me to get it, though. This list is "collaborative," and to collaborate, puzzle designers need to run a program on their computers. The download page had Mac, Windows versions... and of course, I'm still a lunkhead Linux user so I had to go and ask what to do. Fortunately, the programmer, Alex Boisvert, was a smartie and had designed the system well enough such that he was able to figure out a solution for me. But it took a while for my questions to go back and forth.

Meanwhile, I was working on Dan Egnor's ideas on how to get "clueable" words and phrases from Nutrimatic's data. (You recall that Nutrimatic uses Wikipedia: it finds common phrases, article titles, and link "anchor text".) Dan suggested concentrating on article titles and link anchor text. That would get more phrases like "Hank Aaron" but fewer like "from his". I tried that and it helped a lot! Which then ran me into the next hurdle: rodr. Nutrimatic thinks that "rodr" is a word. It doesn't think it's a great word, but it thinks rodr is OK. But rodr looks funny in a crossword grid, or at least I was surprised to find it there when I tried using a revised Nutri-clueables list with Crossword Constructor. And there were some other weird things in there, too. It turned out that these were artifacts of, uhm, international text. Text like "Rodríguez". Nutrimatic is set up for English; when it sees "Rodríguez" it does its best and interprets the text as two words "rodr guez". And again, for Nutrimatic's use case, that's fine. But now I was trying to figure out how to tweak Nutrimatic to be more careful with these förêígn letters. So I'm digging around, trying to find out which software library is dropping this stuff and what other software library I might replace it with. And it's taking me a while because every time I think I've figured something out the next step is "OK, now that it's working, run this program over all of Wikipedia... and come back tomorrow when it's done." So when things weren't working as well as I thought... uhm, yeah.

Meanwhile, Mr Boisvert had set me up with his software. So I finally got a copy of the heralded Collaborative Word List. And since I don't want to be just a parasite, I figure I should, y'know contribute something. So I write a little program to look at Nutrimatic's highly-rated phrases+words and compare them to what was already in the C.W.L. I figured that out of Nutrimatic's top 50K words, there would probably be 100 worth adding to the C.W.L. And... there was "Eurovision." Yup, that was about it. "Eurovision" was popular in Nutrimatic, but not in the C.W.L. (But probably the C.W.L. people had considered "Eurovision" seeing as how their list had "EUROVISIONSONGCONTEST".) Wow, one word was... less than 100. So I looked over the C.W.L.

If you get a list of "good" words out of Nutrimatic, you're looking at about 50 thousand words. There are more words than that in Wikipedia... but if you go for more than the most "popular" 50,000, you're kind of in the dregs. There are about 100 thousand "good" phrases, including things like "from his". The C.W.L. has 400 thousand entries. Hand-crafted. This thing is a cultural treasure. I just kind of took all the tinkering I was doing to re-jigger Nutrimatic and Wikipedia and nudged it aside. Nutrimatic is good at doing what Nutrimatic is good at; I don't need to try to force it to do something else.

Now I've got a pretty good crossword construction word list. Now when I make a crossword puzzle, I'm not complaining about the fill. Now I'm complaining about the crappy clues I write. That's progress, right?

Bones of Contention

Across
1. K-12
5. Sailboat with lateen sails
12. Rapper known for "Shawty"
17. Island territory
18. Sixty minutes from now
20. Cost
21. Star near Sol
23. Prefix with graphic
24. Dr House: "It's not ___"
25. ___ Paulo, Brazil
26. Actress Myrna
27. Actress Sophia
28. Sang "Orinoco Flow"
30. Pilgrim portrayer
31. Retinal researchers' org.
32. Divine disagreement topic
38. Hoosegow
39. Early anesthetic
40. Term for a long-handled gardening tool
41. Suffix with chlor-
42. Skater Harding
44. Longtime congressman from New Jersey
47. Excavating machine
49. "Hulk" director Lee
50. Fingerrpinting dept.
52. Asian capital
54. Advanced teaching deg.
55. Fierce fight, contained
59. Flightless flock
62. New York mayor during blackout of '77
63. Southern school, home of Mike the Tiger
64. ___ Victor
67. Shakespearean setting
69. Actress Nastassja
72. Breakfast, lunch and dinner
74. Fla. neighbor
75. Flowery verse
77. River in eastern France
79. Sporty car roof
80. Chromatic cause of arguments
85. Snare, for example
86. Humorist Lebowitz
87. Castle part
88. They make water filters
89. A as in Austria
90. Online vocational sch. teaching Mold Awareness and more
93. "Sunflowers" setting
96. "Bolero" composer
97. Signal of understatement
100. Less than a Manwich
101. Raised
102. A chip, maybe
103. Toadlike
104. Opposite of dowry?
105. Future atty.'s exam

Down
1. Alike: Fr.
2. Humdinger
3. Flashmob, for example
4. Richard Wright's complaint to his mother.
5. Taiwanese manufacturer of motherboards
6. Hydrocarbon suffixes
7. Superboy's girlfriend
8. Golden rule word
9. Half a dance
10. Grand ___ Dam
11. Sky lights
12. Anti-abortionist
13. The rose, to Ramon
14. Comic book with slogan "Mad scientsists are a disease. Meet the cure."
15. Singer Melissa
16. Anon
19. Mideast capital
22. "__ __ sow, so..."
29. Bar order
30. Skywalker portrayer
32. Amenhotep IV's god
33. Pool ball type
34. Cry of surprise
35. Actor Beatty
36. Lots
37. Lack
38. "Come ___?" (Italian greeting)
43. Air hero
45. Alumna bio word
46. South Africa's ___ Paul Kruger
48. Ambulance V.I.P.
51. ___ Gigante: Univision show
53. Talks to sattelites
55. Military leader known for chicken
56. Furniture wood
57. "I wish you hadn't told me that."
58. Total
59. Emptying a place of ppl.
60. Movie with exaggerated emotions
61. Kazakhstan riparian feature
64. Hardest thing to learn about mobile phones
65. Blockhead
66. Cleopatra biter
68. In the ordinary way
70. Mumbai TV station
71. Carp
73. Light
76. Decadent
78. Comics shriek
81. What Takeru Kobayashi can do
82. Wind instrument with a keyboard
83. Gretel's brother
84. Close, as an envelope
88. Dressed in a fine or showy manner.
90. IMHO
91. ___ von Bismarck
92. Consequently
94. "¿Como ___ usted?"
95. Editor's mark
98. Wrote "Nothing But The Truth"
99. Dreyer, east of the Rocky Mountains

(No gimmick in this puzzle. The Os don't make the Big Dipper or anything.)

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Todd Etter: best day job ever?

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The new ice cream parlor a few blocks away has a backstory: during prohibition times, bartenders were out of work. So they went to the soda fountains and sophisticated-itized them. I felt like a n00b sitting in this place with a bowl of ice cream reading about how all the impressive treats were at the fountain in the back. Seasonal menu of milkshakes made with egg and stranger things. Custom syrups. I didn't feel nearly degenerate enough to really do the place justice, but I went to work with a spoon and tried my best.

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Mechanics' Institute Library

Remember a while back I screamed that USA legislators wanted to make a local censorship service a la China's Great Firewall? They're still at it. Lots of folks are protesting it today. You can, too. Meanwhile, it's tough not to get distracted by details. While I was cynically looking at where some entertainment-industry PACs were spending money, I found out that Rhode Island has a senator whose last name is Whitehouse. His website is whitehouse.senate.gov, not to be confused with whitehouse.gov, the White House website. But I bet folks get them confused all the time.

But the fun thing I did today was tour the Mechanics' Institute Library. This is a private library in downtown San Francisco. In general, it's not open to the public but they give tours Wednesday noons. It's a nice library, with a bunch of books. If I were in the market for another library, I'd probably like this one plenty. As it was, I was wondering if it would be a nice workspace, a place to peck away at the laptop away from home... while avoiding being one of those people pecking at laptops at cafes. This Library didn't seem right for that; folks were reading, not pecking. Things were pretty still, I might feel sheepish with my grunts of inspiration. No reason to think a library would be a good place for that. But it was interesting to check out anyhow. It's a pretty space. It's got some architectural details that folks wouldn't bother with anymore, but at the same time it's a well-used functional space. Plus now when I keep hearing about its chess club, I can say Oh, I've been there. And I finally got to see the staircase. I walked up, which isn't perhaps the best way to appreciate its beauty so much as its climbi-ness, but there you go.

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ArtGameLab, Super Going

@thacher has been interesting lately if you're a San Francisco person who likes pervasive games. (That's not unusual. If you're even halfway into ARGy stuff, yawta follow her.) She mentioned that the Elsewhere Philatelic Society would appear at ArtGameLab, a set of games set in SFMOMA, starting January 15th. Then she pointed out another contributor to that exhibit, Super Going. I visited their site and it reminded by of SFZero. Do you remember a few years back when I wrote about stumbling upon a game that ran like Mutual Dare with a scoring system? So I visited the SFZero site and it says... SFZero's been slow lately because a couple of the folks running it have been taking time to work on a new project, Super Going. So there you go.

If you're thinking of signing up for Super Going, friend me and let me know if you complete missions. I think you score in the game by completing missions and then getting points from your appropriately-impressed friends. So... I signed up before I found out about that. And now I'm thinking "What's the point of doing anything, I don't know anyone on this service." But if you sign up, I'll know you and I'll probably be generous with my points. Because who else am I going to give them to? ~~(Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure that I, in fact, have any points to give out.)~~

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Joined goodreads

I joined goodreads, yet another site that recommends books to read based upon books that you liked. It's been around for a while, but I didn't join. Amazon.com's recommendations were fine! But then Amazon.com tweaked their recommendation UI, and I could only rate books I'd bought through Amazon.com. If there was a way to rate books that I'd checked out from the library, I couldn't find it. So I rated 1000 books on goodreads and now I have some new recommendations, yay.

I mention this because I bet some of y'all are already on bookreads and it has some "social" aspects. Though I don't pretend to understand them yet. OK, I gave up on understanding them. (Do I want to be goodreads-friends with you if we're real-life friends but have different taste in books?) And I don't remember which of y'all are on it. But if you find it useful, feel free to "friend" me at http://www.goodreads.com/lahosken.

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Link: thelatitude The Nonchalance website (GC behind Jejune Institute) updated recently The Jejune Institute is now CLOSED. Our adventures concluded in 2011 with hidden episodes IV and V. For information on our ne...