1956 Mideast imbroglio / TUE 7-7-20 / 1980s-90s heavyweight champ Mike / Feeling unhappy or angry
Constructor: Kevin Patterson
Relative difficulty: Easy (2:48! Zing!)
THEME: WRAPPING PAPER (38A: Holiday purchase ... or a hint to the circled letters) — circled letters spell out different kinds of paper if you imagine the letters wrapping around from the east, off the grid, continuing again in the west:
Papers:
STOCK SPLIT / MUST
A TOI / LET GO
OSCAR / BOND
OTIS / SUEZ CRISIS
Word of the Day: MARIST College (48D: ___ College (school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.)) —
Marist College is a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. Founded in 1905, Marist was formed by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic religious institute of Brothers, to prepare brothers for their vocations as educators. In 1929, Marist became accredited by the state to offer a wider range of degrees in the arts and sciences. Today, Marist offers a comprehensive liberal arts education, offering 56 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and 21 certificate programs. (wikipedia)
• • •
Hard to be too mad at a Tuesday puzzle that you destroy the way I destroyed this one. I can't remember the last time I was in the 2:40s on a *Tuesday*. Sometimes, on Monday, if I'm pretty fast, but Tuesday? For me, that is very rare. Again, as with my record-setting Monday last week, I was able to run the top three Acrosses 1-2-3, and then drill virtually all the crossing Downs from there, including long stuff like RICHARD GERE (8D: "Pretty Woman" co-star) and HALFTIME (11D: Occasion for a locker room pep talk)—it really does make a profound difference not just how many letters you have in a word before you look at the clue, but *which* letters you have. First is best. Odds are always that it's going to be the most valuable letter in any answer, in terms of its ability to help you guess the answer. Yes, sometimes you luck into a Q or a J in in some non-initial position and that will help you get an answer quickly, but in terms of which *position* is likely to help you: first first first. So run the top Acrosses and then work the Downs. That is how to do the easy puzzles, I've determined (if some actual speed-solving pro tells you different, though, you should listen to them, as the real speedsters will have me beat by a full minute today). Another thing about finishing swiftly—it makes you feel as if the grid was clean *and* generally warmly disposes you to the puzzle as a whole. So, yeah, I don't hate this one. The theme seems fine. I didn't get an aha from it; more of an "oh, sure, yeah, I see." It's entirely adequate, and because the theme is not (at all) demanding in terms of the pressure it puts on the grid, we are able to enjoy a reasonably smooth overall experience. I mean, yeah, lots of uninspired short stuff, but nothing inordinately bad, and the worst (À TOI) had thematic purpose. Oh, sorry, UIE is the worst, but that is in theme territory too. . . so I'm not too mad. That SW corner is (inexplicably) the very weakest, but still, overall, this holds up just fine for a Tuesday.
ONE PUR ROO IMP to rule them all! ... seems like a good tagline for a very bizarre fantasy movie. Ooh, I don't like ANOWL much at all, so maybe the fill is wobblier here than I first suspected. The things you miss when you're flying! Someone on Twitter suggested just now that the "PLEASE" clue (20A: Word repeated before "Me" in a Beatles hit) was problematic because it specifically refers to "Me" when "Me" is clearly in the grid at "BEER ME!" (42A: Slangy frat house request). I guess, technically that's a dupe, but two-letter words ... don't really rate as violations (for the most part) in my book. I thought REI sold camping gear, whereas LL Bean ... that's mostly just casual clothes for lightly outdoorsy types, right? Oh, I see they also sell camping gear, technically ... still, something seems slightly off about the comparison. I've never seen an REI catalogue, is my main point. It's fine. I don't particularly like REI as fill, though, regardless of the clue. But Tuesdays can be and certainly have been much worse than this. I will take this.
For Rex, a puzzle gets better as his time gets faster. If everything in life was rated this way, I would have had a lot more girlfriends than I had. Oh well ...
Easy. Another smooth grid with a fun/interesting theme. I did need a few nanoseconds of staring at the completed grid to grok what was going on. Liked it, and Jeff gave it POW. Great debut!
A nice n easy Tuesday. Hated the Rex review. Around 2/3 was about how it’s easiest to solve if you know the first letter of the answer, Gee, that never would have occurred to me, and it sure sheds a lot o’ light on the pluses and minuses of this puzzle. Most of the rest of the critique was taken up with disparaging the aptness of the LL Bean / REI comparison, at the end of which he admits that he actually has no familiarity with REI. Maybe it was a three Negroni night.
Happy that a monstrous ROO made the scene. Didn’t count the Fs.
I actually thought it was a good Tues. Easy solve as a themeless, but the theme could be milked a bit for help if you were so inclined.
ONE PUR ROO IMP to rule them all. Drat. Rex beat me to it. But Rex, did not know the "all" in question is his own crossword blog, although I fear ROO saves his best effort for SB now. Alas.
CALIBRATING RICHARD GERE. OSCAR, YESNO?
Also enjoy the sentence the first 4 downs make: SIMPLE AMULET RESETS ID TAG.
A present wrapped in toilet paper? If you are giving a toilet. I've used newspaper. Usually the Sunday comics, but the local paper for gifts to people who have moved away. Yes, l know, WRAPPING PAPER is the answer to the first part of the clue. The papers listed are wrapping not for gifts at Christmas, but because they are wrapping round the puzzle. PLEASE PLEASE me do, and let us not ever have to have that discussion again. Thank you. You too Rex.
And no rips or nits about NIP. Proper word, properly clued.
If you want some PC action: I am a Cleveland baseball fan. They are thinking of changing their name from Indians. For a couple decades I have been hoping they would change it to the Cleveland TRIBE. Hoping that TRIBE could be neutral enough to be non-insulting, it has a pretty innocent background, and a more general application. Also it is already one of the team's nicknames. So if you care: 1. A good and proper change 2. Not a good name for any non-native team in the USA. 3. A good name for some teams, but not for a team with Chief Wahoo baggage.
The theme is nicely done with all 3 letter sections to each half answer. I feel the circles were necessary in this one.
Super easy but took me artificially long because my phone is broken and I always have typos that I don’t find ‘til the end. I solved this without the theme at all and only got it when I came here to check your solve. Maybe if id finished sub three minutes I’d think this theme wasn’t stupid. As it is, however...
Got through the puzzle quickly, but couldn’t grasp the theme. I guess my feeble brain doesn’t cipher right to left. Felt like a total eediot when I read the write up. Oh well, it’s not the first time. Better luck tomorrow, little one.
Rex, you got a shout out from Deb Amlem herself in the comments section to today’s NYT Wordplay. I don’t know what she’s referring to. Can you explain?
Nice puzzle - very easy like yesterday. Basically solved it as a themeless almost to the end - saw the theme just before finishing. Not an overly interesting theme - but unique and well constructed. The fill was clear and went in quickly for me - agree with Rex that there may be too much short glue - ETS, IVE, IMP etc but it didn’t bring down the solve. Liked SUEZ CRISIS and HALFTIME. I’m sure someone can find a reference that says ICE TEA is allowable but in reality it’s not. Grew up near MARIST - not a big fan.
The grid filled in in a splash, pretty much, but figuring out the theme afterward took a few more beats than usual and brought my brain far more into play, which made the puzzle much more entertaining, and thank you for that, Kevin. A few post solve observations: * WEST is east in the grid, which echoes the theme, where the three circled letters on the left are read to the right of the final three circled letters. * Nice cross of HALF and SPLIT. * In the final column, there's a TO-NY "wrapping" to go along with OSCAR. * Does the second-to-last column (ELI OVER MARIST) indicate an Ivy League preference?
Congratulations on your debut, and I never thought I'd say this after three years in the army (way back when) -- I look forward to some more KP.
Sure, it was easy. Monday fare if you ignore figuring out the theme.
I didn't know REI nor, I am proud to say, had I ever heard anyone say "BEER ME". So finishing up with IN A MOOD took me longer than I would have liked.
I think what Rex might be trying to say is that he doesn't like a challenge.
It took me a while to proofread and fix HIREe instead HIRER. But I still almost did it faster than I did the Mini, even though I had red letters on. Funny day.
WOW what a great theme. Four types of paper; all six letters; not a clunker in the bunch.
Clue for OSCAR was weird. Richard Gere is probably a nice fellow, but he's definitely not on my list of acting greasts. I think the word “surprisingly” was intended to be “unsurprisingly”.
Rex, who says he completed this puzzle in 2:48, adds, "...the real speedsters will have me beat by a full minute today." So we're supposed to believe that someone finishes reading all the clues and writing or typing in all the answers in one minute and 48 seconds? Well, there may be a sucker born every minute, but I'm not one of them. But I also have to ask, where's the enjoyment in blasting through a puzzle so fast? You don't have even a spare second to stop and appreciate clues like the one for AMULET. I guess I know what answer these folks would give to Ted Allen, who always asks the chefs on "Chopped," "Are you a competitive person?" Me, I'm in it for the fun.
Easy puzzle and quite enjoyable. I liked the long answers--unusual for a Tuesday. It's always a different solving experience when a few of those appear, and these were nice and clean. I keep seeing REI in puzzles and forgetting what the third letter is. No familiarity with that company since I don't, and won't, camp. Someone gave me a huge box of L.L. Bean fatwood sticks for my fireplace last year for Christmas. What a great gift!
As usual, I ignored the circled squares until I was finished, and then it took me a minute to grasp the theme, which was fine for a Tuesday.
So I looked at my WRAPPING PAPER (comprised of annoying tiny little circles, btw) and went "Huh???" Here was my WRAPPING PAPER:
MUSLIT LETTOI BONCAR SUETIS
And if I hadn't come here, I would have gone to my grave not knowing what on earth this puzzle was about.
Look, I'm a literal, straightforward, left-to-right thinker. Always have been, always will be. Never saw the [really weird, when you come to think about it] trick. SUE me.
A better puzzle than I realized while solving. If you don't mind doing things bass ackwards, that is.
Hey All ! Har Rex! ONE PUR ROO IMP. Although, I'm past the age of being IMPy. TOASTY, maybe. Also past the age of asking someone to BEER ME! (Which is OVER ROO.)
ICE TEA. Har. The debate will rage today. Yes, it should be ICED, as the TEA has ICE in it, ergo it's ICED, but in puzzledom, it works just fine. Remember, puzzledom/crossworld is like Rex's ROO IMP movie, fantasy, not reality. 😀
Thought the "wrap around-east/west" thing was kind of odd. Took me a bit to figure out what in tarhooties was happening. I was like, "What is MUSLIT?" etc.
Fill didn't seem too terrible, which is nice. Another debut, congrats.
I am surprised RICHARD GERE never won an OSCAR. He was pretty good in "Primal Fear".
So I'm staring at my finished product and my mouth is wide open. What is wrapped in Christmas paper? Maybe that PEAR in a Partridge tree? No, that's not it. Put it down, pick it back up. Shake the cobwebs, concentrate, you can figure this out.... OK, so I finally see TOI LET and in a flash I wondered why you would wrap a Christmas present in that. TIS SUE yes, but toilet? Shake the cobwebs again and concentrate. OOOOH it's different kinds of paper that have nothing to do with Christmas. Cool beans. And on a Tuesday, no less. Yes, REI was my only HUH? I guess it's camping equipment that's their specialty. I loved going into the L.L Bean shop here at our local mall. This was when they still had stores that were open. I remember buying my husband a cool beige chamois ( sp?) shirt and eyed some boots he'd never wear. I guess you can still order by catalog.....(sigh). Eye wanders to RICHARD GERE and I think Gerbil. He certainly is a handsome man. BEER ME is kinda cute. I'm more of the WINO ME. No disrespect to the non imbibers. ROO gets his name again....right next to the little IMP. Just kidding. I can see why this was Jeff's POW. It's clever and it's different. Thanks for a Tuesday where Speedy Gonzalez didn't blow a head gasket.
#Lewis (6:24): Great observation. In the last column, TONY wraps around the grid like the themers do. And the last column intersects OSCAR.
I think that crosswordese and junk are different. Most of the fill that Rex criticizes is crosswordese but not junk. To me, junk is a sequence of letters that doesn’t have an established meeting. Sounds, for example, like YEOWW or AARGH. In today’s, the only junk I noticed was PUR.
Nancy missed the only semi-redeeming part of the puzzle, the WRAPPINGPAPER. She hates those little circles.
PLEASE Please Me is a Beatles song I hadn’t heard. I just played a clip. I think that it was part of their sets when they started.
Once upon a time,(60s/70s), L.L. Bean was for serious outdoors people, back when folks hunted and fished. And REI was created as a cooperative for serious mountaineers and climbers (I think based out of Seattle). Both slowly morphed over the years into "active wear" for folks who just want to dress the part. I have a L.L. Bean winter jacket that I got 43 years ago! Still fits! A great puzzle; didn't grok theme until I saw Rex's explanation, which far outweighs his constant bragging about his fast times and daily nit-picking about the fill.
This was sorta fun with a decent theme, which I (like others have stated) completely ignored until it was all over.
ICE TEA always, a.l.w.a.y.s. sets my teeth on edge. It is not TEA made from ICE, it is TEA that has been ICEd so that it is no longer hotted.
I like RICHARDGERE. For the most part, I enjoy his movies. Do I think that it is at all surprising he's never been nominated for an OSCAR? Absolutely not.
@OffTheGrid 745am Are you sure?
🧠🎉🎉
Off(ish) topic: To others who have donated to Grids for Good, how long is it taking to receive the puzzles? Are they swamped or something? I only ask here because I've been waiting since last Thursday and a subsequent email has gone unanswered.
@Petsounds - While I do find the times incredible, Rex isn't kidding that the speediest of speed solvers can do it in under 2 minutes. Google some of Dan Feyer's videos, or, here's one to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdFUD0Y5dEk
He finishes the Monday in 1:41 there, and the Tuesday in 1:46.
Never thought about the theme until I came here and found out what it was. Fastest Tuesday ever... but I couldn't even type/write in all the letters in less than 3-minutes. I don't get how people can (speed) solve that fast.
@Petsounds The scales may fall from your eyes if you google "Dan Feyer 19 minutes" and watch the YouTube video. That is, if seeing is believing, this speed solver did an **entire week** of puzzles in just under 19 minutes. (H/T to @Z who let me in on this.) To me, it looked entirely legit. Yes, he made mistakes along the way. He did the Monday in a little over a minute, if I recall.
You have to understand that such crossword titans use special software that optimize their performance, and they have the agility and finger dexterity of a teenage gamer champion (so, really fast typing, and flawless and economical control of the arrow keys). Plus, the whole 10,000 hours thing. I have a private theory that most of their attention is laser-locked on negotiating around the clues and they barely see the grid out of the corner of their eyes -- they just have an internal sense of knowing where they are in the grid at all times as they type.
Apparently Erik Agard is really, really good as well.
I solved this as a themeless, ignored the little circles, and didn't have a clue until I read Rex. Does that make me BONCARs? Don't know, don't care.
20A Word repeated before "Me" in a Beatles hit: I immediately thought "Love, love me do." That was too short, so it must be PLEASE. Does this repeated word before "me" occur anywhere else in Beatles' lyrics?
@TTrimble from last night. Thanks for the further discussion and that wonderful Ptolemaic video. I gather that in spite of his great contribution, even Newton wasn't able to explain the vagaries of Mercury's orbit. That required Einstein and General Relativity. It's all fascinating stuff. You said: (Sorry -- I'll step away from the lectern now. You gave me an opening and I ran with it!) That, in a nutshell, is one of the beauties of this blog. Somebody says something that sparks off another commentator and sends discussion off in one intriguing direction or another.
I was going to explain the REI/LL BEAN thing, but @bauskern beat me too it. There are surviving differences— REI’s clothing is more like outdoor gear; Bean’s sells more fly rods. (Not sure if they still sell fly-tying supplies, but I suspect they do.
It would be better without the circles, but too tough for Tuesday.
@ bauskern (8:52) mentions he has an LLBean jacket he purchased 43 years ago and it still fits. Well, I got ya beat, bauskern. I have an item I got from LLBean when I was in high school, 60+ years ago, and it still fits. It's a scarf, but still ...
Like Rex, I was loving this puzzle as I zipped thru through it while ignoring the circles. But the love came to a screeching halt when I was finished and stared at the circles trying to figure out WTH was going on. I tried reading them forwards and backwards and every which way except the way it had to be read to make sense. I never judge a crossword by how fast I can finish it, and I don’t care how easy it is, but I hate it when a theme makes me feel stupid which this did. Otherwise it was a great Tuesday effort and like yesterday’s, another good starter puzzle for novices.
I grew up with SODAPOP or pop but never just soda. A soda is served in a tall glass with ice cream, flavored syrup, whipped cream and a cherry on top. Maybe I’m out of touch but I never heard of REI. Sounds a lot like Bass Pro Shop which is the outdoorsy mecca in my neck of the woods.
An Officer And A Gentleman is one of my favorite movies, and the final scene when RICHARDGERE carries Debra Winger off to their happily ever after is one of the most perfect endings in the history of film. I just watched it the other day and was wondering why Richard Gere did not receive an OSCAR nomination. He gave an incredible performance but was overshadowed by Lou Gossett who won for Best Supporting Actor as the shrewd drill sergeant.
@Joaquin (12:05) Once again you cracked me up first thing in the morning. I’m still laughing. 😂😂😂
LL Bean has its flagship store in Freeport, Maine and a whole shopping ecosystem has developed around it.
REI stands for Recreational Equipment, Inc., if that helps anyone remember it in the future.
Both companies have famously liberal return policies. LLBean brags about taking in a pair of shoes worn heavily for an octogenarian's lifetime, and sending him off with a new replacement.
REI is jokingly referred to as "Rent Every Item" for the people that purchase high end gear for one trip, then return it. They resell these items every so often at a steep discount and it is hilarious/damning-of-the-human-race to see the lame reasons people put forward for their returns on the sales tags.
@Peter P and @TTrimble: Thanks for the speedster info! It must be the software. I spend entirely too much time moving the cursor from one box to another and switching from across mode to down mode. It's still hard to fathom, but seeing is believing. Doesn't look like much fun, though.
If it's Iced Tea must it also be SnoedCone? Kidding! As my son says when I correct his pronunciation/grammar, "I've heard it both ways," (he really hasn't.) @Frantic, Love the idea of "Hotted Tea!" Hand up for Iced though.
Sodapop. Back in college we knew if you were from the east or west side PA by the way you referred to sugar water, soda or pop.
@OfftheGrid, Are you sure?
Super easy puzzle. But why backwards? Muslit, LeToi, BonCar. I thought the theme was French.
Sincerely, JD nee Lori Lee, now blue. Google was stalking me anyway. You can't escape.
But, but, but... can you earn a living at it? Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Benjamin: Yes, sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Benjamin: Yes, I am. Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
@burtonkd: LLBean brags about taking in a pair of shoes worn heavily for an octogenarian's lifetime, and sending him off with a new replacement.
not any more. don't think they grandfathered existing purchases, either. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-return-ll-bean-items-after-policy-change-2018-2
IceD tea: housewine of the South. Usually sweet, though I’ve always preferred straight. Never heard “soda” or “pop” ‘til went off to school; always “coke”, irrespective of brand.
@Barbara S. Glad you appreciated the commentary! I agree, such discussions are fun (and welcome relief from the occasional sniping and trolling I see, from people who should know better).
Yeah, I don't know when the data on Mercury's deviations from the predictions of Newtonian theory -- that is, deviations not ascribable to experimental error -- became available. (Of course one could easily consult Wikipedia.) But anything like Einstein's General Relativity, the necessary correction of Newton's law of gravitation, was completely out of the question in Newton's time. The relevant mathematics is pretty sophisticated and simply didn't exist back then; one needs to interpose a few mathematical geniuses like Gauss and Riemann, and then a whole slew of other fine mathematicians, and decades of hammering and smoothing things out, to convert the required differential geometry into a product that Einstein could use. (Contrary to popular opinion, Einstein was nothing like a mathematical genius -- he needed other people to teach him the math as he was working General Relativity out. But he was a physicist non pareil.)
Special Relativity, a prerequisite of General Relativity, is much, much simpler, but even that is implausible to imagine in Newton's time. Newton was able to calculate the speed of light, but asking him to accept that it's the same in all (inertial, in vacua) reference frames would be asking him to accept a complete upheaval of his entire background framework for doing physics. Really, that seemed to require a collective sinking-in of the consequences of Maxwell's equations (produced in the 1860's I think) over some decades, and a really fresh, original, brilliant and clear-headed young physicist (Einstein), for the scene to be set for that upheaval -- even though nowadays it's easily and routinely taught to undergraduates.
It's often said that the three greatest mathematicians of all time were Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. I can believe that, and have a hard time picking between them. All three, seen in historical context, are utterly terrifying. Perhaps Newton scares me the most.
When I say ICED TEA I don't pronounce 2 separate T sounds and I think most people don't. The "controversy" is mainly confined to how one writes it.
People who buy something with the intention of using it once and returning it are stealing. They cannot be prosecuted but they are stealing nonetheless.
Solve went quite quickly, then it seemed to take about equally long to figure out the gimmick, which provided a very satisfying aha! One of the best Tuesday themes ever, I’d say. Fill well above average to boot. Great work, Kevin Patterson!
@Petsounds (9:56) The speed solvers really are amazing, but I agree with you. Where is the joy? And I seldom use the app but again agree with you about maneuvering from the crosses to the downs, etc. Plus it never fails that I have a stupid little typo somewhere that it takes me then another five minutes to find before I can call it finished. Just give me a paper on the clipboard with my .5 mm and a nice cup of coffee and I am a happy camper.
@JC (10:24) re WINO, you’re right. I expected his usual rant about that too.
I enjoyed being stumped for a bit on a Tuesday, as MUS..LIT and LET...TOI placed ??? over my head. But then BON...CAR erased the ??? for a switched-on lightbulb, and in went SUE...TIS with no crosses. I thought the theme was funny and creative and a nice change of pace for a Tuesday. I liked AN OWL joining the partridge in the PEAR tree. Re: @Rex's remark about having the first letter of an entry: "Odds are always that it's going to be the most valuable letter in any answer, in terms of its ability to help you guess the answer" - I agree, of course...and at the ASHEN cross almost wrote in "Home game." Help from previous puzzles: BEER ME.
Knitty, Dunno that I agree about Gere deserving a nom that year. The noms were Ben Kingsley for that temple fakir, Paul Newman, in maybe his best performance, Jack Lemmon , giving the same performance which the academy loved for 40 years and, the guy who should’ve won, Peter O’Toole in a bravura performance in the criminally underrated My Favorite year.
Let me NIP this in the bud. Enough with the sots and souses and WINO fill. Slurs about alcoholics IS offensive.
Mike TYSON gets a pass?
"Stock splits" are much in decline. Not such BIG news anymore.
ICED TEA is better than making tea out of ICE.
A small room with a roaring fire is Toasty? ROASTY is more like it.
Can we please CAN the ASST??
The only thing I liked was starting with SARI in a puzzle about Wrappings.
Richard Gere was "surprisingly" good in "Chicago." But really, does anyone give a hoot about the Oscars anymore. They lost any (and there wasn't much to begin with) credibility a few decades ago.
We emailed both of you the puzzles within 15 minutes of when you forwarded your receipts to us. So please do one of two things:
1) Check your spam and trash folders. The Grids for Good email might be getting filtered in there. 2) If for some reason you still can't find them in those folders, send me an email at devilcrosswords AT gmail DOT com and I'll forward you the puzzles again from there.
@TTrimble (10:50). Your essay on the connections between mathematics and Einstein and relativity theory took my breath away. Great stuff, beautifully expressed.
@ TTrimble - I think Euler, Euclid and Maxwell - maybe even Fourier and Laplace should be in the argument for at least top 5. I’d take Leibniz over Newton since he provided a complete calculus. Also great modern mathematicians - Turing, Hilbert, Abel and so many others. From a technical understanding point - my fear was always Planck’s wavefunctions.
Cool & easy wrap theme. Very tidy, with three circles on each side, for each themer. Woulda also been a good WedPuz or so, without the circles? (Mcguffin would be harder to get -- but, then at least the revealer is in the middle, to help put solvers in the know, midsolvequest.)
staff weeject pick: PUR. Better clue: {Pup in disguise??}. Honrable mention to MUS & SUE.
Some fave big words: WHATIF. BEERME. HALFTIME (Theme-related potential!). SODAPOP.
ANOWL. har
Thanx for the fun and congratz on yer debut, Mr. Patterson. U are now a wrap star, I reckon.
The whole concept of Grids for Goods is totally non-profit.
If someone/anyone contributes fo one of the many charities involved, Grids for Goods sends them a bunch of puzzles constructed PRO BONO by some of the finest constructors today.
Very easy here. REI was a gimme, as I have a dear friend in Seattle, and spent almost a year in Tacoma, before it had its Dome. Just as Portland has it's must go, Powell's books, Seattle had its must go, REI. Plus what is surely the greatest bar in the country, the Athenian in Pike Place Market. Oh the many, many hours my friend and I spent there, solving the problems of the world while gazing at the ferries heading to the docks below, from Bainbridge or Bremerton. And drinking really lousy beer, back then (of course in more recent years, they have featured far superior local brews).
Seattle also has a very splendid hotel, the Inn at the Market, and what is surely the most pleasant fish restaurant there is, Ivar's Salmon House, where dozens of yachts pass before you on their way to or from Lake Washington. I hope it survives.
I couldn't find the reference to OFL in the Amlen column.
@Mods Thank you for allowing @Evan's comment. This has been the only way we've been able to connect. @JC66 and I both have been having issues - through no one's fault - receiving the GridsForGood puzzles, which Rex himself has touted.
Does anyone know if @OffTheGrid is okay or what his/her problem might be? From that comment, it appears he/she has experienced a foiled attempt at world domination. I doubt that's it, though. 🤔
Regarding REI, in 1981 I bought one of the early GoreTex jackets in preparation for my 2 years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Despite the theoretical waterproof nature of GoreTex, during the rainy season I got wet. When I returned to the US I called REI - they said "oh, the early jackets had problems with the seam sealing. Send it back and we'll give you a new one." They too changed their return policies a few years ago because people were abusing it. @anonymous - the definition of business https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/business refers to commerce, or dealings of an economic nature. Grids for Good receives no economic benefit for their puzzles. More to the point - it's Rex's blog, and he can allow or not allow comments. I haven't seen anything that says "no business can be conducted." You are absolutely free to not contribute to any of the charities in question, or even stop visiting the blog. Full disclosure - I've contributed to two different charities, the Equal Justice Initiative for myself and the ACLU for a birthday gift for my 92 year old father (I could have just forwarded him the puzzle, but as Rex said in his initial plug for Grids for Good, while they ask for a minimum $10 donation, "you can do better." (@ Rex -I did, twice)
FWIW, this whole Grids for Goods discussion is in response to its being mentioned by @Rex a few days ago, so it does fall within the guidelines, IMO.
But getting back to the main topic, I've been trying to keep a pitcher of ICED TEA in the fridge, but it keeps turning cloudy on me. Anyone have a good remedy for that?
Cary Grant never received an Oscar. Paul Newman should have received one for Cool Hand Luke. Richard Gere…Lordy no, a journeyman but not Oscar-worthy. My two centavos,
@Frantic, Woo. I was so excited to comment under blue reality I was just sliding through all the comments (had to go back and look to figure out what you referring to). Or could it have been subliminal?
Or,I've heard that @Z is actually Rex, so maybe we're actually each other and don't know it ... many worlds interpretation? (@TTrimble, I mean this so loosely, don't flinch). I'm the occasionally ranting, not as funny one :) The team's behind you!
Also @TTrimble, I finished off The Making of the Atomic Bomb recently and either in there or in subsequent obsessive followup reading found a Bohr-over-Einstein-in-the-genius-department debate. Any thoughts there? Enjoyed your post.
@Anon, agree. Just too lazy to type the C word at that point.
@jberg - Cooks Illustrated (my go to cooking magazine - no advertising and multiple tests/iterations of recipes) - says the following: https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/6528-avoiding-cloudy-iced-tea steep at room temp.
Imagine caring *this* much about a single blog comment of mine that a) harms no one, b) doesn't actually promote anything much less "conduct business," and c) responds directly to a question that two other commenters raised, without which they may not have gotten their issue resolved (they weren't receiving my group's emails for whatever reason, but I knew they would see my comment here).
@mathgent Why, thank you! You're very kind. I always feel a tad leery about going so off-topic like this, but it's nice to hear a few people are appreciative.
@ChuckD Interesting! You raise some very intriguing names. FWIW, I'll offer a few thoughts. Euler: yes, I agree, very arguably in the top 5. (Some people might not be aware of some of these names, but Euler was a Swiss mathematician who flourished late 1700's and early 1800's, and probably still does hold the record for most prolific mathematician. If you want a bookshelf for his collected works, you'd better make it long, strong, and sturdy. He was also a master of the calculus and what I would call formal symbolic calculation, with an extremely inventive technique. All this despite going blind in his later years.)
Some of the names you mention rate very high on impact factor, e.g., Euclid, Fourier, Maxwell, Turing. For example, everyone knows the name Euclid. The "top three" I mentioned were meant in terms of sheer raw talent -- as if from a different species. Von Neumann (of the 20th century century, and who arguably did more than anyone else in inaugurating the age of computers, and was functionally at the head of Los Alamos) was another one of these other-worldly types in terms of sheer power of intellect.
Whereas I think of Euclid as a standout more for his scholarship: in his Elements he collected and organized essentially all of the known mathematics of his day. Hugely impactful, but not one I think of in terms of mind-blowing intellect. (I'm not sure how much is really known about him, to be honest.) Fourier: clearly he had a wonderful and fertile idea with his trigonometric representations of functions, but similarly he doesn't seem a standout for his intellect. Maxwell I don't think of as a mathematician, but one could plausibly argue that his eponymous quartet of equations, summarizing the entirety of what was understood up until then about electromagnetism and light (to be broadly construed, e.g., radio waves, X-rays) as electromagnetic radiation, was the most important historical event of the 19th century. Probably many people would scoff at that as an impossibly provincial or parochial or naive thing to say -- but here I mean taking a long view of implications and reverberations and scientific/technological consequences. Consider that the vast majority of the physics we experience in everyday life, putting gravity aside, comes down to the interactions of photons and electrons -- then maybe you can see the point.
Laplace: I think of him as a great analyst, and he was known for his Celestial Mechanics which I guess was a capstone to the Newtonian revolution in explaining the motions of planets and stars. France produced some wonderful mathematicians during that golden era, e.g., Laplace, Legendre, a little later Cauchy, and ... Galois.
(To be continued: first attempt overstepped the 2^14 character limit!)
Abel (Norwegian) and Galois both died young -- no telling what would have happened had they lived longer. Both absolutely first-rate. They both solved a problem in algebra (is there a formula for finding roots of polynomials in degree 5, similar to the quadratic formula? answer is no!). Galois had extremely penetrating insights into this and is largely responsible for introducing methods of "abstract algebra" (groups, fields); where before there tricks and formal manipulations, now there were very deep concepts at play. In this he went further than Abel, but this is essentially all he was known for. Whereas Abel had a number of irons in the fire (for example his study of elliptic functions and integrals).
Leibniz: another great manipulator of mathematical syntax, and you're right that he introduced the suggestive and convenient notation that we continue to use and teach in calculus -- he is responsible for why "the calculus" is "a calculus". Also one of these universal polymaths with big dreams for the future of science. But otherwise I don't rate his mathematical insights as being at the same level of profundity as Newton's. (An interesting book which can be read at a multitude of levels: Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke by Vladimir Arnol'd.)
I'm impressed that you know the name Hilbert. (Clearly you have some training in mathematics, yes?) Indeed, enormously influential for the development of 20th-century mathematics. I'd happily spend a paragraph outlining some of his accomplishments. But not exactly a household name, alas. General knowledge about mathematics is sadly wanting, alas, even with highly cultivated and intellectually curious individuals. Speaking of the greats of the 20th century: I'd also mention Poincare. (As well as Goedel, Erdos, Weil, Grothendieck, ...). (I'm not sure about Planck wavefunctions -- might you have meant Dirac? The so-called "Dirac function" is hard for a lot of people to grok. The most well-known name paired with "wave function" is I guess Schroedinger.)
Well, there I go again. There should be mention of women mathematicians as well: Hypatia, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether. I'm talking about back in the day. Conditions for women entering mathematics have vastly improved, but clearly there's plenty of room for more improvement.
Mr. "Wake up xword sheeple" Anonymous was definitely the hall monitor in elementary school who got a major power trip out of checking your bathroom pass
Giovani 6. If this doesn’t get spiked as the last one was. Mr. Birnholz is here fixing a problem external to this site. The problem is transactional. That is,parts have given consideration ( money) for a product ( puzzles). That’s business. It has no business here. That you can’t see that is a pity. That, however, is no substitute for an argument.
@anon yeah I understood what your point was, just not why you care so much about it except to shit stir, which is all you contribute here. Pretty ironic you complaining about someone not commenting on the puzzle by spending 6 posts yourself on it. No one cares.
Loving all of the mathematical discussions and would love to weigh in with some comments about Russell and Whitehead and Wittgenstein, but I’m thinking about another aspect of my life right now.
My brother got married on a New Year’s Day in Freeport, ME, which required me to break a resolution formed a few years earlier, when I foolishly joined him in Waterville, ME for Thanksgiving. In both cases I drove from NJ and in the former case I encountered a blizzard in Massachusetts and icy roads and minus 10 degree temperatures in ME. I resolved to never venture into ME between Columbus Day and Memorial Day. On New Year’s Eve, I figured that L.L. Bean would be a nerdfest at midnight, with all sorts of backpackers and other outdoors types joining me, a kayaker, hiker, and camper, to celebrate the New Year in the Mother Ship. Imagine my chagrin when I showed up with my wife and found only very bored clerks in the store. I bought a duck call and went outside and blew it a few times and slinked back to our motel.
A few years later, I was slated to hike to the top of Half Dome with my daughter and son-in-law. We flew from PHL to SFO, where I went to the REI to pick up my order of bear bells and bear spray. A few years later yet, I found myself in Seattle, with my wife, after a Panama Canal cruise that began in Ft. Lauderdale. After going to Pike Street Market, we headed to the REI Mother Ship, with the climbing wall in the vestibule. I paid homage to all of the backpacking gear until my wife hauled me out of there. I’m still a member of REI and shop there online once in a while. My last purchase was for a shelter to be used in a 24 hour running event that I ran in Salisbury, MD last fall.
So here's my spit-take (and by the way, I'm not a physicist; I'm a mathematician by profession -- so take with a grain). Undoubtedly you know that Bohr and Einstein had a for-the-most-part cordial, and decades long, running debate about the place of quantum mechanics in physics. Well, Bohr won that battle. QM is here to stay. Einstein, for all his brilliance, was a man behind the times on that score. In some sense it was the tragedy of his life.
I think I ought to get hold of Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr. Of all the physicists of his (Pais's) generation, Pais knew him best, and came to love him. There's a story of another illustrious physicist who came up to Pais and said, "You knew Bohr well." -- "Yes." -- "Tell me: what did he actually do?"
Bohr I guess was the dean of quantum mechanics in that he was the first to clearly realize its importance and really promote it, hard. Well, of course he was the first to propose quantum energy levels of electrons, proposing a model of the atom with its electron shells. But his was a bit of a hodge-podge as theories go -- a kind of mix of quantum and classical conceptions. All this is before the "young men" (Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Born, Dirac) provided the firm theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics during the heroic era of the 1920's, where the subject really came into its own. But as I understand it, Bohr provided a kind of institutional home for the new quantum mechanics, in Denmark, where all the important personages would pass through, have meetings, etc. So he was a kind of godfather, and a tireless one at that. But in terms of world-shattering ideas: he was not all that. A lot of his time was spent in quasi-mystical ruminations on the philosophy of the complementarity principle (the principle that quanta behave like waves under some experimental conditions, and like particles in others), which he apparently considered susceptible of much broader application (I forget what... "mercy and justice" might have been one such pairing, but perhaps you get the idea based on that type of thing).
Einstein was all that. His relativity has already been mentioned. Any one of his four annus mirabilis papers of 1905 would have marked him as one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Strangely, one of Einstein's 1905 annus mirabilis papers was a quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect, and yet in later years he railed might and main against quantum physics. He simply could not accept its fundamentally probabilistic nature, as against his steadfast belief in a deterministic universe. (Aside: actually, Schroedinger's equation is perfectly deterministic in a sense, but what it uniquely determines are probabilities!)
Moreover, as opposed to Einstein who was just crystal clear, and a hard thinker, and an honest thinker, we have Bohr the foggy obscurantist. One can go back and read Einstein's 1905 paper and it's wonderfully clear and principled and fresh. Nobody, and I mean nobody but the most dogged historian of science, reads Bohr's physics papers. By all accounts, they are practically unreadable.
Better post before I hit the character limit again.
A year ago last Thursday, I was strolling in the zoo When I met a man who thought he knew the lot He was laying down the law about the habits of baboons And the number of quills a porcupine has got So I asked him "What's that creature's name?" and he answered "That's an elk!" And I'd have gone on thinking that was true If the animal in question hadn't put that chap to shame, And remarked?"I ain't no elk? I'm a gnu!
MICHAEL FLANDERS
This is the intro to what is probably my favorite song, long memorized. I remember a time my daughter asked to go to the Bronx zoo - maybe she was 5 or 6 - (where we had a membership and went often) I replied with this song, the above intro of which is recited, not sung. I was half way through before she realized that it was a song, not a story. She was delighted as only a 5 year old can be - and also became a dedicated gnu fan. We always made a specific, extended visit to their corner of the Bronx (Zoo). At a later age, I took to a Flanders & Swan concert in NYC - she loved that too! (I also have a son but he is not musically or artistically inclined. In his case, it was a Mets or a Knicks game. That okay, too.
Life is too short to worry with circles in an xword grid, so I solved this as a themeless and, other than 48D MARIST, it went pretty well. SUEZ CRISIS (59A) was primo. Was NATO (68A) involved it that?
Loved the Rodney Dangerfield clip. It's not on this clip, but one of my favorite Dangerfield zingers: The doctor said I have a serious condition requiring major surgery. I said I wanted to get a second opinion. He said, Okay, you're ugly too.
Looks like the ICE TEA vs ICED TEA controversy has put some folks IN A MOOD. I believe it was Wittgenstein who provided the elegantly SIMPLE solution to that vexing dilemma: If there are six squares in the assigned grid slot, it's ICE TEA; if there are seven, then it's ICED TEA. QED.
Must do some research to see if the ANOWL is related to the ANOA.
Sorry, me again. Just one more thing, to balance out the mostly negative sketch I just gave of Bohr. On the positive side -- I think Pais mentions this and certainly the New Yorker writer of old, Jeremy Bernstein (a physicist by profession), mentions this -- Bohr made a vital remark: in the end, the instruments by which we measure quantum effects belong to the classical regime, and the evidence we collect must be accordingly be expressed in classical terms. Apparently this is not just wishy-washy philosophy: some of the more modern formulations of quantum field theory proceed axiomatically from this interpretive basis. Here I'm beginning to get beyond my ken, but in case anyone is curious, I'll point to this where Bohr is quoted directly, and this leads to a so-called "Bohr topos" approach which, speaking personally, may be my best key of entry to things like algebraic quantum field theory [probably just muttering to myself at this point!].
@TTrimble, Wow, extremely generous of you! Thanks. The book went into some detail about Bohr's foggy thinking and his difficulty writing. At the same time, the author seemed to tie that foggy thinking to some of his breakthroughs. I think I remember from the book that he dictated his thoughts to his wife and she actually did the writing.
@ TTrimble - wonderful, elegant discussion. Years ago my quantum professor based his entire discourse on his infatuation with Planck - so even though the math was formally conceived by Born, Heisenberg and Schrödinger - he always attributed the physics to Planck. It’s always stuck with me. That’s also where we were introduced and toyed with Hilbert’s field equations and his Hilbert space. It was only after that and some reading where I discovered his astounding functional analysis work and his relationship with Einstein. Also intrigued by his prodigious group of students - including as you mention the brilliant von Neumann.
Euler was so prolific - as an undergrad we read the Feynman lectures in which he describes his identity as our jewel - just so cool.
Is that the song that has the line "I'm a gnu, how do you do?" with "gnu" pronounced as 2 syllables: guh-NOO
My mother used to occasionally sing that -- I'm not sure why. She'd burst out with it at odd moments. And I think that's the only line she knew (I mean kah-NEW)!
@ChuckD This was the second mention of Feynman today and I can't resist. Read a couple of his books, but one of the few things I retained was when he ventured into biology and gave a talk to a group of biologists (think it was in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman). In my vague memory, he started out by discussing the anatomy of a cat, which drew titters from the audience. The newcomer didn't know that the anatomy of cat was a given in that crowd. When my son and I get into any kind of discussion and one is belaboring the obvious, the other says, anatomy of a cat, which now means cut to the chase.
I thought Rex would be INAMOOD about this one but since he broke a speed record PLEASEd him to no end. The editor should have saved this one for the festive season where its theme would have had more relevance. Lacking fizz like a flat SODAPOP, I found this one a bit flat and SIMPLE even for a Tuesday.
I have to disagree with OFC on this one. Perhaps the really good Monday puzzle helped raise the bar, but I felt that this constructor BAILED on a number of occasions. Look at that SW corner and ASK yourself: would Lynn have submitted this? Even the long one is unlovely: REENTERS. That into HIRER YESNO--and *barf* UIE??? No way. We have TYSON and NIP...there oughta be EAR somewhere.
As to GERE, I think he got snubbed for Officer...maybe Gossett upstaged him.
Looks like there'll be no HALFTIME pep talks this year; conference after conference in the NCAA announce season cancellations. It's a brave--strike that--cautious new world. Will the NFL still go? Stay tuned.
BOND is a grade of paper, a little lagniappe for the theme, which is OK. No direct DOD, so I'll borrow one from RICHARD's impressive co-star list: Debra Winger of the above NAMED film. Bogey.
WHATIF it’s SIMPLE that some ICETEA is SHOWN to make RICHARDGERE pee? YES a TOILET is just OVER TIME such a MUST if he’s INAMOD to say, “PLEASE BEERME.”
I think it's hard to disagree that it's hard to hate an easy puzzle but at least Rex seems to have come around on how bad the fill was toward the end.
I could not get the theme until reading the review even with the revealer. MUSLIT? MUSLET? LETTOI? Also seems like a really bizarre theme for July.
54A seemed very opinionated to me. I've never heard of 48D, had HIREE for 63A which made 57D ACEO which seems like it could be a Latin root. 16A was a pain as I had SERTA then SEELY and would have been better off just doing all the downs which were easy except for the misdirection at 9A.
This is my first comment and it's 5 weeks late.That's when the puzzle arrives in Montreal's Gazette. So, nobody will see this. That's ok. I will!! First Beatles song that came to mind was Help me, help me,etc I found the wrap-around theme counterintuitive. When lines wrap around, they normally start on the following line not on the same line.
Decent Tuesday puzzle with a novel wrap-around a line theme. Maybe a bit too easy, and maybe not as "professional" as yesterday's, but I enjoyed it. I even liked AN OWL, but that's me, I guess.
The ICE TEA/ICEd TEA discussion amuses me. Of course the latter is "more" correct, but people actually say the former. Just listen to them. "ICE TEA" - see, there's another.
Maybe Will Shortz and company had to hunt around a bit for a good Tuesday puzzle, and they came up this one. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn't it? Consider . . .
TOILET PAPER. Uh . . ., okay. TYSON, Mike. He's still around? BEER ME please, a Bud will do. WINO. Bit of empathy might be in order.
WRAPPING PAPER is not bad as a theme/revealer, but it doesn't have much sparkle either.
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For Rex, a puzzle gets better as his time gets faster. If everything in life was rated this way, I would have had a lot more girlfriends than I had. Oh well ...
ReplyDeleteEasy. Another smooth grid with a fun/interesting theme. I did need a few nanoseconds of staring at the completed grid to grok what was going on. Liked it, and Jeff gave it POW. Great debut!
ReplyDeleteWhen you chill tea, it is ICED. I don’t know what ICE TEA is (47D). Sad!
ReplyDeleteYes, thank you!
DeleteAGREED! You can’t make tea out of ice!
DeleteYep.
DeleteA nice n easy Tuesday. Hated the Rex review. Around 2/3 was about how it’s easiest to solve if you know the first letter of the answer, Gee, that never would have occurred to me, and it sure sheds a lot o’ light on the pluses and minuses of this puzzle. Most of the rest of the critique was taken up with disparaging the aptness of the LL Bean / REI comparison, at the end of which he admits that he actually has no familiarity with REI. Maybe it was a three Negroni night.
ReplyDeleteHappy that a monstrous ROO made the scene. Didn’t count the Fs.
I actually thought it was a good Tues. Easy solve as a themeless, but the theme could be milked a bit for help if you were so inclined.
ONE PUR ROO IMP to rule them all. Drat. Rex beat me to it. But Rex, did not know the "all" in question is his own crossword blog, although I fear ROO saves his best effort for SB now. Alas.
ReplyDeleteCALIBRATING RICHARD GERE.
OSCAR, YESNO?
Also enjoy the sentence the first 4 downs make: SIMPLE AMULET RESETS ID TAG.
A present wrapped in toilet paper?
If you are giving a toilet.
I've used newspaper. Usually the Sunday comics, but the local paper for gifts to people who have moved away. Yes, l know, WRAPPING PAPER is the answer to the first part of the clue. The papers listed are wrapping not for gifts at Christmas, but because they are wrapping round the puzzle. PLEASE PLEASE me do, and let us not ever have to have that discussion again. Thank you. You too Rex.
And no rips or nits about NIP. Proper word, properly clued.
If you want some PC action:
I am a Cleveland baseball fan. They are thinking of changing their name from Indians. For a couple decades I have been hoping they would change it to the Cleveland TRIBE. Hoping that TRIBE could be neutral enough to be non-insulting, it has a pretty innocent background, and a more general application. Also it is already one of the team's nicknames. So if you care:
1. A good and proper change
2. Not a good name for any non-native team in the USA.
3. A good name for some teams, but not for a team with Chief Wahoo baggage.
The theme is nicely done with all 3 letter sections to each half answer. I feel the circles were necessary in this one.
Super easy but took me artificially long because my phone is broken and I always have typos that I don’t find ‘til the end. I solved this without the theme at all and only got it when I came here to check your solve. Maybe if id finished sub three minutes I’d think this theme wasn’t stupid. As it is, however...
ReplyDeleteGot through the puzzle quickly, but couldn’t grasp the theme. I guess my feeble brain doesn’t cipher right to left. Felt like a total eediot when I read the write up. Oh well, it’s not the first time. Better luck tomorrow, little one.
ReplyDeleteRex, you got a shout out from Deb Amlem herself in the comments section to today’s NYT Wordplay. I don’t know what she’s referring to. Can you explain?
ReplyDeleteNice puzzle - very easy like yesterday. Basically solved it as a themeless almost to the end - saw the theme just before finishing. Not an overly interesting theme - but unique and well constructed. The fill was clear and went in quickly for me - agree with Rex that there may be too much short glue - ETS, IVE, IMP etc but it didn’t bring down the solve. Liked SUEZ CRISIS and HALFTIME. I’m sure someone can find a reference that says ICE TEA is allowable but in reality it’s not. Grew up near MARIST - not a big fan.
ReplyDeleteNot surprising at all about RICHARD GERE.
Had the same thought about REI and L.L.Bean. This is a super debut. Cleverly crafted theme, smooth solve.
ReplyDeleteThe grid filled in in a splash, pretty much, but figuring out the theme afterward took a few more beats than usual and brought my brain far more into play, which made the puzzle much more entertaining, and thank you for that, Kevin. A few post solve observations:
ReplyDelete* WEST is east in the grid, which echoes the theme, where the three circled letters on the left are read to the right of the final three circled letters.
* Nice cross of HALF and SPLIT.
* In the final column, there's a TO-NY "wrapping" to go along with OSCAR.
* Does the second-to-last column (ELI OVER MARIST) indicate an Ivy League preference?
Congratulations on your debut, and I never thought I'd say this after three years in the army (way back when) -- I look forward to some more KP.
@Richard - Rex is famous/infamous for his anti-racist fill screeds.
ReplyDeleteSure, it was easy. Monday fare if you ignore figuring out the theme.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know REI nor, I am proud to say, had I ever heard anyone say "BEER ME". So finishing up with IN A MOOD took me longer than I would have liked.
I think what Rex might be trying to say is that he doesn't like a challenge.
I needed Rex to explain the gimmick. And on a Tuesday? Embarrassing!
ReplyDeleteIt took me a while to proofread and fix HIREe instead HIRER. But I still almost did it faster than I did the Mini, even though I had red letters on. Funny day.
ReplyDeleteWOW what a great theme. Four types of paper; all six letters; not a clunker in the bunch.
ReplyDeleteClue for OSCAR was weird. Richard Gere is probably a nice fellow, but he's definitely not on my list of acting greasts. I think the word “surprisingly” was intended to be “unsurprisingly”.
Anon 12:49, ChuckD - Lipton, purveyor of teas since 1890, might disagree with you.
ReplyDeleteRex, who says he completed this puzzle in 2:48, adds, "...the real speedsters will have me beat by a full minute today." So we're supposed to believe that someone finishes reading all the clues and writing or typing in all the answers in one minute and 48 seconds? Well, there may be a sucker born every minute, but I'm not one of them. But I also have to ask, where's the enjoyment in blasting through a puzzle so fast? You don't have even a spare second to stop and appreciate clues like the one for AMULET. I guess I know what answer these folks would give to Ted Allen, who always asks the chefs on "Chopped," "Are you a competitive person?" Me, I'm in it for the fun.
ReplyDeleteEasy puzzle and quite enjoyable. I liked the long answers--unusual for a Tuesday. It's always a different solving experience when a few of those appear, and these were nice and clean. I keep seeing REI in puzzles and forgetting what the third letter is. No familiarity with that company since I don't, and won't, camp. Someone gave me a huge box of L.L. Bean fatwood sticks for my fireplace last year for Christmas. What a great gift!
As usual, I ignored the circled squares until I was finished, and then it took me a minute to grasp the theme, which was fine for a Tuesday.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
ReplyDeleteNo what?
DeleteSo I looked at my WRAPPING PAPER (comprised of annoying tiny little circles, btw) and went "Huh???" Here was my WRAPPING PAPER:
ReplyDeleteMUSLIT
LETTOI
BONCAR
SUETIS
And if I hadn't come here, I would have gone to my grave not knowing what on earth this puzzle was about.
Look, I'm a literal, straightforward, left-to-right thinker. Always have been, always will be. Never saw the [really weird, when you come to think about it] trick. SUE me.
A better puzzle than I realized while solving. If you don't mind doing things bass ackwards, that is.
Hey All !
ReplyDeleteHar Rex! ONE PUR ROO IMP. Although, I'm past the age of being IMPy. TOASTY, maybe. Also past the age of asking someone to BEER ME! (Which is OVER ROO.)
ICE TEA. Har. The debate will rage today. Yes, it should be ICED, as the TEA has ICE in it, ergo it's ICED, but in puzzledom, it works just fine. Remember, puzzledom/crossworld is like Rex's ROO IMP movie, fantasy, not reality. 😀
Thought the "wrap around-east/west" thing was kind of odd. Took me a bit to figure out what in tarhooties was happening. I was like, "What is MUSLIT?" etc.
Fill didn't seem too terrible, which is nice. Another debut, congrats.
I am surprised RICHARD GERE never won an OSCAR. He was pretty good in "Primal Fear".
One F
One ROO 😋
SIMPLE GNUS
RooMonster
DarrinV
So I'm staring at my finished product and my mouth is wide open. What is wrapped in Christmas paper? Maybe that PEAR in a Partridge tree? No, that's not it. Put it down, pick it back up. Shake the cobwebs, concentrate, you can figure this out....
ReplyDeleteOK, so I finally see TOI LET and in a flash I wondered why you would wrap a Christmas present in that. TIS SUE yes, but toilet? Shake the cobwebs again and concentrate. OOOOH it's different kinds of paper that have nothing to do with Christmas. Cool beans. And on a Tuesday, no less.
Yes, REI was my only HUH? I guess it's camping equipment that's their specialty. I loved going into the L.L Bean shop here at our local mall. This was when they still had stores that were open. I remember buying my husband a cool beige chamois ( sp?) shirt and eyed some boots he'd never wear. I guess you can still order by catalog.....(sigh).
Eye wanders to RICHARD GERE and I think Gerbil. He certainly is a handsome man.
BEER ME is kinda cute. I'm more of the WINO ME. No disrespect to the non imbibers.
ROO gets his name again....right next to the little IMP. Just kidding.
I can see why this was Jeff's POW. It's clever and it's different. Thanks for a Tuesday where Speedy Gonzalez didn't blow a head gasket.
#Lewis (6:24): Great observation. In the last column, TONY wraps around the grid like the themers do. And the last column intersects OSCAR.
ReplyDeleteI think that crosswordese and junk are different. Most of the fill that Rex criticizes is crosswordese but not junk. To me, junk is a sequence of letters that doesn’t have an established meeting. Sounds, for example, like YEOWW or AARGH. In today’s, the only junk I noticed was PUR.
Nancy missed the only semi-redeeming part of the puzzle, the WRAPPINGPAPER. She hates those little circles.
PLEASE Please Me is a Beatles song I hadn’t heard. I just played a clip. I think that it was part of their sets when they started.
Once upon a time,(60s/70s), L.L. Bean was for serious outdoors people, back when folks hunted and fished. And REI was created as a cooperative for serious mountaineers and climbers (I think based out of Seattle). Both slowly morphed over the years into "active wear" for folks who just want to dress the part. I have a L.L. Bean winter jacket that I got 43 years ago! Still fits!
ReplyDeleteA great puzzle; didn't grok theme until I saw Rex's explanation, which far outweighs his constant bragging about his fast times and daily nit-picking about the fill.
In one's wheelhouse does not make a puzzle good, it makes it easy to solve if all you really care about is speed.
ReplyDeleteI can't be bothered with speed, however this puzzle personified meh.
Gere? Oscar-worthy?
Right.
This was sorta fun with a decent theme, which I (like others have stated) completely ignored until it was all over.
ReplyDeleteICE TEA always, a.l.w.a.y.s. sets my teeth on edge. It is not TEA made from ICE, it is TEA that has been ICEd so that it is no longer hotted.
I like RICHARDGERE. For the most part, I enjoy his movies. Do I think that it is at all surprising he's never been nominated for an OSCAR? Absolutely not.
@OffTheGrid 745am Are you sure?
ðŸ§
🎉🎉
Off(ish) topic: To others who have donated to Grids for Good, how long is it taking to receive the puzzles? Are they swamped or something? I only ask here because I've been waiting since last Thursday and a subsequent email has gone unanswered.
@Petsounds - While I do find the times incredible, Rex isn't kidding that the speediest of speed solvers can do it in under 2 minutes. Google some of Dan Feyer's videos, or, here's one to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdFUD0Y5dEk
ReplyDeleteHe finishes the Monday in 1:41 there, and the Tuesday in 1:46.
Never thought about the theme until I came here and found out what it was. Fastest Tuesday ever... but I couldn't even type/write in all the letters in less than 3-minutes. I don't get how people can (speed) solve that fast.
ReplyDelete@Petsounds
ReplyDeleteThe scales may fall from your eyes if you google "Dan Feyer 19 minutes" and watch the YouTube video. That is, if seeing is believing, this speed solver did an **entire week** of puzzles in just under 19 minutes. (H/T to @Z who let me in on this.) To me, it looked entirely legit. Yes, he made mistakes along the way. He did the Monday in a little over a minute, if I recall.
You have to understand that such crossword titans use special software that optimize their performance, and they have the agility and finger dexterity of a teenage gamer champion (so, really fast typing, and flawless and economical control of the arrow keys). Plus, the whole 10,000 hours thing. I have a private theory that most of their attention is laser-locked on negotiating around the clues and they barely see the grid out of the corner of their eyes -- they just have an internal sense of knowing where they are in the grid at all times as they type.
Apparently Erik Agard is really, really good as well.
I solved this as a themeless, ignored the little circles, and didn't have a clue until I read Rex. Does that make me BONCARs? Don't know, don't care.
ReplyDelete20A Word repeated before "Me" in a Beatles hit: I immediately thought "Love, love me do." That was too short, so it must be PLEASE. Does this repeated word before "me" occur anywhere else in Beatles' lyrics?
@TTrimble from last night. Thanks for the further discussion and that wonderful Ptolemaic video. I gather that in spite of his great contribution, even Newton wasn't able to explain the vagaries of Mercury's orbit. That required Einstein and General Relativity. It's all fascinating stuff.
You said:
(Sorry -- I'll step away from the lectern now. You gave me an opening and I ran with it!)
That, in a nutshell, is one of the beauties of this blog. Somebody says something that sparks off another commentator and sends discussion off in one intriguing direction or another.
Well done, Joaquin!
ReplyDeleteI was going to explain the REI/LL BEAN thing, but @bauskern beat me too it. There are surviving differences— REI’s clothing is more like outdoor gear; Bean’s sells more fly rods. (Not sure if they still sell fly-tying supplies, but I suspect they do.
ReplyDeleteIt would be better without the circles, but too tough for Tuesday.
@ bauskern (8:52) mentions he has an LLBean jacket he purchased 43 years ago and it still fits. Well, I got ya beat, bauskern. I have an item I got from LLBean when I was in high school, 60+ years ago, and it still fits. It's a scarf, but still ...
ReplyDeleteLike Rex, I was loving this puzzle as I zipped thru through it while ignoring the circles. But the love came to a screeching halt when I was finished and stared at the circles trying to figure out WTH was going on. I tried reading them forwards and backwards and every which way except the way it had to be read to make sense. I never judge a crossword by how fast I can finish it, and I don’t care how easy it is, but I hate it when a theme makes me feel stupid which this did. Otherwise it was a great Tuesday effort and like yesterday’s, another good starter puzzle for novices.
ReplyDeleteI grew up with SODAPOP or pop but never just soda. A soda is served in a tall glass with ice cream, flavored syrup, whipped cream and a cherry on top. Maybe I’m out of touch but I never heard of REI. Sounds a lot like Bass Pro Shop which is the outdoorsy mecca in my neck of the woods.
An Officer And A Gentleman is one of my favorite movies, and the final scene when RICHARDGERE carries Debra Winger off to their happily ever after is one of the most perfect endings in the history of film. I just watched it the other day and was wondering why Richard Gere did not receive an OSCAR nomination. He gave an incredible performance but was overshadowed by Lou Gossett who won for Best Supporting Actor as the shrewd drill sergeant.
@Joaquin (12:05) Once again you cracked me up first thing in the morning. I’m still laughing. 😂😂😂
LL Bean has its flagship store in Freeport, Maine and a whole shopping ecosystem has developed around it.
ReplyDeleteREI stands for Recreational Equipment, Inc., if that helps anyone remember it in the future.
Both companies have famously liberal return policies. LLBean brags about taking in a pair of shoes worn heavily for an octogenarian's lifetime, and sending him off with a new replacement.
REI is jokingly referred to as "Rent Every Item" for the people that purchase high end gear for one trip, then return it. They resell these items every so often at a steep discount and it is hilarious/damning-of-the-human-race to see the lame reasons people put forward for their returns on the sales tags.
@Peter P and @TTrimble: Thanks for the speedster info! It must be the software. I spend entirely too much time moving the cursor from one box to another and switching from across mode to down mode. It's still hard to fathom, but seeing is believing. Doesn't look like much fun, though.
ReplyDeleteIf it's Iced Tea must it also be SnoedCone? Kidding! As my son says when I correct his pronunciation/grammar, "I've heard it both ways," (he really hasn't.) @Frantic, Love the idea of "Hotted Tea!" Hand up for Iced though.
ReplyDeleteSodapop. Back in college we knew if you were from the east or west side PA by the way you referred to sugar water, soda or pop.
@OfftheGrid, Are you sure?
Super easy puzzle. But why backwards? Muslit, LeToi, BonCar. I thought the theme was French.
Sincerely, JD nee Lori Lee, now blue. Google was stalking me anyway. You can't escape.
@TTrimble:
ReplyDeletePlus, the whole 10,000 hours thing.
But, but, but... can you earn a living at it?
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
@burtonkd:
LLBean brags about taking in a pair of shoes worn heavily for an octogenarian's lifetime, and sending him off with a new replacement.
not any more. don't think they grandfathered existing purchases, either. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-return-ll-bean-items-after-policy-change-2018-2
now, where did I stash that receipt???
IceD tea: housewine of the South. Usually sweet, though I’ve always preferred straight.
ReplyDeleteNever heard “soda” or “pop” ‘til went off to school; always “coke”, irrespective of brand.
It appears that @Rex did the puzzle so fast, he failed to notice 38D (WINO).
ReplyDeleteI wish Rex would post a video of solving a puzzle in record time. I cannot read and comprehend the clues that quickly.
ReplyDeleteI could not figure out what the shaded squares were even after reading the blog. I finally get it.
Yes, ICEd not ICE.
Never would consider LLBean and REI competitors.
RICHARDGERE should have been nominated for An Officer and a Gentleman and Chicago. He was also very good in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
@Joaquin you're on a roll today! Lol
@Barbara S.
ReplyDeleteGlad you appreciated the commentary! I agree, such discussions are fun (and welcome relief from the occasional sniping and trolling I see, from people who should know better).
Yeah, I don't know when the data on Mercury's deviations from the predictions of Newtonian theory -- that is, deviations not ascribable to experimental error -- became available. (Of course one could easily consult Wikipedia.) But anything like Einstein's General Relativity, the necessary correction of Newton's law of gravitation, was completely out of the question in Newton's time. The relevant mathematics is pretty sophisticated and simply didn't exist back then; one needs to interpose a few mathematical geniuses like Gauss and Riemann, and then a whole slew of other fine mathematicians, and decades of hammering and smoothing things out, to convert the required differential geometry into a product that Einstein could use. (Contrary to popular opinion, Einstein was nothing like a mathematical genius -- he needed other people to teach him the math as he was working General Relativity out. But he was a physicist non pareil.)
Special Relativity, a prerequisite of General Relativity, is much, much simpler, but even that is implausible to imagine in Newton's time. Newton was able to calculate the speed of light, but asking him to accept that it's the same in all (inertial, in vacua) reference frames would be asking him to accept a complete upheaval of his entire background framework for doing physics. Really, that seemed to require a collective sinking-in of the consequences of Maxwell's equations (produced in the 1860's I think) over some decades, and a really fresh, original, brilliant and clear-headed young physicist (Einstein), for the scene to be set for that upheaval -- even though nowadays it's easily and routinely taught to undergraduates.
It's often said that the three greatest mathematicians of all time were Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss. I can believe that, and have a hard time picking between them. All three, seen in historical context, are utterly terrifying. Perhaps Newton scares me the most.
@Frantic Sloth - It shouldn’t have taken that long. I got mine in a couple of hours.
ReplyDeleteWhen I say ICED TEA I don't pronounce 2 separate T sounds and I think most people don't. The "controversy" is mainly confined to how one writes it.
ReplyDeletePeople who buy something with the intention of using it once and returning it are stealing. They cannot be prosecuted but they are stealing nonetheless.
Solve went quite quickly, then it seemed to take about equally long to figure out the gimmick, which provided a very satisfying aha! One of the best Tuesday themes ever, I’d say. Fill well above average to boot. Great work, Kevin Patterson!
ReplyDelete@Z @ @Frantic
ReplyDeleteI donated last Wednesday and still haven't heard anything since.
Jd,
ReplyDeleteSugar water isn’t equivalent to soda. By your reckoning Kool-Aid is soda.
The sine qua non of soda is carbonation.
@Petsounds (9:56) The speed solvers really are amazing, but I agree with you. Where is the joy? And I seldom use the app but again agree with you about maneuvering from the crosses to the downs, etc. Plus it never fails that I have a stupid little typo somewhere that it takes me then another five minutes to find before I can call it finished. Just give me a paper on the clipboard with my .5 mm and a nice cup of coffee and I am a happy camper.
ReplyDelete@JC (10:24) re WINO, you’re right. I expected his usual rant about that too.
I enjoyed being stumped for a bit on a Tuesday, as MUS..LIT and LET...TOI placed ??? over my head. But then BON...CAR erased the ??? for a switched-on lightbulb, and in went SUE...TIS with no crosses. I thought the theme was funny and creative and a nice change of pace for a Tuesday. I liked AN OWL joining the partridge in the PEAR tree. Re: @Rex's remark about having the first letter of an entry: "Odds are always that it's going to be the most valuable letter in any answer, in terms of its ability to help you guess the answer" - I agree, of course...and at the ASHEN cross almost wrote in "Home game." Help from previous puzzles: BEER ME.
ReplyDeleteKnitty,
ReplyDeleteDunno that I agree about Gere deserving a nom that year.
The noms were Ben Kingsley for that temple fakir, Paul Newman, in maybe his best performance, Jack Lemmon , giving the same performance which the academy loved for 40 years and, the guy who should’ve won, Peter O’Toole in a bravura performance in the criminally underrated My Favorite year.
Let me NIP this in the bud. Enough with the sots and souses and WINO fill. Slurs about alcoholics IS offensive.
ReplyDeleteMike TYSON gets a pass?
"Stock splits" are much in decline. Not such BIG news anymore.
ICED TEA is better than making tea out of ICE.
A small room with a roaring fire is Toasty? ROASTY is more like it.
Can we please CAN the ASST??
The only thing I liked was starting with SARI in a puzzle about Wrappings.
Richard Gere was "surprisingly" good in "Chicago." But really, does anyone give a hoot about the Oscars anymore. They lost any (and there wasn't much to begin with) credibility a few decades ago.
Spelling Bee alert:
Today's is not alas one for the HOI POLLOI.
@Frantic Sloth and @JC66:
ReplyDeleteWe emailed both of you the puzzles within 15 minutes of when you forwarded your receipts to us. So please do one of two things:
1) Check your spam and trash folders. The Grids for Good email might be getting filtered in there.
2) If for some reason you still can't find them in those folders, send me an email at devilcrosswords AT gmail DOT com and I'll forward you the puzzles again from there.
--Evan Birnholz
@TTrimble (10:50). Your essay on the connections between mathematics and Einstein and relativity theory took my breath away. Great stuff, beautifully expressed.
ReplyDelete@ TTrimble - I think Euler, Euclid and Maxwell - maybe even Fourier and Laplace should be in the argument for at least top 5. I’d take Leibniz over Newton since he provided a complete calculus. Also great modern mathematicians - Turing, Hilbert, Abel and so many others. From a technical understanding point - my fear was always Planck’s wavefunctions.
ReplyDeleteCool & easy wrap theme. Very tidy, with three circles on each side, for each themer. Woulda also been a good WedPuz or so, without the circles? (Mcguffin would be harder to get -- but, then at least the revealer is in the middle, to help put solvers in the know, midsolvequest.)
ReplyDeletestaff weeject pick: PUR. Better clue: {Pup in disguise??}. Honrable mention to MUS & SUE.
Some fave big words: WHATIF. BEERME. HALFTIME (Theme-related potential!). SODAPOP.
ANOWL. har
Thanx for the fun and congratz on yer debut, Mr. Patterson. U are now a wrap star, I reckon.
Masked & Anonymo4Us
**gruntz**
@Anon 12:06
ReplyDeleteWhat business is @Evan conducting, exactly?
The whole concept of Grids for Goods is totally non-profit.
If someone/anyone contributes fo one of the many charities involved, Grids for Goods sends them a bunch of puzzles constructed PRO BONO by some of the finest constructors today.
Any and all money goes directly to the charities.
Very easy here. REI was a gimme, as I have a dear friend in Seattle, and spent almost a year in Tacoma, before it had its Dome. Just as Portland has it's must go, Powell's books, Seattle had its must go, REI. Plus what is surely the greatest bar in the country, the Athenian in Pike Place Market. Oh the many, many hours my friend and I spent there, solving the problems of the world while gazing at the ferries heading to the docks below, from Bainbridge or Bremerton. And drinking really lousy beer, back then (of course in more recent years, they have featured far superior local brews).
ReplyDeleteSeattle also has a very splendid hotel, the Inn at the Market, and what is surely the most pleasant fish restaurant there is, Ivar's Salmon House, where dozens of yachts pass before you on their way to or from Lake Washington. I hope it survives.
I couldn't find the reference to OFL in the Amlen column.
@Mods Thank you for allowing @Evan's comment. This has been the only way we've been able to connect. @JC66 and I both have been having issues - through no one's fault - receiving the GridsForGood puzzles, which Rex himself has touted.
ReplyDeleteAnd, thanks @Evan for emailing me the Grid for Good's puzzles.
ReplyDeleteCan't wait to solve them.
@Evan What @JC66 1236pm said!
ReplyDelete@JD née Lorelei Lee And now you are of the body. Congrats? Why, yes indeed! Did you mean to echo my sentiment to @OffTheGrid for emphasis/humor or did you just not see it? Either way, it's funny! (and just a tad creepy)
Does anyone know if @OffTheGrid is okay or what his/her problem might be? From that comment, it appears he/she has experienced a foiled attempt at world domination. I doubt that's it, though. 🤔
Regarding REI, in 1981 I bought one of the early GoreTex jackets in preparation for my 2 years in the Peace Corps in Cameroon. Despite the theoretical waterproof nature of GoreTex, during the rainy season I got wet. When I returned to the US I called REI - they said "oh, the early jackets had problems with the seam sealing. Send it back and we'll give you a new one." They too changed their return policies a few years ago because people were abusing it.
ReplyDelete@anonymous - the definition of business https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/business refers to commerce, or dealings of an economic nature. Grids for Good receives no economic benefit for their puzzles. More to the point - it's Rex's blog, and he can allow or not allow comments. I haven't seen anything that says "no business can be conducted." You are absolutely free to not contribute to any of the charities in question, or even stop visiting the blog. Full disclosure - I've contributed to two different charities, the Equal Justice Initiative for myself and the ACLU for a birthday gift for my 92 year old father (I could have just forwarded him the puzzle, but as Rex said in his initial plug for Grids for Good, while they ask for a minimum $10 donation, "you can do better." (@ Rex -I did, twice)
@ChuckD (11:49). My love is discrete mathematics, so Euler is my guy, too.
ReplyDeleteFWIW, this whole Grids for Goods discussion is in response to its being mentioned by @Rex a few days ago, so it does fall within the guidelines, IMO.
ReplyDeleteBut getting back to the main topic, I've been trying to keep a pitcher of ICED TEA in the fridge, but it keeps turning cloudy on me. Anyone have a good remedy for that?
I think it would hilariously funny if for just one week, Rex did a write-up of the Times' mini-puzzle.
ReplyDeleteCary Grant never received an Oscar. Paul Newman should have received one for Cool Hand Luke. Richard Gere…Lordy no, a journeyman but not Oscar-worthy. My two centavos,
ReplyDeletejuanito
@Frantic, Woo. I was so excited to comment under blue reality I was just sliding through all the comments (had to go back and look to figure out what you referring to). Or could it have been subliminal?
ReplyDeleteOr,I've heard that @Z is actually Rex, so maybe we're actually each other and don't know it ... many worlds interpretation? (@TTrimble, I mean this so loosely, don't flinch). I'm the occasionally ranting, not as funny one :) The team's behind you!
Also @TTrimble, I finished off The Making of the Atomic Bomb recently and either in there or in subsequent obsessive followup reading found a Bohr-over-Einstein-in-the-genius-department debate. Any thoughts there? Enjoyed your post.
@Anon, agree. Just too lazy to type the C word at that point.
How do you spell HUEY??
ReplyDeleteiceD Tea - yes.
Hated it. I don't care how fast I run through them. I won't LIETO you
@jberg - Cooks Illustrated (my go to cooking magazine - no advertising and multiple tests/iterations of recipes) - says the following: https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/6528-avoiding-cloudy-iced-tea steep at room temp.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous 12:06 and several more times today:
ReplyDeleteImagine caring *this* much about a single blog comment of mine that a) harms no one, b) doesn't actually promote anything much less "conduct business," and c) responds directly to a question that two other commenters raised, without which they may not have gotten their issue resolved (they weren't receiving my group's emails for whatever reason, but I knew they would see my comment here).
Or just carry on if it makes you feel better.
@evan I know 4 posts from anon that have nothing to do with the puzzle complaining that a post has nothing to do with the puzzle. FOUR!
Delete@mathgent
ReplyDeleteWhy, thank you! You're very kind. I always feel a tad leery about going so off-topic like this, but it's nice to hear a few people are appreciative.
@ChuckD
Interesting! You raise some very intriguing names. FWIW, I'll offer a few thoughts. Euler: yes, I agree, very arguably in the top 5. (Some people might not be aware of some of these names, but Euler was a Swiss mathematician who flourished late 1700's and early 1800's, and probably still does hold the record for most prolific mathematician. If you want a bookshelf for his collected works, you'd better make it long, strong, and sturdy. He was also a master of the calculus and what I would call formal symbolic calculation, with an extremely inventive technique. All this despite going blind in his later years.)
Some of the names you mention rate very high on impact factor, e.g., Euclid, Fourier, Maxwell, Turing. For example, everyone knows the name Euclid. The "top three" I mentioned were meant in terms of sheer raw talent -- as if from a different species. Von Neumann (of the 20th century century, and who arguably did more than anyone else in inaugurating the age of computers, and was functionally at the head of Los Alamos) was another one of these other-worldly types in terms of sheer power of intellect.
Whereas I think of Euclid as a standout more for his scholarship: in his Elements he collected and organized essentially all of the known mathematics of his day. Hugely impactful, but not one I think of in terms of mind-blowing intellect. (I'm not sure how much is really known about him, to be honest.) Fourier: clearly he had a wonderful and fertile idea with his trigonometric representations of functions, but similarly he doesn't seem a standout for his intellect. Maxwell I don't think of as a mathematician, but one could plausibly argue that his eponymous quartet of equations, summarizing the entirety of what was understood up until then about electromagnetism and light (to be broadly construed, e.g., radio waves, X-rays) as electromagnetic radiation, was the most important historical event of the 19th century. Probably many people would scoff at that as an impossibly provincial or parochial or naive thing to say -- but here I mean taking a long view of implications and reverberations and scientific/technological consequences. Consider that the vast majority of the physics we experience in everyday life, putting gravity aside, comes down to the interactions of photons and electrons -- then maybe you can see the point.
Laplace: I think of him as a great analyst, and he was known for his Celestial Mechanics which I guess was a capstone to the Newtonian revolution in explaining the motions of planets and stars. France produced some wonderful mathematicians during that golden era, e.g., Laplace, Legendre, a little later Cauchy, and ... Galois.
(To be continued: first attempt overstepped the 2^14 character limit!)
(Comment continued, in response to @ChuckD)
ReplyDeleteAbel (Norwegian) and Galois both died young -- no telling what would have happened had they lived longer. Both absolutely first-rate. They both solved a problem in algebra (is there a formula for finding roots of polynomials in degree 5, similar to the quadratic formula? answer is no!). Galois had extremely penetrating insights into this and is largely responsible for introducing methods of "abstract algebra" (groups, fields); where before there tricks and formal manipulations, now there were very deep concepts at play. In this he went further than Abel, but this is essentially all he was known for. Whereas Abel had a number of irons in the fire (for example his study of elliptic functions and integrals).
Leibniz: another great manipulator of mathematical syntax, and you're right that he introduced the suggestive and convenient notation that we continue to use and teach in calculus -- he is responsible for why "the calculus" is "a calculus". Also one of these universal polymaths with big dreams for the future of science. But otherwise I don't rate his mathematical insights as being at the same level of profundity as Newton's. (An interesting book which can be read at a multitude of levels: Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke by Vladimir Arnol'd.)
I'm impressed that you know the name Hilbert. (Clearly you have some training in mathematics, yes?) Indeed, enormously influential for the development of 20th-century mathematics. I'd happily spend a paragraph outlining some of his accomplishments. But not exactly a household name, alas. General knowledge about mathematics is sadly wanting, alas, even with highly cultivated and intellectually curious individuals. Speaking of the greats of the 20th century: I'd also mention Poincare. (As well as Goedel, Erdos, Weil, Grothendieck, ...).
(I'm not sure about Planck wavefunctions -- might you have meant Dirac? The so-called "Dirac function" is hard for a lot of people to grok. The most well-known name paired with "wave function" is I guess Schroedinger.)
Well, there I go again. There should be mention of women mathematicians as well: Hypatia, Sofia Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether. I'm talking about back in the day. Conditions for women entering mathematics have vastly improved, but clearly there's plenty of room for more improvement.
Mr. "Wake up xword sheeple" Anonymous was definitely the hall monitor in elementary school who got a major power trip out of checking your bathroom pass
ReplyDeleteAnd Evan,
ReplyDeleteImagine caring enough to respond.
@anon 3:56 Five!
DeleteGiovani
ReplyDelete6. If this doesn’t get spiked as the last one was. Mr. Birnholz is here fixing a problem external to this site.
The problem is transactional. That is,parts have given consideration ( money) for a product ( puzzles). That’s business. It has no business here. That you can’t see that is a pity. That, however, is no substitute for an argument.
@anon yeah I understood what your point was, just not why you care so much about it except to shit stir, which is all you contribute here. Pretty ironic you complaining about someone not commenting on the puzzle by spending 6 posts yourself on it. No one cares.
DeleteLoving all of the mathematical discussions and would love to weigh in with some comments about Russell and Whitehead and Wittgenstein, but I’m thinking about another aspect of my life right now.
ReplyDeleteMy brother got married on a New Year’s Day in Freeport, ME, which required me to break a resolution formed a few years earlier, when I foolishly joined him in Waterville, ME for Thanksgiving. In both cases I drove from NJ and in the former case I encountered a blizzard in Massachusetts and icy roads and minus 10 degree temperatures in ME. I resolved to never venture into ME between Columbus Day and Memorial Day. On New Year’s Eve, I figured that L.L. Bean would be a nerdfest at midnight, with all sorts of backpackers and other outdoors types joining me, a kayaker, hiker, and camper, to celebrate the New Year in the Mother Ship. Imagine my chagrin when I showed up with my wife and found only very bored clerks in the store. I bought a duck call and went outside and blew it a few times and slinked back to our motel.
A few years later, I was slated to hike to the top of Half Dome with my daughter and son-in-law. We flew from PHL to SFO, where I went to the REI to pick up my order of bear bells and bear spray. A few years later yet, I found myself in Seattle, with my wife, after a Panama Canal cruise that began in Ft. Lauderdale. After going to Pike Street Market, we headed to the REI Mother Ship, with the climbing wall in the vestibule. I paid homage to all of the backpacking gear until my wife hauled me out of there. I’m still a member of REI and shop there online once in a while. My last purchase was for a shelter to be used in a 24 hour running event that I ran in Salisbury, MD last fall.
In defense of ICETEA, since LMS seems to be in absentio:
ReplyDeleteApparently iced tea is used by Lipton for US advertising and ice tea in Britain. Who are you going to trust regarding tea?
We are in the early stages of transformation from the editorially-preferred and logical iced tea to the future of writing ice tea.
If this leaves you kicking and screaming, sit back and relax with a scoop of ice cream, formerly known as iced cream.
Thanks to those of you who updated my comments on the return policies of LLBean and REI - we can't have nice things here...
@JD
ReplyDeleteOh, I'm afraid it's Einstein, hands-down.
So here's my spit-take (and by the way, I'm not a physicist; I'm a mathematician by profession -- so take with a grain). Undoubtedly you know that Bohr and Einstein had a for-the-most-part cordial, and decades long, running debate about the place of quantum mechanics in physics. Well, Bohr won that battle. QM is here to stay. Einstein, for all his brilliance, was a man behind the times on that score. In some sense it was the tragedy of his life.
I think I ought to get hold of Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr. Of all the physicists of his (Pais's) generation, Pais knew him best, and came to love him. There's a story of another illustrious physicist who came up to Pais and said, "You knew Bohr well." -- "Yes." -- "Tell me: what did he actually do?"
Bohr I guess was the dean of quantum mechanics in that he was the first to clearly realize its importance and really promote it, hard. Well, of course he was the first to propose quantum energy levels of electrons, proposing a model of the atom with its electron shells. But his was a bit of a hodge-podge as theories go -- a kind of mix of quantum and classical conceptions. All this is before the "young men" (Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Born, Dirac) provided the firm theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics during the heroic era of the 1920's, where the subject really came into its own. But as I understand it, Bohr provided a kind of institutional home for the new quantum mechanics, in Denmark, where all the important personages would pass through, have meetings, etc. So he was a kind of godfather, and a tireless one at that. But in terms of world-shattering ideas: he was not all that. A lot of his time was spent in quasi-mystical ruminations on the philosophy of the complementarity principle (the principle that quanta behave like waves under some experimental conditions, and like particles in others), which he apparently considered susceptible of much broader application (I forget what... "mercy and justice" might have been one such pairing, but perhaps you get the idea based on that type of thing).
Einstein was all that. His relativity has already been mentioned. Any one of his four annus mirabilis papers of 1905 would have marked him as one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Strangely, one of Einstein's 1905 annus mirabilis papers was a quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect, and yet in later years he railed might and main against quantum physics. He simply could not accept its fundamentally probabilistic nature, as against his steadfast belief in a deterministic universe. (Aside: actually, Schroedinger's equation is perfectly deterministic in a sense, but what it uniquely determines are probabilities!)
Moreover, as opposed to Einstein who was just crystal clear, and a hard thinker, and an honest thinker, we have Bohr the foggy obscurantist. One can go back and read Einstein's 1905 paper and it's wonderfully clear and principled and fresh. Nobody, and I mean nobody but the most dogged historian of science, reads Bohr's physics papers. By all accounts, they are practically unreadable.
Better post before I hit the character limit again.
A year ago last Thursday, I was strolling in the zoo
ReplyDeleteWhen I met a man who thought he knew the lot
He was laying down the law about the habits of baboons
And the number of quills a porcupine has got
So I asked him "What's that creature's name?" and he answered "That's an elk!"
And I'd have gone on thinking that was true
If the animal in question hadn't put that chap to shame,
And remarked?"I ain't no elk? I'm a gnu!
MICHAEL FLANDERS
This is the intro to what is probably my favorite song, long memorized. I remember a time my daughter asked to go to the Bronx zoo - maybe she was 5 or 6 - (where we had a membership and went often) I replied with this song, the above intro of which is recited, not sung. I was half way through before she realized that it was a song, not a story. She was delighted as only a 5 year old can be - and also became a dedicated gnu fan. We always made a specific, extended visit to their corner of the Bronx (Zoo). At a later age, I took to a Flanders & Swan concert in NYC - she loved that too! (I also have a son but he is not musically or artistically inclined. In his case, it was a Mets or a Knicks game. That okay, too.
Nice to reminisce a little in these dog days ...
Life is too short to worry with circles in an xword grid, so I solved this as a themeless and, other than 48D MARIST, it went pretty well. SUEZ CRISIS (59A) was primo. Was NATO (68A) involved it that?
ReplyDeleteLoved the Rodney Dangerfield clip. It's not on this clip, but one of my favorite Dangerfield zingers: The doctor said I have a serious condition requiring major surgery. I said I wanted to get a second opinion. He said, Okay, you're ugly too.
Looks like the ICE TEA vs ICED TEA controversy has put some folks IN A MOOD. I believe it was Wittgenstein who provided the elegantly SIMPLE solution to that vexing dilemma: If there are six squares in the assigned grid slot, it's ICE TEA; if there are seven, then it's ICED TEA. QED.
Must do some research to see if the ANOWL is related to the ANOA.
Sorry, me again. Just one more thing, to balance out the mostly negative sketch I just gave of Bohr. On the positive side -- I think Pais mentions this and certainly the New Yorker writer of old, Jeremy Bernstein (a physicist by profession), mentions this -- Bohr made a vital remark: in the end, the instruments by which we measure quantum effects belong to the classical regime, and the evidence we collect must be accordingly be expressed in classical terms. Apparently this is not just wishy-washy philosophy: some of the more modern formulations of quantum field theory proceed axiomatically from this interpretive basis. Here I'm beginning to get beyond my ken, but in case anyone is curious, I'll point to this where Bohr is quoted directly, and this leads to a so-called "Bohr topos" approach which, speaking personally, may be my best key of entry to things like algebraic quantum field theory [probably just muttering to myself at this point!].
ReplyDelete@TTrimble, Wow, extremely generous of you! Thanks. The book went into some detail about Bohr's foggy thinking and his difficulty writing. At the same time, the author seemed to tie that foggy thinking to some of his breakthroughs. I think I remember from the book that he dictated his thoughts to his wife and she actually did the writing.
ReplyDelete@bigsteve46, 5:01 - "You really oughtta g-know w-who's w-who!" Another fan here.
ReplyDelete@ TTrimble - wonderful, elegant discussion. Years ago my quantum professor based his entire discourse on his infatuation with Planck - so even though the math was formally conceived by Born, Heisenberg and Schrödinger - he always attributed the physics to Planck. It’s always stuck with me. That’s also where we were introduced and toyed with Hilbert’s field equations and his Hilbert space. It was only after that and some reading where I discovered his astounding functional analysis work and his relationship with Einstein. Also intrigued by his prodigious group of students - including as you mention the brilliant von Neumann.
ReplyDeleteEuler was so prolific - as an undergrad we read the Feynman lectures in which he describes his identity as our jewel - just so cool.
@bigsteve46 5:01
ReplyDeleteIs that the song that has the line
"I'm a gnu, how do you do?"
with "gnu" pronounced as 2 syllables: guh-NOO
My mother used to occasionally sing that -- I'm not sure why. She'd burst out with it at odd moments. And I think that's the only line she knew (I mean kah-NEW)!
@ChuckD This was the second mention of Feynman today and I can't resist. Read a couple of his books, but one of the few things I retained was when he ventured into biology and gave a talk to a group of biologists (think it was in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman). In my vague memory, he started out by discussing the anatomy of a cat, which drew titters from the audience. The newcomer didn't know that the anatomy of cat was a given in that crowd. When my son and I get into any kind of discussion and one is belaboring the obvious, the other says, anatomy of a cat, which now means cut to the chase.
ReplyDelete@TTrimble - Thanks, I enjoyed it all a lot.
ReplyDeleteI can't read every comment, but
ReplyDeleteICED TEA has an adjective for TEA so ICE TEA makes no sense
ICE CREAM
SNO-CONE
are compound nouns, therein lies the difference.
If already posted, I am so so sorry
@Anon(9:27am):
DeleteAt one time,iced cream was often used, and sno-cone as spelled is a trademarked name.
I thought Rex would be INAMOOD about this one but since he broke a speed record PLEASEd him to no end. The editor should have saved this one for the festive season where its theme would have had more relevance. Lacking fizz like a flat SODAPOP, I found this one a bit flat and SIMPLE even for a Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with OFC on this one. Perhaps the really good Monday puzzle helped raise the bar, but I felt that this constructor BAILED on a number of occasions. Look at that SW corner and ASK yourself: would Lynn have submitted this? Even the long one is unlovely: REENTERS. That into HIRER YESNO--and *barf* UIE??? No way. We have TYSON and NIP...there oughta be EAR somewhere.
ReplyDeleteAs to GERE, I think he got snubbed for Officer...maybe Gossett upstaged him.
Looks like there'll be no HALFTIME pep talks this year; conference after conference in the NCAA announce season cancellations. It's a brave--strike that--cautious new world. Will the NFL still go? Stay tuned.
BOND is a grade of paper, a little lagniappe for the theme, which is OK. No direct DOD, so I'll borrow one from RICHARD's impressive co-star list: Debra Winger of the above NAMED film. Bogey.
PRO WINO
ReplyDeleteWHATIF it’s SIMPLE that some ICETEA
is SHOWN to make RICHARDGERE pee?
YES a TOILET is just
OVER TIME such a MUST
if he’s INAMOD to say, “PLEASE BEERME.”
--- OSCAR BOND, EMT
I think it's hard to disagree that it's hard to hate an easy puzzle but at least Rex seems to have come around on how bad the fill was toward the end.
ReplyDeleteI could not get the theme until reading the review even with the revealer. MUSLIT? MUSLET? LETTOI? Also seems like a really bizarre theme for July.
54A seemed very opinionated to me. I've never heard of 48D, had HIREE for 63A which made 57D ACEO which seems like it could be a Latin root. 16A was a pain as I had SERTA then SEELY and would have been better off just doing all the downs which were easy except for the misdirection at 9A.
This is my first comment and it's 5 weeks late.That's when the puzzle arrives in Montreal's Gazette. So, nobody will see this. That's ok. I will!!
ReplyDeleteFirst Beatles song that came to mind was Help me, help me,etc
I found the wrap-around theme counterintuitive.
When lines wrap around, they normally start on the following line not on the same line.
Decent Tuesday puzzle with a novel wrap-around a line theme. Maybe a bit too easy, and maybe not as "professional" as yesterday's, but I enjoyed it. I even liked AN OWL, but that's me, I guess.
ReplyDeleteThe ICE TEA/ICEd TEA discussion amuses me. Of course the latter is "more" correct, but people actually say the former. Just listen to them. "ICE TEA" - see, there's another.
Maybe Will Shortz and company had to hunt around a bit for a good Tuesday puzzle, and they came up this one. It has a certain je ne sais quoi, doesn't it? Consider . . .
ReplyDeleteTOILET PAPER. Uh . . ., okay.
TYSON, Mike. He's still around?
BEER ME please, a Bud will do.
WINO. Bit of empathy might be in order.
WRAPPING PAPER is not bad as a theme/revealer, but it doesn't have much sparkle either.
Not so sure I'd want to WRAP myself around these papers - doesn't pass some LITMUS test in the back of my mind.
ReplyDeleteDiana, Lady-in-Waiting for the bathroom paper (not the NYT)
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