The cryptography tag has a clear tag wiki excerpt:
A puzzle concerning techniques for secure communication in the presence of (hostile) third parties. Do NOT use this for simple "crack the code" problems; use [cipher] instead.
(I'm the one who added that last sentence, but the edit history show...
Can you tile a $25 \times 25$ square (no overlaps, no gaps) with a mixture of $2 \times 2$ squares and $3 \times 3$ squares?
This puzzle is by David A. Klarner.
speaking of favourite words, i've always been a fan of "hmm"
it's very versatile, can mean totally different things depending on intonation, and exists in every language i know in pretty much the same form even though that form breaks the rules of how words can be formed in all of them
like look me in the eye and tell me "hmm?", "hmm!" and "hmm..." are not three different words
@Jafe They are not different words. They are the same word, that adopts different meanings based on the inflection. Take the word "what" as an example. It can replace the first two examples that you've brought here, with "What?" as a question and "What!" as an exclamation having two different meanings. (In theory, "Wha(t)...." could also replace the third usage of "hmm" mentioned above.)
@oAlt “Untenanted” would be a left field interpretation of a let down. I reckon we’re looking at ???LESS with the unknown three being a homophone of a gallery.
@msh210 … or perhaps when a feather on a shuttlecock causes a point to be replayed? TIL rule 14.2.2 of badminton: “[It shall be a ‘let’, if] during play, the shuttle disintegrates and the base completely separates from the rest of the shuttle;“
"It's a let down" could be a down-hairdo, maybe. Some seven-letter ones are BLOWOUT and RATTAIL, and arguably CHIGNON and RINGLET. "Without" matches the WOUT or WO part of BLOWOUT, but I don't see any other wordplay for any of them.
Maybe "a let down" could be a down in American football which is let, somehow? (I don't know enough about American football to know if there is such a thing, but a Web search seems to imply that there is not.)
i doubt it requires very deep research since ASR mentioned he expected it to be solved after just over 9 hours... then again, i have absolutely nothin'
@msh210 the only thing I can think of that sort of fits would be the fifth down game, where an officiating mistake gave colorado an extra down that they shouldn't have had
and then even looking past the fact that asr would be aware of that bit of american sports trivia and the fact that it doesn't really fit, I can't think of any way that would resolve to a 7-letter solution
If "without" means just "outside of" and not "immediately outside of", then "I hear without art gallery" can mean any outdoor sculpture of an ear, most of which are indeed letdowns to this philistine.
Again, none of these ideas seems likely at all.
hm, SINKING = it's a let down (arguably), and sounds like "sin King" = without (in Spanish) an art gallery. The problems with this solution, too, are manifold.
Maybe the definition is "it's 'A', let down", as in, we're somehow "letting down" A to make it something else? #graspingatstraws
Or, similarly, "it's a let, down" -- a "let" could be a lease, or a redo in tennis/badminton, or a hindrance/obstruction, and "down" refers to its state somehow...?
This Colombian Sudoku is by Xavier Castillo. Usual Sudoku rules apply. Additionally, digits on each of the two diagonal must all be different.
The dots outside the board above indicate how many cells in the corresponding column or row of that board contain precisely the same digit as is to be fou...
Imagine a 2D plane, where each point represents a position. Your mission is to trace a path from the origin (0,0) to an end point (x,y) following a set of specific rules. Each step in the path can be one of four types:
Up: Move one unit upwards.
Down: Move one unit downwards.
Left: Move one unit ...
… on an unrelated note, I once had a falling out with a friend who wanted to borrow a Pixar DVD, swallow some beer, go for a jog with me and then have me buy pudding for them. You can probably guess what I said.