From a construction point of view, though, the idea is a little too easy to execute on, since once you go past the teens (in terms of atomic numbers), nearly every chemical symbol contains two letters. It wasn't necessary - ATOMIC NUMBERS could have gone in the middle row - but I appreciated having more to enjoy inside my puzzle.Ĭreative idea, and I appreciate bizarre, mold-breaking grids. It's rare ever to get a themed grid where we get so many grid-spanning bonuses. RAN SMACK DAB INTO, GOING OUT ON A LIMB, BEGGED FOR MORE are all excellent. Solver.įun treat to get so many long pieces of fill. (Neodymium and samarium.) That bodes poorly for even the advanced Thursday solver. This former science wonk, who hit an easy 5 on his AP chem test and received a couple of chemistry scholarships, scored only 6 out of 8. Nd: … wait … hmm … North Darkotium? Nerdvedium? Bah! Sn: tin (you narrowly avoided a pedantic lecture about the root word "stannum" and my so-crazy-they're-genius theories on Stannis Baratheon) Quiz! How many of these chemical symbols can Jeff translate? The clock starts … NOW! Ultimately, however, a clean, interesting solve rightfully takes priority. Using these cheater squares, however, muddles the grid art and eliminates the supersymmetry. For example, if the cheater square in the upper-left corner were removed, the first element would be Beryllium (BE) instead of Lithium (LI). By changing how many black squares there are and where they are deployed, the two-letter slots can correspond to different clue numbers. They make filling easier and provide flexibility to manipulate which elements get featured. The current arrangement uses 12 cheater squares.
They offered that if I could create a cleaner grid featuring more familiar elements, they'd take a look.
#NYT ACCENT TEST HOW TO#
There is the new culture to comprehend, local jokes to decode, an unfamiliar city grid to navigate and survival pressures like how to pay international student fees, juggle a part. When arriving to a new country, mastering the ability to interact with locals becomes paramount. Luckily, despite these flaws, Will Shortz and crew were still interested in the idea. Where is Your Accent from So much is at stake when you communicate.
#NYT ACCENT TEST FULL#
Furthermore, by using such a spartan grid configuration, I was at the mercy of the crossword gods as to which elements got featured. The British Isles - containing the UK and Ireland - are full of different accents, varying down to areas as small as a few blocks. Generally speaking, the more white space you have, the harder it is to find clean fill. 6 Q’s About the News Read the article and answer the news questions below. Unfortunately, since the original grid only had 25 black blocks, the fill was relatively weak. Janu4:30 am Screenshot of a personal dialect map as generated by taking this New York Times quiz. For reference, only six other NYT grids in the Shortz era have contained two-letter words. They break the fundamental crossword convention that all words should be at least three letters long. Unusually, this theme relies on two-letter entries. To enhance the theme, I created a sparse, super-symmetric grid-art layout evocative of the Rutherford-Bohr model of an atom. My original submission used that phrase as the revealer, thereby giving a raison d'être for abbreviating the chemical elements. Since I don't drive now, and rotaries are basically unheard of in the NYC area anyway, it's not likely that will change.The impetus for this puzzle was a bizarre desire to make something interesting out of the terrible crosswordese abbreviation AT NOS. I had seen rotaries before I lived in Massachusetts, and called them traffic circles then, but Massachusetts really drove rotary into my head, so now they're rotaries. What you call a median or a highway or a rotary (showing my biases!) doesn't say anything abour your accent and is probably much more easily influenced by the first time you heard a word for a (sometimes obscure) concept than an accent is. I have merry as different while Mary and marry are the same, which is apparently the rarest of all possible combinations.Īlso, a lot of the quiz is about word choice rather than pronunciation. Well, that one's a little bit hard, but very few people still have the distinctions. I had to take a few minutes to think about how I really pronounce the words. I had this issue with the Mary, marry and merry question. This can be tricky because when you read a word, the pronunciation in your head might be different than what comes out your mouth. It's accurate if you think carefully about the questions and answer it how you actually say things, not how you think you say them.
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