This weekend was the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt. Ordinarily, you'd have to be in Seattle/Redmond to participate, but this year they were kind enough to run a simulcast instance of the game in the Bay Area through the internet.
It was great. The hunt was train-themed. I'd never hunted with any of the people on my team before, but they were all pretty sharp. We started out ranked in the top three, but lost some steam over the course of the day. By 3am, it was just me, Ankur, and Nima puzzling, and we were all pretty tired. By Sunday at 5pm, we were in 9th place out of 29 teams. I quite liked the round 2 meta - perhaps I should get a copy of Ricochet Robots. I also particularly appreciated the "Whistle Stop" puzzles, which were designed for teams to complete together as quickly as they could which usually involved plays on words. The first couple were quite easy and made for a good morale boost. I can't wait for the MIT Mystery Hunt.
This link is food for thought. The thoughts described there are quite close to my own. I wound up reading the paper that article references at the end.
In other news, today I learned that there is a protein involved in the mammalian signalling pathway called Sonic hedgehog homolog. Yes, it was named after this one.
Oh, and apparently we humans have also made glow-in-the-dark cats. Pretty cool technique - they use an analogue of HIV for cats called FIV to deliver genetic material to eggs before fertilization.
Comments:
Dad | 2011-09-13T22:39:57.979815
Glad you had a fun time with the Puzzle Hunt. Perhaps you'd have done better if you had been more into trains as a boy. :)Good article on being a libertarian. I share many of the same views.
I also saw the article about the glow-in-the-dark cats. I wouldn't have to worry about tripping over a cat in the dark, but I'm not sure I'd like a 15 pound "nightlight" sleeping on my bed with me; it would probably keep me awake.
Drew Jaworski | 2011-09-15T19:44:15.538433
The cats don't actually "glow in the dark", unfortunately; they fluoresce (produce a photon when struck with another), but do not glow (emit photons autonomously). You'd have to have a UV light installed everywhere in your house.