The winners of our crossword puzzle contest are:
—Todd Trimble (3 mistakes)
—Eric Kehr (4 mistakes, but he corrected them all by email almost immediately)
—Serge Elnitsky (5 mistakes)
—Paul Epps (5 mistakes)
(There were supposed to be three winners, but since there’s a tie for third place, we have four.)
For all those who struggled and want to see the answers, I’m temporarily posting the solution here, but might take it down after a little while in case others want to try the puzzle without being tempted to peek.
Each winner is entitled to a copy of one of my books, with a personal inscription acknowledging your brilliance. If you’re a winner, please send me your mailing address by email and book choice by email or by commenting below.
The choices are:
The Armchair Economist — the principles of economics, applied to everyday life. Available both in the original (1993) edition and in the updated (2012) version. The latter is (I hope) a little better and a lot more up-to-date, but available only in paperback. The Wall Street Journal review is
here. You can read the preface to the 2012 version here.
Fair Play. The argument of this book is that we tend to think most seriously about issues like fairness when we’re explaining them to our children — so we should listen to things we say to children, draw lessons from them, and take those lessons into the marketplace and the voting booth. The Washington Post review is here. You can read a sample chapter here.
More Sex is Safer Sex. A compendium of surprises from economic theory, including how you can do your part to fight STDs by having more sex, and why you should contribute to only one charity. The Financial Times review is here. You can read an excerpt here.
The Big Questions — tackling the problems of philosophy, beginning with “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, using ideas from economics, mathematics and physics. Some reviews are here.
Thanks to everyone who participated. I seem to be in the habit of creating a crossword puzzle approximately once every fifteen years. I hope you’ll all be with me for the next one.
Thought I’d make a suggestion: make your links open in a new tab. I find myself not clicking links sometimes only because I have to click back if I want to continue reading. Only a suggestion.
Andy: Done, at least for this post.
Andy: ctrl-click (or cmd-click) opens in a new window, at least for chrome. I use it every day.
Thanks to both of you, my life just got a little bit more efficient!
In presenting this crossword, Landsburg initially wrote, “[I]t’s not impossible that nobody will solve the whole thing.”
Having reviewed some of the answers, I can definitively disagree: It was impossible that nobody would solve the whole thing.
I really enjoy this collection of puns – at least, the ones I get. Alas, that’s maybe about half of them.
How about an explanation of the answers for those still baffled?
Andy: If you have a mouse with a middle click button, middle clicking on a link will also open it in a new tab. You can also middle click on the tabs that are open to close them.
THis comment section has really been hijacked to talk about tabs…
Doug: Are there one or two that you find particularly obscure?
Doug: have you seen this sort of cryptic crossword (which is the type of crossword puzzle popular in British Commonwealth countries) before? Another example is here: http://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/cryptic/26399 If you aren’t familiar with the way these puzzles work, then as an example from the Guardian puzzle, let’s take 23D: Don’t eat seconds in lard (4). In this case you are told that the answer is a single 4-letter word. The answer happens to be FAST. Part of the clue (“don’t eat”) might be usable as a clue for an American-style crossword, but the other part is a cryptic (“lard” is FAT; insert S an abbreviation for “seconds” so that S is “in lard”, i.e., in FAT to make FAST). The trick is typically figuring out how to parse the clue into a (relatively) straightforward part and a cryptic part, which might involve anagrams, homonyms, double meanings and double entendres, obscure allusions, and other types of wordplay.
The puzzle constructed by Steven Landsburg is, IMHO, a fairly challenging puzzle within this genre.