(no subject)
While I'm nowhere near cool enough to be an International Puzzle Party (IPP) invitee, I got a chance to meet up this evening with some WPC/USPC friends who are in Boston for the event. We had a fun evening, albeit with some very puzzling conversation topics, but I did get to try my wiles at some mechanical puzzles for a change. I also got a "gift" of "sudoku origami" which strikes me as being on the usefulness scale between "sudoku toilet paper" or, an as yet unseen but imaginable idea, "sudoku playing cards". I won't say which is the more useful end of the spectrum, just that the origami is somewhere imbetween.
I know its been awhile since I did a top five list, but looking out the window during the subway brought to mind this list:
Top Five Recent Signs You Spend Too Much Of The Day Thinking About Random Puzzles:
1. When riding the T home, you find the sets of lights that whiz past, including "spaces" where bulbs have burned out, to be pretty close - albeit needing some small round light bulbs - to being morse code. You start to wonder to yourself if its worth hacking the T between Harvard and MIT to say something cool in this manner.
2. You have picked up an ability to read Braille by eye, but could not read it with your fingers to save your life.
3. When looking at a mathematical manipulation puzzle and trying to use the digits 2, 3, and 8 to get to a special target number (using any basic arithmetic operation [+,-,x,/], powers, concatenation, decimal points, parentheses), you hear someone say "Oh, I've got a nasty way to get to 16, but its not what we need" and after some reflection you know exactly what he meant.
4. You have a dream in which you are frantically doing the final runaround at the MIT Mystery Hunt. As your team scrambles from one location to the next, you notice another team close behind (somehow movie-star rpipuzzleguy finally snuck into a dream as he was on that lagging team) and you run off in a bunch of directions to try to keep them from following you. After you get lost and search seemingly infinite corridors for the puzzle room, you finally manage to find where your team is and step in just as thedan is leaping for joy in the middle of the room having finally extracted an answer from a set of weird drawings on the blackboard of the room. That, unfortunately, is when you wake up, and you find yourself very disappointed that the dream ended.
5. While having the dream (4) itself is probably a great sign you do too many puzzles, I think waking up, pulling out some graph paper, and trying to redraw the random subconcious images that fulfilled a "puzzle" in your dreaming mind really ices the cake. Someday I may solve that dream puzzle, or just trust that it clues the "meta" word the dream told me it did and use it untested.
I know its been awhile since I did a top five list, but looking out the window during the subway brought to mind this list:
Top Five Recent Signs You Spend Too Much Of The Day Thinking About Random Puzzles:
1. When riding the T home, you find the sets of lights that whiz past, including "spaces" where bulbs have burned out, to be pretty close - albeit needing some small round light bulbs - to being morse code. You start to wonder to yourself if its worth hacking the T between Harvard and MIT to say something cool in this manner.
2. You have picked up an ability to read Braille by eye, but could not read it with your fingers to save your life.
3. When looking at a mathematical manipulation puzzle and trying to use the digits 2, 3, and 8 to get to a special target number (using any basic arithmetic operation [+,-,x,/], powers, concatenation, decimal points, parentheses), you hear someone say "Oh, I've got a nasty way to get to 16, but its not what we need" and after some reflection you know exactly what he meant.
4. You have a dream in which you are frantically doing the final runaround at the MIT Mystery Hunt. As your team scrambles from one location to the next, you notice another team close behind (somehow movie-star rpipuzzleguy finally snuck into a dream as he was on that lagging team) and you run off in a bunch of directions to try to keep them from following you. After you get lost and search seemingly infinite corridors for the puzzle room, you finally manage to find where your team is and step in just as thedan is leaping for joy in the middle of the room having finally extracted an answer from a set of weird drawings on the blackboard of the room. That, unfortunately, is when you wake up, and you find yourself very disappointed that the dream ended.
5. While having the dream (4) itself is probably a great sign you do too many puzzles, I think waking up, pulling out some graph paper, and trying to redraw the random subconcious images that fulfilled a "puzzle" in your dreaming mind really ices the cake. Someday I may solve that dream puzzle, or just trust that it clues the "meta" word the dream told me it did and use it untested.