Puzzler Solutions

April 5th, 2008 by chriszs | Posted in Generation LoL | 1 Comment »

So, Puzzler stumped you. It’s okay, it stumped a lot of people. A lot of people besides the group from Computer Science House, who won $300 after solving the meta-puzzle 35 hours after the issue hit the stands. Here’s how they did it.

(If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest you click here.)

First thing’s first: If you want a better understanding of what the single-digit answers are you have to remember the famous pangram depicted on the cover. A pangram, for those too lazy to pick up a dictionary, is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet, such as the famous “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” It’s not a perfect pangram, though, so you have to remove the repeating letters to get “A quick brown fx jmps ve th lzy dg”. When you write this out over the blank phone number and GPS coordinates, you now know where to place your answers to the 26 puzles (A-Z). Nifty, huh?

(AQU) - ICK - BROW

NF XJ’ MP.SV” N

ET HL’ ZY.DG” W

A) I bet you didn’t even know that you knew the ancient Mayan numeral system. Dots are ones, bars are fives, football shapes are zeroes. The GPS coordinates land you right on top of the Pentagon, (use Google Earth) for an answer of five.

B) You might have to search online for the rules to a Battleship puzzle, but this rather easy one can be solved by determining the location of the small boats and figuring out what letters correspond to them in the margins. Unscramble to get 4.

C) The hands fingerspell colors that represent bands on a resistor. Calculate and get 7.

D) This one’s just a word search from hell. The only word to be found (excepting any coincidental two or three-letter words) is “shift back one”, which is backwards and diagonal. Once you do this, the only word that can be found is “again”. After rewriting yourself a new grid once again, you can finally find all the words, which reveal the GPS coordinates of London Bridge, giving you “London Bridge is _______ ____” for the meta-sentence. A trip down nursery rhyme lane reveals “falling down”. Convert the letters to numbers, add the numbers from each word and subtract the “value” of each word from one another to get 5.

E) Follow the chess game expressed by the abbreviations. The illegal move is the answer (7).

F) As simple as it states: follow the lines to complete the equation. 2 and 3 connect, 1 and 6 connect, and 0 and 4 connect. Three is the answer.

G) Novice puzzlers determined that “Horace homophone” referred to Egyptian god Horus, but only puzzle masters realized that Egyptians represented fractions using shapes from the classic Egyptian eye symbol. Each shape represents one over two to the nth power. This particular shape (the stem-shape under the eye) happens to represent 1/64, making the answer 6.

H) Put your 10-color Rubik’s cubes away. This puzzle is just a sudoku in disguise. Push the squares together, disregard the inclusion of a tenth color in the key to the left, assign each color an arbitrary value, and solve to get 4.

I) Look up a bit of euchre vocabulary to figure out that the bowers are jacks of the trump suit and the suit of the same color, push your 2s through 8s to the side and just throw down the cards when they are revealed. Use the key to get six.

J) Saran

Satan

Sat on

Baton

Baron

Boron, which has an atomic number of 5.

K) You needed to check our website to see what you were solving for, but once you did it was just a matter of remembering genetics from high school biology. The answer is 2.

L) Unfortunately, the fictitious text The Cacti Ether Henry has no ISBN number., but if you stared at the hint long enough, the letters might just rearrange themselves to say “anagram puzzle.” The Cacti Ether Henry is The Catcher in the Rye, by reclusive author Slander Jig, errr, J. D. Salinger. The digit from the ISBN is 0.

M) Because Denninger dismisses someone every time he figures something out, you have to determine the suspects’ answers by assuming that the answers that are given have to be the ones that give a unique solution that Denninger can use for dismissals. Our Banjo thief is student C, making the answer 0.

N) You could’ve solved this mojito problem drunk by tripling the lime juice in the recipe and subtracting the original dosage to get 4. Don’t get cocky, though. As far as the GPS coordinates in the meta-puzzle are concerned, this only tells you that the path to the prize is somewhere between 40 and 49 degrees North, which refers to a pretty big chunk of populated land mass.

O) A puzzle in Puzzler? Should be easy, right? Not when you see the picture, which to the average human looked like a stack of three sheets of paper with six horizontal lines on the top sheet. A computer, typeface geek, or Puzzle Master saw something different: the number 4 typed out in wingdings.

P) A guitar tab for Matchbox 20’s song, 3 a.m. At least we didn’t try to express it in Guitar Hero tabs.

Q) Guess you had to hit our website archives up to fill in this sudoku with the 8 in question.

R) Just dividing 19 by the ill-fated student’s net gain of two yards a day puts you one day off, since the student has no need to slide back three yards once he’s home free on day 8.

S) A grueling logic puzzle. I hope you checked the website to see that you had to alter your final answer to get 7 before plugging it into the meta-puzzle.

T) A few people were curious how a mere maze could reveal a number, until they completed it and saw the number 7 drawn before them.

U) As Biblical as it looks, the quote is from Alan Turing’s 1950 essay where he postulates the rules for the Turing test.

V) You’ve solved enough of these puzzles at a computer. Get some exercise and discover that a door on the first floor of the stairwell has a misleading white 2 painted on it. Because it’s on the first floor, the answer is 1.

W) Once you get past the binary, it’s a simple math problem whose answer is 0.

X) A coin flip is a coin flip is a coin flip, no matter how grave the consequences or foolish the logic. Your odds? 0.500. Your answer? 0.

Y) If you don’t know what an acrostic is, look at the first letter of each line to get 9.

Z) Ask a friendly cashier to scan it and void the purchase (or look it up on the internet if you’re not interested in making new friends) to discover that what you’re looking at is the UPC from a can of Arizona Arnold Palmer. You might have to look up the man’s birthday on wikipedia, though, instead of asking him. I guess you can’t make too many friends in the course of a single puzzle.

So, now you have everything you need. Plug in the answers to get the phone number:

(585) - 672 - 4840, which just happens to be the number of RIT Rings. Calling it only gives you the standard “Leave your ring after the tone” line. How about we look at the GPS coordinates?

43 05′ 03.71″ N

77 40′ 29.56″ W

No, you don’t just need to call RIT Rings and tell us that the answer is “The Eastman Building” or go stand near the Eastman Building and call from your cell phone and demand cash prizes delivered to you at 3:30 in the morning like a pizza. You have to go to the exact coordinates to discover a dinosaur from years past: a pay phone. Scrounge up 50 cents in pocket change, blow the dust off the receiver and call RIT Rings (which is set up using Grand Central) to receive a personalized congratulatory message and $300.

And, if you couldn’t solve it quickly or “accureatley” enough we might just try this again next year, when you might have better luck. But if we do, I promise that we’ll hold you off for at least 48 hours instead of the 12 hours it took to solve the first and the 35 hours it took to solve this one.

The World’s Biggest Ball Pit

March 20th, 2008 by casey | Posted in Generation LoL | No Comments »

In Rome, at the Spanish Steps, everything seemed normal as a few men and women went up and down, going wherever they happened to be going. It was a grey, overcast day set against the grim stone of the steps and the fountain at their base. That was until thousands of plastic multi-color play pen balls were dumped from the tops of the steps. First, a cascade of red bounced down the right side, followed seconds later by a blend of green and yellow from the left. It sounded like a hollow rain storm as 500,000 plastic balls tumbled down what have been referred to as “the longest and widest staircase in all Europe.” Some pedestrians ran in fear, others stared in awe as the tide flowed harmlessly by them. The video documenting the event shows an old man reach down, pick up two handfuls of red playpen balls and throw them up into the air like confetti, a look of pure joy on his wrinkled face as he played in the world’s largest ball pit.

Guerilla artist Graziano Cecchini, who dished out nearly $30,000 for the feat, was promptly arrested, stating that he did it to raise awareness for the plight of the Karen and Burmese people and that the balls represented the lies of politicians.

Cecchini bought enough balls to fill 11 unfurnished RIT dorm rooms up to five feet in multicolored fascination. He also spent enough money to pay tuition for a year.

Upon first glimpse, it looked like fun. It was more of a light-hearted prank than a political statement. Granted, many people were outraged at the stunt. Feedback on news sites ranging from tirades about the waste of money to workers who were late for work due to road blocks in light of the stunt, to en masse littering concerns.

If you ask me, there are much worse things Cecchini could have rolled down those stairs (last June a man drove a Toyota Celica down the same steps, terrorizing pedestrians and damaging several of the landmark steps). It’s just hard to get angry about playpen balls. Especially in light of his attribution of their meaning to the plight in Burma, there is certainly a “love not war” connotation to the stunt.

There’s such a peaceful, almost Buddhist, thing about ball pits. They just repel anger, it seems. Out of curiosity, I’ve been looking into xkcd-inspired ball pits, almost as a vacation from current events. Yes, we have been in Iraq for five years. Yes, Obama is still black. Yes, Spitzer paid (too much) for a call girl. Most stirring to me, however, is what little news is escaping Tibet.

I’ve had a complex relationship with China over the past year or so. Every vilifying thing that escapes from their politicians’ mouths concerning the Dalai Lama offends me greatly. Having witnessed Tenzin Gyatso at the University of Buffalo in Fall 2006 for a Reporter assignment, it was clear that the man couldn’t harm a fly, let alone convince another human to harm a fly.

In the Dalai Lama’s current position I would breathe fire and break chains and scream until my lungs collapsed. But all that negativity doesn’t help the Tibetan plight or even progress their culture in any way. Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama remains peaceful and calm. My disgust at the situation converts to internal unrest in light of my hypocrisy. I don’t know how to hide my anger as I watch China destroy a culture and create policy that may cause Tenzin Gyatso to be the last of the Dalai Lamas. (Bear with me, we’re getting back to ball pits. I promise.)
I have gone so far as to try and sympathize with China by putting myself in their shoes, but their strongest and (only argument) for maintaining sovereignty over Tibet is that “Tibet is part of China.” I have nowhere to look for corroboration but the American Civil War. After all, before slavery was thrown to the forefront of our history books, the Union’s best argument was “The South is part of the United States”. But the South wasn’t exactly peaceful in their dissent. Few parallels can be drawn.

It wasn’t until I came back to the video of Cecchini’s stunt several times that I found a way to balance out the forces pulling on me. Instead of imagining Chinese politicians literally and violently choking on their words, and successful-yet-violent uprisings and other un-Tibetan actions I have come to this conclusion. If I had the means, I would fly over China with fleets of airplanes and bury Shanghai and Beijing in millions upon millions of plastic play pen balls.

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A Not-So-Funny LoLCat

March 20th, 2008 by casey | Posted in Generation LoL | 1 Comment »

I have a saying for when I discover appalling things on the world wide web: “God’s gonna be pissed when he finds the internet.” I also like to say that youtube comments are a step below bathroom graffiti. Every time I talk a stroll through the darker neighborhoods of Web 2.0 I wonder who these people are, and how their lackadaisical manners have monopolized certain markets of the internet. After all, my experience with mankind has been, on the whole, quite positive. Although I tend to disagree with many and am less than fond of even more, there’s a chocolaty Anne Frank candy center to my hard cynical candy shell. The rotten eggs are about five standard deviations out from the status quo, and most of the people in between, no matter how intolerable, are at least harmless. Either there is a mass underground network of off-the-grid assholes accounting for all the atrocities of the internet, or the minority of jerk-offs on the surface of the planet are efficiency gurus, stockpiling the internet with poor grammar and homophobic sentiments in ALL CAPS at an alarming rate. I’d hate to think that I go about shaking the filthy hands of cyber bigots on a daily business, brushing palms with the very fingers that type blasphemies.

One such occasion happened just a couple months ago. Standing outside the Student Alumni Union, hiding a fire extinguisher under my jacket while my girlfriend lit things on fire in a microwave to the amusement of a few hundred passersby (perhaps you read the article in the November 9 issue of Reporter) I shook hands with a student who said he had lots of experience putting things in microwaves and over-heating other objects for the amusement of himself and others during his tenure as a camp counselor. He was kind, polite, and charismatic. Up to a point, I rather enjoyed talking with him. After watching some LEDs flicker in the microwave, my girlfriend started to informally interview him, asking the first thing he ever put in a microwave to disastrous results, what happened when he threw the bug spray in the camp fire, and so forth. Eventually, she asked what the most extreme thing he had ever microwaved was. “A cat,” I thought I heard him reply.

“What was that?” I asked, a little too politely.

“We microwaved a cat.”

My girlfriend asked, “Was it dead?”

“Well, not when we put it in there.”

Now, I have few regrets in life. I’ve done things I’m not proud of (none as atrocious as microwaving a living creature) but few I go so far as to regret. Refraining from verbally lashing this student with a cat o’ nine tongues is one of them. But in an awkward moment as such, the mind does terrible things to get out of that awkward moment. Terrible things like not publicly condemning someone for torturing an animal. In true Reporter fashion, we continued with the interview as if it were a microwave dinner and not a distant relation of my parents’ cat, Fluffy. We unintentionally condoned the unforgivable.

When it came time to part ways, his information was written down. By the time we wrapped up our experiment and returned to the office, the editor in chief had received an e-mail from the student in question, stating ambiguously that he “Hadn’t put a cat in a microwave. It would be more accurate to say that I bore witness to a cat being placed in a microwave.” He was referring to his fellow camp counselors, who had a relatively safe knack for pyromania that tragically escalated into the grotesque act described above. After insisting that we hadn’t done as much, and that the student was referring to a previous incident, I started to believe that the student was being absolutely truthful in saying that he only witnessed the event.

Individual people do not allow terrible things to happen. If you walk into a kitchen to discover a lone person trying to force a cat into the microwave, rest assured you will stop them. If you witness a stranger choking, and no one else is around, you save them. The equation changes when someone starts choking on free breadsticks at the Olive Garden at a table of 15. At the Olive Garden, 15 people bear witness to a person choking to death. The boyfriend of the victim sits in awe, not knowing the Heimlich maneuver. The Doctor cousin at the other end knows it, but assumes that the 13 people closer to the victim will come to the rescue. The friend to the other side remembers being taught the Heimlich maneuver, but knows there’s a doctor at the table. The people who don’t know the victim well assume that someone who knows her better should take responsibility. Psychologists have tested this by studying groups of varying numbers while pretending to study something else. An actor in the group starts pretending to die, and the psychologist times how long it takes someone to attend to the victim. The more people in a group, the longer it takes for one of them to take responsibility. None of those people want the person to choke, of course, but none of them feel qualified to save their life.

This is the phenomena I’m interested in: our ability to take human relationships—the things that allegedly makes us so civilized—and inadvertently use them to cast ourselves as outsiders in order to avoid moral responsibility. The Nuremburg defense is only one version of this: the readiness of an inferior to assume that their superior is precisely that. I believe this is what happened to our microwaving friend: he thought the event was grotesque, but silently deferred responsibility to senior camp counselors who had been on the scene longer. The senior counselors did the same to their most respected members, and if interviewed, none of them could probably name the person that actually committed the crime. I’m convinced that our feline victim was a distant relation to Schrödinger’s cat, caught in his own hard-to-grasp paradox.

There’s not a person on this planet you can’t sit down with for a good hour or two and come to the conclusion that, in their own way, they mean well. These are the same individuals that, when part of an angry mob, will rip you limb from limb. Web 2.0 isn’t so much about the individual as it is bringing individuals together. To that digital cesspool I described I apply the same concept: mob mentality is the root of all evil. Thanks to the internet individualism has become a group activity, and the line between the two is starting to blur.

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A Spirit Rekindled

February 1st, 2008 by casey | Posted in Bitching About RIT | 1 Comment »

Although Spirit Week is upon us, it is two weeks late, given the cataclysm of Dr. Destler’s orange-haired stunt during halftime of the Tiger’s men’s basketball game. As commendable as it may have been for RIT’s president to don the hairdo of true tiger spirituality in exchange for filled stands, it still isn’t the particular event that made me feel that RIT has the capacity to be spirited. Despite Dr. Destler’s efforts, the crowd cared only for his stunt, and while our student organizations dipped deep into their shallow pockets, into our own activity fees, and pulled out a myriad of free t-shirts and orange wigs, students stopped caring rather quickly.

Attending a women’s hockey game the following weekend, an event where students were encouraged to wear the orange shirts handed out at the basketball game, I noticed that attendance was still poor, despite the free barbeque provided by the Student Athletic Advisory Committee, and any increase in attendance was mostly due to the food as opposed to a genuine interest in the women’s hockey team.

Perhaps RIT was never meant to be an overly-enthusiastic school. My own senior cynicism has long since left me languid, hoping for the worst. I laughed maniacally when the men’s basketball team was robbed in the final seconds of their game, proving my theory that all the cheering idiots in the world can’t sway a game. Now Spirit Week is here (if you even noticed), and reactions are at an all time low. A few trees have been mummified in orange streamers, and students are supposed to wear camouflage next week for some vague, arbitrary reason that my mind can’t fully grasp. Still, I don’t believe that the subject of spirit is entirely lost on this campus.

The night before the famed basketball game where Dr. Destler dyed half his pale, snowy peak of hair orange, an auditorium on this campus was crammed beyond capacity, to standing room only, without promise of any cheap trickery or bribes of administrative humiliation. There was no free food or apparel. A few textbooks were available for free at the door, and the only promise made was the prospect of an old-school intellectual debate. The RIT Skeptics against the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. The venue packed Webb auditorium, and left many a customer satisfied, free of charge. For much less than a box of free don’t-shoot-me-I’m-hunting orange shirts with tigers printed on them, the debate event could be repeated ten-fold, yet our governance insists that sports are the only way to express school spirit.

Students can’t be bribed into passion, but they can only be accommodated into passion. You don’t meet a sexy siren of a woman (or man) and think “Damn, I could work hard to make us to appear to be an acceptable couple”. You meet a sexy siren of an individual with a brain and personality worth preserving in a vat of formaldehyde, and there really isn’t much effort involved for you to appreciate one another. Provide venues that students actually want to attend, and they will go. Adding poorly conceived gimmicks to the mix only empties tired pockets.

There is spirit on this campus, though, and there’s a reason I cite the weekend before last as the weekend of “spirit”. I had to direct a segment of the men’s hockey game for RIT Sports Zone. Granted, I am not a sports fan by any stretch of imagination, but I was there, trying to peer between the negative space of thousands of fans clogging the seats, aisles, and walkways while directing cameramen to get the shots we needed amongst screaming fans.

At the end of the second period I had to shoot an intro shot with our talent, and I decided to throw her in the midst of the Corner Crew (our rowdiest crowd of fans, let by a man known as “Big Goon”). As an aside, consider that over 300 of these people go on Facebook the night before a hockey game and poke the opposing team’s goalie, just to freak him out. They also photoshop pictures of opposing goalies to make them appear decapitated.

Big Goon agreed to help me make the shot work, and got the crowd riled up for me for the first take. I was concentrating on the announcer, listening from the headphones to make sure she sounded natural. At the end of her intro, I raised my arms, and Big Goon gave a cue and the whole crowd erupted, screaming “Good luck, Tigers!” but my announcer flubbed a line, and I needed a few more takes.

Big Goon left, and I did take two. At the appropriated moment, I raised my arms in the air, as if conducting a band, and this raunchy crowd of overexcitable fans just stared at me with blank faces. I tried to explain that I needed them to scream again. A few said they didn’t understand something. A few others seemed irate with me. Others just seemed bored with the prospect of being on TV. Then, one of my crew members said to me, “I think they want you to flip them off.” Incredulous, I ask what he meant. He explained that that’s what Big Goon had been doing. So, to test it out, I turned to the crowd of hundreds, raised my hands in the air, and extended both of my middle fingers, cautiously. Like a sudden tide of sound crashing against me with all its fury, the hundred or so people roared to life, cheering on our hockey team. “Okay! Okay! Perfect! Roll camera, let’s get this!” I exclaimed.

The announcer nailed the intro, and I confidently flipped off every member of that crowd, young and old, man and woman, father and mother and son and daughter, and without repercussion every one screamed their heart out, praising our team. And, while that uproarious cheer filled the stadium, it was our team. I didn’t have to give them shirts or free food or anything. Even without the cameras, they do it every home game. All I had to do was exclusively point my middle fingers to the heavens and let them unleash hell. That’s what spirit is, and I refuse to accept any half-baked imitations that have the nerve to waste student activity fees.

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Microcelebrities: Jobs in Jeopardy

December 14th, 2007 by casey | Posted in Generation LoL | 1 Comment »

A recent article in Wired by Clive Thompson compared Web 2.0 to an en masse microcelebrity maker. Facebook has allegedly turned into a poor man’s paparazzo, with photos popping up and documenting our daily debauches. We twitter and blog our own press releases and get positive and negative reviews from the posts of others.

Thompson is absolutely correct in the mechanics of the microcelebrity, but the portrait he paints of the result is perhaps a few shades too flattering. What could be wrong with a fanbase of anonymous dozens, linking and posting and discussing your latest blog entry? Even debating over the future of your work or hypothesizing about your personal life? Anonymity is the key, though: having fans and rivals that stay in the shadows of the internet. There is perhaps no better way to refer to them than “the internet” (i.e. The internet didn’t like my last post). It’s when people you know find your soul on the internet that you start running into trouble. Particularly employers.

Mankind has a long history of being able to perform jobs exceedingly well while utterly abhorring the job in question. Even people who love their jobs need the occasional night out with the friends to bitch about how much better they could do their supervisor’s job. Don’t you dare blog about it, though. Last September Jessica Zenner was fired from Nintendo for comments she made on her personal blog, which she maintained under the pen name Jessica Carr.

Take a minute to think about what web 2.0 has really done to us.

I feel that much of this is due, in part, to the versatility of computers. In the beginning, those archaic monoliths surrounded by lab-coated scientists with clipboards were undeniably tools, but as a teenager in the late 90s computers were a toy that allowed me to talk to friends—old and new—and play Myst. It was a rousing land of LoLs and OMGs and self-identification. As we age, the computer starts becoming a tool, but our generation is unwilling to let go of the toy. No one stops to think how sincerely strange it is that we play World of Warcraft and type our résumés on the same hunk of metal, plastic, and wires.

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Can NaNoWriMo Replace Striking Writers?

November 30th, 2007 by casey | Posted in Generation LoL | No Comments »

November has been a strange month for the written word, particularly in a digital sense. Writers are picketing, demanding to be paid when their content is distributed online while NaNoWriMo has kindled a deafening roar of fingers tapping keyboards across the world.

NaNoWriMo, for the uninitiated, is an almost-acronym for National Novel Writing Month, and their website has users pledge to write a 50,000-word novel starting on November 1, and ending in about 12 hours with the dawn of December. A couple hours ago the site’s collective word count surpassed one billion. Shaking a stick at that many words would tire your arm, but they’re all there, nonetheless, regardless of quality. Personally, I turned down NaNoWriMo for a break with a NaNoWiiMote.

This merely goes to show that everyone is a writer, and the lack of scabs in the writers’ strike baffles me for exactly this reason. I’m glad there is enough solidarity amongst them to carry through with the strike and for their co-workers—directors, producers, actors—haven’t picked a few scabs off the massive sore-filled body that is Hollywood’s writing pool. Granted, the Writers Guild of America consists of talented people (writers for The Big Bang Theory not withstanding), but it isn’t as if spinal surgeons were going on strike. Every resident of the state of California is sitting on a Batman script, and talented or not, who doesn’t have a story to tell?

But while writers stand up to show that online content has value, NaNoWriMo makes the unintentional counterpoint that virtually everyone has a word processor and a few fingers (or voice recognition software) and is willing to write for next to nothing. Not to mention, the result of the strike will be an inundation of our TVs with game shows and reality TV: shows about regular people doing irregular things for money. And, when you think about it, reality TV is not much different from Web 2.0. The “people” cast their vote for the best (or most sympathetic) singer on American Idol. The “people” get to win money at chance, pulling cylinders out of tubes or picking random numbers. Then there are the romance-based shows. I’m waiting for Deal Or No Deal to skip the foreplay: stop having contestants pick women holding suitcases and let them pick suitcases holding women.

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