Category: Uncategorized

The Mensa Workout, or “Exercise for Those Who Steadfastly Refuse to Leave Their Computers”

I was poking around on puzzle blogs recently looking for news and fun information to recycle share with you, and I came across something that intrigued me – the annual Mensa Mind Games event. This year, the event will be held April 16-18 in San Diego, California. At this event, Mensa members get together and play the newest board games non-stop for an entire weekend. As you play the games, you’re required to evaluate each game on a variety of factors, and at the end the top-scoring games get certified as winners by Mensa. Pretty cool, eh?

The only downside to this is that you must be a member of Mensa to play and evaluate the games. Becoming a member of Mensa isn’t hard – you just have to pass an IQ test and score in the top 2% (along with registering and paying the membership fee, of course).

To help you prepare for the test, Mensa created a free and fun online exam called the Mensa Workout. Even if you have no plans to join a worldwide social network of smarty-pantsy people (oh, wait – you read this blog, so you already have! GOTCHA!), the Mensa Workout is a fun collection of brainteasers and logic problems to ponder.

Geochecker Outage, Plus Other Coordinate Verifiers

The site Geochecker.com – which provides solution verification services for puzzle caches – seems to be having database problems. When you submit a guess, you get the following error message:

Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: Unable to save result set in /home/simusi/public_html/index.php on line 1064
Logging query #1 failed : Table ‘gc3_pointcloud’ is marked as crashed and should be repaired

I sent a note to Goldenhawk, the site operator, to let him know about the issue. But just in case its issues are fatal, here are links to some other free verification services:

Of these three, I think I like GeoCheck the best … so much, in fact, that I think I may switch all of my puzzles over to it. Among its many virtues:

Custom response

If a user inputs the correct coordinates, you can design a custom response page including user-defined text and images. You may also include additional waypoints in the form of nearby parking, trailheads etc. All coordinates can be downloaded as GPS/LOC files or sent directly to Garmin GPS receivers.

As the cache-owner, you decide if the users must enter the coordinates exactly or if a ‘fuzzy’ solution is allowed choosing between ±3 meters, 10, 30, or even user-defined distances.

Google Maps Integration

Using a Google Map, cache-owners can easily view your defined solution, ‘fuzzy-factor’, waypoints and all the attempted coordinates from the users. Heavily tried coordinates will appear as dark markers, while rarer coordinates will appear lighter colored. Clicking a marker reveals further information including the number of tries, time of last attempt, and distance from the correct position.

Sub-coordinates

You may define multiple sub-coordinates for your cache. Using the Google Map, you may notice a particular set of wrong coordinates being tried often. In this case, you can provide the users with a helping hint when they try the wrong coordinates. Each sub-coordinate can be defined as requiring exact coordinates, or allowing ‘fuzzy’ solutions – just like a regular solution.

Account page

You may create as many solutions you wish. From your central account page you can view all the details concerning your caches including the number of attempts, how many succeeded and how many failed. From this page you can also edit your individual caches, add waypoints, sub-coordinates, view the Google Map, view statistics and much more.

Statistics Page

You can view a complete list of attempted coordinates, the time of the attempt, distance from the correct coordinates and even the nationality of the person behind the attempt based on their IP-address.

IP Statistics Page

The statistics on correct attempts and wrong tries may be grouped by IP. Though you cannot assume constant IP addresses for all the users, this page will give you an idea of the number of attempts by each user. For security reasons, the IP-numbers are encoded, but will remain constant for a given IP-number allowing you to track individual IPs across your caches.

RSS feed for your cache list

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of all the caches listed in your account allowing you to track the number of correct and incorrect attempts and visitors remotely.

It’s raining iguanas!

This week our new non-puzzle-related feature called “Stuff We Never Thought We’d Have to Deal With”, we feature a story on a new form of precipitation peculiar to South Florida this week: a rain of frozen iguanas.

We take you now to a news story that appeared on MSNBC:

… the prolonged freeze could doom some of the nonnative iguanas that have called Florida home since being illegally introduced from South America by pet owners.

“It’s almost like they go totally to sleep,” Ron Magill of Miami Metrozoo told WPLG TV, referring to the fact that once temperatures drop into the 40s, iguanas shut down with very little blood flow and only their heart beating.

On Wednesday, many iguanas were spotted in “frozen” states, clinging from trees or stuck on the ground.

“Generally speaking, if it warms up afterwards, they can recover,” Magill added, but a long cold snap can also kill iguanas.

Magill warned against trying to remove iguanas since they might quickly spring back to life.

“I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck,” Magill said.

Links! (and I’m not talking about golf, for a change)

In my ongoing quest to explore all of the features of WordPress, I decided to start to make better use of the the blogroll feature to manage links to sites I think might be of interest to readers of this blog. So I’ve restructured the right-hand sidebar a bit now to feature various categories of links which I hope will be self-evident. Enjoy!

The Crossword Puzzle Cruise

I can’t believe I missed the memo on such an important event happening in my own backyard! Here’s the link from which I stole the following letter:

Stan Newman’s Crossword University tm
P.O. Box 69
Massapequa Park, NY 11762
(516) 795-8823 – StanXwords@aol.com – Fax 516-795-6788

Dear Puzzle Friend:You’re invited to join me on our Ninth Annual Crossword-theme event: a relaxing 10-day cruise from Ft Lauderdale, on Holland America Line’s beautiful ms Noordam. The itinerary includes 5 terrific Caribbean Ports plus a visit to Holland America’s private island, Half Moon Cay. Continue reading The Crossword Puzzle Cruise

Crazy Overthinking Ingenious Nerds (aka, “The MIT Mystery Hunt”)

Next week (on Friday, January 15), one of the most famous puzzle hunts of all time begins anew – the MIT Mystery Hunt! I would try to do justice to this story, but an article in Games Magazine sums it up far better than I could …

Continue reading Crazy Overthinking Ingenious Nerds (aka, “The MIT Mystery Hunt”)

Praguenostications for 2010

The image below is a panoramic 360-degree view of the city of Prague photographed from the top of the TV tower in the heart of the city. The image is a stunning 18 gigapixels (yes, you read that right) in size. Click on the image to go to the fully-navigable panoramic image viewer.

To test your mad searching skillz, the creator of the image has also challenged viewers to a contest! The contest is simple: just find these things in the image above:

1. blue hair
2. a heated floor under construction
3. somebody in their underwear
4. south end of the suicide bridge
5. lone pitbull
6. a bagel (or maybe it’s a donut)
7. exterior nudity
8. number 11 and 12, next to each other
9. a bus from a town between the rivers Krka and Kolpa
10. Sgraffito

11. “Pat & Mat” at work, up there
12. A driving range
13. A water tower being beautified
14. A “gentleman’s nightclub”
15. A clock that’s wrong
16. A sphere (no, NOT the spherical image itself)
17. A chairlift
18. A bulls-eye and cross-hairs
19. A female pink face on a window
20. A square and a triangle next to each other (in a field)

21. Where you go when you need fish food
22. Hippy czech flag
23. Helicopter
24 Where you can have a beer with Stelcer
25. A raven (or a type of crow anyway)
26. Pizza = mc squared
27 W‪here God can read the time from his chair in heaven‬
28. Vineyard
29. This building http://bit.ly/5jpfY1
30. This place http://www.360cities.net/image/treasure-hunt-clue-01

When you’ve found them all, just follow the contest rules for submitting your answers. There’s a $1,000 prize for the first person to submit the most correct answers. Of course, the contest ends at midnight tonight, so by the time you read this it will likely be over 🙁

Good luck!

21. Where you go when you need fish food
22. Hippy czech flag
23. Helicopter
24 Where you can have a beer with Stelcer
25. A raven (or a type of crow anyway)
26. Pizza = mc squared
27 W‪here God can read the time from his chair in heaven‬
28. Vineyard
29. This building http://bit.ly/5jpfY1
30. This place http://www.360cities.net/image/treasure-hunt-clue-01

Calendar Widget and Page Reorg (oh my!)

Calendar Widget Installed

I installed a new widget to show you puzzle events that are happening around the world. Any time I find out about a new puzzle event, I’ll add it to the calendar. You can find the calendar widget on the bottom of the right-hand column.

Page Layout Changed

I decided to clean up the layout of this blog a bit so that it makes somewhat more logical sense. All of the site natigation widgets (archives, categories, tags, pages, etc) are in the left column, while all of the other widgets are in the right column.