A few months back, I played in SFPursuit, a San Francisco
challenge hunt. Uhm, where "challenge hunt" is a phrase I
made up just now for "Something like a puzzlehunt, but most
of the activities aren't puzzle-y, but they are still challenging."
One of the activities involved looking over a physical book
that had been created for the hunt. A few bookstores across
San Francisco had one copy each of the special book. Each
player's phone directed them to the nearest such bookstore.
There, they could find the special book, gather data from it,
solve the book's riddle, and enter the answer on their phone
to complete the challenge.
Thus I found myself in
Fabulosa Books,
negotiating with fellow hunt enthusiasts to snap pictures
of the pages from a false birdwatching guide.
Unsurprisingly to anyone who's participated in such events,
everyone was very focused on solving the riddle;
nobody bought any books.
I remembered back to when
I helped run 'Terngame 2012
for Twitter interns. I'd set up one puzzle at
Isotope Comics and then watched over the puzzle,
in case any interns needed help solving it.
All of the interns were hyperfocused on
the puzzle; none of them dawdled in the
store after solving to browse or buy.
I felt pretty sheepish for having asked the store's
propietor to let me set up the puzzle there.
I might as well have used a conference room
back at company HQ.
That's what was on my mind when I bought a book at Fabulosa.
Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?
In the novel The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers,
the protagonist goes on a quest of self-discovery.
He's been given a crossword puzzle; he's been instructed
to seek out the answers to the puzzle along his journey.
So one of the answers might be BEAUTY and the
protagonist might encounter a really-nice sunset and
contemplate its BEAUTY. And everyone reading
the book is nodding "Yep, I saw that BEAUTY when
I first solved the crossword, and now here we encounter
it in the story; this whole story is satisfyingly interwoven."
The puzzle's kinda weird, tho. The book takes place in England,
most of the characters are English. But the central-theme
crossword puzzle uses American-style
definition clues, not British-style cryptic clues.
The book explains the reason thusly: The protagonist doesn't
think of himself as smart enough to solve cryptic clues; the
quest-giver knew this, and wanted the puzzle to be solve-able.
But but cryptic clues are just a small part of why
British-style puzzles can be difficult. A much bigger problem
is that their grids are "sparse"; not every square is part of
of an across-word and a down-word. In an American-style puzzle,
if you don't know the across answer, the first name of
whazzerface Świątek you might still be OK: Maybe you'll know
the down-answers that intersect. But in a British-style grid,
even if you have all the intersecting answers, you don't have
all the letters.
A British-style crossword grid from Wikipedia
Maybe you're looking at S□A□E and you're not sure
whether it's
SCALE,
SHADE,
SHAKE,
SHAME,
SHAPE,
SHARE,
SLATE,
SNAKE,
SPACE,
SPARE,
STAGE,
STATE, or what-have you.
If the clue is British-cryptic-style, you have some hope: the clue
has two halves: one definition, one wordplay. If the definition is
so vague that you're not sure whether the answer is SHAPE
or SPACE, probably the wordplay will clear things up. (oh,
a "change" of phase, ok)
So… our not-amazing-puzzler protagonist has to solve
a crossword in a British-style grid and doesn't have an answer
key, so he has to just hope that he picked the right words,
that □E□T□E might be CENTRE or KETTLE…
Also, one of the crossword clues is wrong: it points you at a noun,
but the answer is the verb form of that noun. It's weird that
one clue was wrong. In a novel structured around a crossword,
I either expect no mistakes (a puzzle nerd trying their hand
at novel-writing) or many mistakes (a novelist who doesn't know
the rules of crosswords but nevertheless wants to incorporate one).
Here's my best hypothesis: The author's first draft of this novel used
a British-style crossword with cryptic clues. The author was delighted
when an American publisher picked up the novel: His work would reach
a big audience! But the publisher imposed a condition: Those cryptic
clues had to go; you couldn't expect Americans to understand them.
The author, gnashing his teeth at this slight to his culture, swapped
out his cryptic clues for grudgingly-written defintion-clue replacements,
not noticing that he'd messed one of them up.
Oh? What's that you say? What did I think of the book?
It was OK. It did a great job of structuring the story around
the crossword. If the crossword had been a mistake-less cryptic,
maybe I'd be calling this book masterful.
Permalink
2024-11-20T21:59:34.077030
Much of the internet runs on ads; but maybe it's a house of cards.
Apps, web pages, other content-thingies show ads to defray
their costs. Advertisers want to show their messages to
potential customers, and pay to do so. Everybody wins.
Except it doesn't always work so smoothly. A small business
might want to show their ads on news sites and phone games
and Google searches and other places; but maybe doesn't want
to keep track of how their ads are doing at all those different
places. So maybe the small business signs up with a couple
of intermediary services, each service promising to show the ad to some
desired demographic. Maybe everything's working fine? Maybe it's not?
It's hard to tell.
The small business starts getting billed for ads.
Thanks to creepy surveillance, that phone game thinks it knows
its players' demographics, and thus will show the ad to the
right people. But what if it has the demographics wrong?
Or what if the intermediary service messed up and asked for
the wrong demographic? Or what if the intermediary service
is crooked, never actually places any ads, just sends a
plausible-looking bill? Or what if…
It turns out, a lot of this stuff is pretty opaque.
Publishers and advertisers have to take a lot on faith.
We know ads aren't always shown to the right people, but
we don't know how often.
We know there's fraud out there, but we don't know how
much.
The book's author compares the situation to the subprime
mortgage meltdown: We know there are some bad assets out
there. We know the rating system has incentive to be lazy
about seeking out that badness. Is it all about to fall apart?
Maybe. That could be darned bad news for news sites; even
if the advertising markets only crash for a short while, it
might be long enough for shoestring news organizations to go under.
Permalink
2024-11-15T23:47:32.464406
November 5, 2024, I once again volunteered as a poll clerk for a
San Francisco election. I clerked at
the same garage as
2022, and it was still swanky: building owner Jay served up
espresso drinks, Italian soda, donuts, snacks.
The crew was:
- Christina (Kristina?): Poll Inspector, fearless leader
- Victoria: We clerked together in the swanky garage in 2022; she didn't bring
crafting stuff this year, but brought some darned-handy office supplies.
- Max and Jack: High school students
- Me: Comic relief
I mention that Victoria returned. Another returner: Kayden, our
2022 high school student volunteer. But he wasn't clerking this year;
he came to vote.
Something new happened this year: We had a paper jam.
This ballot, physically, was four big sheets of thick paper.
(thin cardstock?) Voters marked their sheets with
a pen, tore receipt strips off the tops, then fed the big parts
of the sheets into a scanner to be counted. But but
one voter botched tearing the little receipt-strips off. They had
ragged edges and tore into the ballot sheets. When they fed a sheet
into the scanner, things didn't go great.
The scanner pulled in the sheet, made some unhappy whining noises,
stopped, and displayed an error message on screen.
I was standing next to the machine when this happened.
I knew what to do next: We have a little booklet that explains
the machine's mysterious error codes. Error 1
means such-and-such
went wrong, the fix is this; Error 2
means this-other-thingy went wrong, the fix is this; etc.
So I flipped through the little booklet; it didn't have an explanation
for this error message.
Fortunately, Poll Inspector and fearless leader Christina knew
that our San Francisco Poll Worker manuals contained a second
list of error messages and remedies. This list knew about the error
message we were looking at: Yep, it was a paper jam. There was a remedy:
Press a button to exhort the scanner to expel the jammed sheet.
Alas, pressing this button
caused the machine to give forth no sheet, but instead more whining noises.
We called up the Department of Elections phone hotline to find out
what to do next. A nice Dept-of-E person asked for the error message,
asked us to press the expel-jammed-paper-button again, and when that
didn't work told us to wait for a technician to come visit and clear
the paper jam. Until the technician showed up, we were to tell voters
that they could either wait for the technician, or could hand over their
ballots to be stored in The Auxiliary Bin: a compartment on the side of
the ballot scanner. After the technician unjammed things, one of us could
feed those stored ballots into the scanner.
So I, the clerk standing next to the scanner, had the not-so-fun
conversation with voters: Unfortunately, we have a paper jam. You
can't feed your ballot into the scanner right now. You can wait
for the technician, or I can put your ballot in The Auxiliary Bin for
now and scan it when the technician has fixed things.
To me, this felt sketchy.
I knew that historically, sometimes poll workers are corrupt.
Maybe that clerk by the scanner is lying about the "paper jam".
Maybe if you, the voter, hand over your ballot to be scanned "later," that
clerk will look over your choices, frown, and "lose" your ballot.
(I asked many people to hand over their ballots. I wonder
how many of them grew up in places with
"elections" like this?)
San Francisco has safeguards against this corruption:
poll workers watch each other; an audit will catch sites
that hand out more ballots than get scanned; probably other safeguards, too.
Nevertheless, asking voters to just hand over their ballots felt bad.
And this was during the morning rush—many people wanted
to scan their ballots and then head to work. Now they had to pause and
make a decision.
Most voters handed over their ballots without thinking about it.
Some voters peered at me, thought, and handed over their ballots.
A few hung on to their ballots.
I found these few ballot-hanger-on voters comforting.
They were keeping things honest.
Eventually, the technician showed up.
You, experienced at clearing paper jams from printers might wonder:
Do they really need a specialized technician to clear a simple
paper jam? But this was an election, and this
technician was, basically, tampering with election equipment. Most
of what he did was keeping records. He stayed on the phone with someone
back at Dept of Elections office, telling them "OK, I'm going to break
the security seal. I'm opening up the panel." He spent a lot of time
making sure nobody (including him) was committing election crimes,
very little time clearing out the paper jam itself.
Then I took on my second sketchy task: Feeding those Auxiliary Bin-stored
ballots into the scanner. Anyone walking into the polling place would have
seen me hunched over a stack of ballot sheets, picking them up and feeding
them into the scanner. It must have looked pretty suspicious. I kind of
hope that some voter called up the Dept of Elections to report my actions.
A few days later, I ambled along a local retail street, seeking a
sandwich. I spotted the voter who'd torn the ballot that started the
whole mess. They spotted me at the same time; looked away; seemed
embarrassed. I hope they weren't too embarrassed.
I hope they keep voting, maybe hope they ask for help
tearing off the strips next time. Nobody was born knowing how to do it,
and I don't think standard high school Civics classes cover papercraft.
Permalink
2024-11-11T16:00:09.569051
I see the NYT Tech Guild went on strike, so this might be a good time for me to post links to my list of daily puzzle pages, so folks have something to do in the absence of their crossword and/or that thing with the bees:
- Cell Tower: a grid already filled in with letters; you figure out what the words are.
- Toddle: Puzzle starts out looking like "Big vehicle: SEMI" which means that you're looking for a big vehicle like a dieSEl locoMotIve (but that's not the answer today, I just checked)
- Puzzmo: home of my favorite daily crossword and many many other puzzles which aren't my cup of tea but might be yours. Has leaderboards, so I can see that Tyler Hinman completed the crossword puzzle in ¼ my time. Keeps me humble.
- Black Crossword: mini crosswords celebrating the African Diaspora, which I now know more about thanks to these puzzles, especially those parts of the African Diaspora with lots of vowels
- Minute Cryptic: one cryptic crossword clue per day, about all my poor American-crossword-accustomed brain can handle
Anyhow, puzzle on and don't cross the line.
Permalink
2024-11-04T16:01:56.573066
I enjoyed the puzzle-y game-y comic book The Beyond, by Jason Shiga, though I played it wrong.
Like his previous work Leviathan,
The Beyond is a choose-your-own-adventure book, but comics instead of plain ol' text.
This game's gimmick: you encounter some special items, each of those special items has a number.
Sometimes when the instructions tell you which page to turn to, you use an item and add its number,
so the item affects what happens next in the plot. It's a neat gimmick.
I played it wrong. I followed instructions: in the game, I found an item. Later on, I used the item
and that affected what happened next in the plot, neat. But I failed to notice that in the comic,
my character had left that item behind. Later on, I encountered other special-number items, and then
a situation where I could use them. Not realizing that my character had left the first special-number
item behind, I "used" it, again adding its number to decide which page to turn to—and jumped to
a page in the book that the author didn't expect. So I was looking at a bit of comic with an abrupt
transition. But I knew that Jason Shiga is a tricky writer, and I can be pretty tricky myself, so I
"cleverly" constructed a probable plotline in my head, bridged the strange transition from my old
situation to my new situation, figured that the author had just elided some
parts and expected me to figure out what had happened. Then I encountered a puzzle where I was supposed
to use my knowledge of the number that had brought me to this point…but of course I had used
the wrong number. So when I applied my "knowledge," things got weirder and I figured out that
I should start over. And when I played again, I finally noticed how the book was trying to call
my attention to that first item getting left behind. Ahem. Anyhow. I eventually finished the comic-game legit.
I notice that the computer game version of this comic-game-thingy
is coming out in a few days. Maybe it will have an "inventory" system that keeps track of which items
you carry with you (or leave behind); maybe it won't, though. I dunno. Anyhow, if you like books,
get the book. If you like computer games, get the game. It's tricky, and if you're too-clever-by-half, you can
make it even trickier.
Permalink
2024-11-02T18:32:45.759821
I donated to the A.P. News Service today. Now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.
I was dismayed when
the Washington Post's owner
killed some stories about why Trump should not be president of the USA. I subscribed to the Post for its national news; but
apparently, I couldn't trust it. So I unsubscribed.
Where should I get national news then? Not the Washington Post, apparently. Not the New York Times; I remember groaning
about their confident-but-wrong tech reporting many years back. If I
couldn't trust their reporting in a topic I knew, how could
I trust it in a topic I didn't know? Maybe I could give them another chance; a lot can change in a few years.
But, thanks to trust issues, the New York Times wasn't my first choice.
I noticed I read a lot A.P. News stories, mostly because of links shared to social media.
So… I already get a lot of my USA national news from the A.P.
Could I subscribe to A.P. News? They don't have paid subscriptions.
I'd like to pay for my news.
You can get daily emails from the A.P., but you can't pay for them.
You can follow them on various social thingies, but you can't pay for those.
Their web site does have a Donate button, however.
So I donated; so now I'm a paid subscriber, sort of.
Permalink
2024-10-27T13:44:10.995028
*unpins the browser tab devoted to the Washington Post daily crossword puzzle web page*
So long, old friend. I hope you understand why I had to unsubscribe.
Permalink
2024-10-25T18:32:54.433527
It's the second volume in a set of books about the history
of keyboards, text entry, the user experience of working with
text on various devices. This volume got into more modern history.
Sometimes I was learning stuff, but other times I was just
wallowing in nostalgia.
Or maybe "nostalgia" isn't the right word. What's the word
for when you find out that you misunderstood what was going
on at the time?
Decades ago, I thought I cured my repetitive strain injury by
making sure I used different types of keyboard at home and at
work. Now, reading this book, I figured out that what really
cured my RSI is that the new "different" keyboard I bought for home
was thinner than older keyboards, and thus didn't encourage my
wrists to bend so much.
(OK, there was regular ol' nostalgia, too.
Talking about Japanese text entry, I remembered
how the then-newfangled Canon WordTank was so
much easier to use than my Nelson's
paper kanji dictionary. At the time, such
a game-changer. Nowadays, the idea of a separate
dictionary device seems absurd, tho.)
Anyhow, there's modern keyboard history, how keyboards
migrated onto our phones, then (alas) to our phone screens.
There are a couple of
chapters about modern keyboard enthusiasts who soup up
their keyboards with custom designed keys, custom-built
boards… Uhm, I didn't really try to follow those
chapters too closely because I already have enough hobbies.
(Also, I would feel bad if I spilled snacks on a
nice keyboard, so that's a deal-breaker.)
Permalink
2024-10-24T00:29:03.642600
Crossing Golden Gate Park on my way to get a COVID vax,
I saw some new-to-me art on the Golden Mile. I ?think?
it's Fnnch's Solar Bridge (which doesn't look so
exciting in daylight, but glows at night).
Permalink
2024-10-17T18:34:31.480718
I'm slogging through my ballot, looking at California proposition 33.
This proposition says that cities could impose rent control on more types of housing.
Opponents say:
Beware! NIMBY jerks will use this to prevent new construction
by imposing unreasonable rent control so that new projects don't "pencil out." That sounds bad to me, but I'm not a real estate
development expert. I dunno whether this is a real problem with the proposition or if it's just a YIMBY echo chamber convincing
themselves it might be a problem. So I went looking for some real estate development experts.
My hypothesis: Suppose this proposition threatens new construction. Then among its opponents, along with landlords, I expect to
see several building unions, contracting companies, construction companies. But when I
look at the opponents, I see landlords.
OK, there's also the California Council of Carpenters, one company with "construction" in its name, and another company with "builders."
That's not zero but it sure ain't much. I expected
to see a lot more than that. (For comparison, there are about a hundred companies with "apartments" in the name.) I tracked down the recommendations of the San Francisco Plumbers, Steamfitters, and HVAC; they had opinions about every California proposition except 33.The prop opponents are well-organized, must have tried to get endorsements from many organizations;
but those organizations mostly replied "nah."
This looks…like the fraction of Californians who believe the world is flat.
So I'll vote Yes. If this proposition wins and all California housing construction indeed grinds to a halt in a year: Sorry, I tried my best.
Permalink
2024-10-13T21:49:18.379981
