What kind of people can answer the following riddle?
Call a=1, b=2, and so on. What is the longest common English word that can be made from only prime letters?
Yes.
Answering a puzzle cynically has endless important benefits.
The sooner a weak puzzle is solved, the sooner it will be forgotten.
A weak puzzle signals that its poser does not know the solution
and needs to be rescued as quickly as possible.
There is no guarantee that someone else will e...
No.
Solving a puzzle unenthusiastically
can cause more harm than good.
A casual solution generally has lower quality than would result
from allowing the puzzle to wait for an interested solver
who would put more time into writing a fuller answer
that is more likely to address nuances of the p...
(stolen moment, wish I had time to really chat about this, and other-topics, right now)
@boboquack , yes oh yes, I just wanted people to think about the subject and got tired of whining in comments here and there.
It was a coin puzzle by Rubio that started me going. I'm still amazed that answerers and voters didn't recognize what a fine history puzzle it is while they were quite impressed with their own and each others' answers.
This is in the spirit of the What is a Word™/Phrase™ series started by JLee with a special brand of Phrase™ and Word™ puzzles.
If a word conforms to a special rule, I call it a Bind Word™.
Use the examples below to find the rule.
$$\smash{\lower{28px}\bbox[yellow]{\phantom{\rlap{rubio.2017...
Seriously easy riddle I was asked last night: If you have a horse with two black legs and two white legs, and it goes into a river, what does it look like when it comes out?
Now that my first puzzle's done and gone it wont be so easy to solve the rest. I've begun to write with reestablished rules. If I've not got your attention I'll start trying harder. So weigh the options and look closely, It shouldn't be hard for you to tell me what number I'm thinking of...
You have twelve coins. You know that one is fake. The only thing that distinguishes the fake coin from the real coins is that its weight is imperceptibly different. You have a perfectly balanced scale. The scale only tells you which side weighs more than the other side.
What is the smallest numb...
Crazy robots: we want you to dance for Miss Evan.
“How I want a drink,” thought Akira, getting himself primed.
You’re high, mom- they don’t have TV on the moon.
Oh mercy, my darling cokehead’s latest x-ray image is ideal!
Oscar dashed off a message: “Eight? Noooo. Three. Angst. Oaths.”
Pick a te...
Huh, I notice that none of the answers there mentions the solution in verse by "Blanche Descartes", which yields the easiest-to-remember algorithm I know of. (It turns it into a story about little Frankie, whose mother is all flustered because she knows she has a fake coin but doesn't know which one it is. F. writes on each coin one letter of "F AM NOT LICKED" and then says: "MA DO / LIKE ME TO / FIND FAKE / COIN".
)
(I attempted to put more spaces between weighings, but of course that didn't work)
Ah, actually I misremembered slightly: not "little Frankie" but "Professor Felix Fiddlesticks". I think I thought it must be a child to fit with the ungrammatical stuff.
I did a project on Logic Gates, I prepared NOR,AND,NOT,OR, NAND Gates, but struggled with XOR. So, I thought, I would do that later, and later became "never".
I have recently observed edits being made in a puzzle, which make no contribution to the puzzle as a whole but are made only to style it. I mentioned a recent example in The Sphinx Lair, The official Chatroom of PSE.
Low rep users can make earn +2 rep for each edit that they suggest and which is...
I think newish users making multiple edits in a short period of time are probably just trying to refine their post, not necessarily looking to game the system re: visibility on the active list. that it earns them rep for doing it makes it a little ticklish; if it's becoming excessive in number of edits, justified or not, maybe a note asking them to batch it all as one is in order, but it's not like we have scores of users trying to march up the rep charts +2 at a time.
In that specific case it looks like the edits are relevant, though minor; they're something a good pass or two of review before posting should have caught, but it's not like they're just tweaking spacing or formatting/fonts as your Meta post suggested, so the poster could argue for their "necessity" to get the puzzle the way they intended it to be worded. But if these are all accepted without comment by reviewers, maybe someone needs to say something to avoid mass revision logs and "activity".
And @Sconibulus I'm pretty sure you cannot edit your own posts without them going through review until you hit 2k rep. I seem to remember being annoyed at being unable to edit my own posts early on without someone's blessing.
You wake up, still dizzy from the blow to your head. You have no idea what they want from you, where you are and how you got here, but you know one thing: you want to get out! Looking around you see four walls, one with a poem and three with dots written on them (click on the images to see a larg...
Ok then I sit corrected. Cuz, like, I'm too lazy to stand. I could swear I remembered being annoyed at having to "suggest" edits for things that should have been automatic.
I think by default rendered output is shown, so you have to click markdown to see the little details. It doesn't help that the text is highlighted so hiding doesn't work in the audit preview.
1:
If you're positive,
I'm so super attractive-
My flow is current.
2:
I am high spy,
Or a big help on the road.
I can be for Sky.
3:
Typical package,
You can do me in a ring,
But I'm just a square
4:
Rock, or metallic?
Holder of keys, or y...
Some people may be sniffy about INDEED but it's generally regarded as OK even without question marks and the like. I would say the same about things like INSIDE or INDOORS, though they're probably harder to use. I'm not so sure about e.g. ONTO in a down clue, but it's probably OK.
I'm pretty sure I remember @MariaDeleva saying she was in Bulgaria, and I seem to remember @Mithrandir saying he was in India or some such (clearly that's wrong as he just said middle east)
for &lit, I believe the clue in its entirety, parsed as wordplay, gives the solution; and simultaneously, the clue in its entirety is the definition for that solution.
"A double-beat at the door" - surface meaning suggests knock, knock, but this is a reference to the two hearts that Dr Who has. A little too obscure, though.
Yo dawg, I heard you like cryptic clues ...
Solve these cryptic clues to reveal (and solve) the final clue.
Well-built steam ship heads East with subtlety (7)
Cost catches new net tournament (7)
Begins amidst messy trash twist (6, 4)
"[Green light objectives incomplete, chief (2, 5)]?"
(5)
...