Tag Archives: Puzzles

Puzzling Bodies

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My eye was recently caught by the headline, “Retired Professor Builds Wooden Anatomy Puzzles.” The article in question is a human-interest piece detailing the woodworking career of former biology professor Roman Miller. AP Journalist Jillian Lynch writes, “Of interest to both oddity-seekers and students, Miller’s anatomy puzzles are a unique offering that blends his love of woodworking and understanding [of] the functions of organs in the human body.”

Interestingly, anatomy puzzles appear to make up only a small percentage of Miller’s recent artistic output. His website features several animal puzzles, a handful of numerically or alphabetically themed puzzles, two abstract shape puzzles, and—among the other miscellaneous wares—a single puzzle showing off the insides of a human head and torso. Yet the article chose to shine the spotlight on the anatomy puzzles, noting that Miller has made twenty such works over the course of his time operating a scroll saw. Lynch clearly knows that there is an allure to what lies inside of us, likely to reel in readers. Human anatomy is, after all, puzzling in real life, much more so than the alphabet or shapes.

An EMT’s worst enemy.

Several years ago, I trained to be an EMT. A regular class exercise was “trauma assessment,” during which a teaching assistant would invent a gruesomely injured patient. Students would evaluate this fictional character and then determine how best to treat them. One T.A. favored mythical creatures gone rogue—unicorn-horn stabbings and vampiric exsanguination. The assessment that stuck most clearly in my head revolved around an imaginary man’s evisceration-by-werewolf. I clearly remember concluding that a cool, damp cloth should be placed over the patient’s abdomen. The T.A. agreed, reminding us all never to try placing a patient’s intestines back inside their body. “Internal organs are a complex puzzle,” he said. “You do not have the training to put that puzzle back together correctly.”

Miller’s motivation for making those twenty puzzles was a desire to help young children learn the basics of anatomy, preparing them for further education in biology. Maybe those children would go on to become surgeons—those who do have the training to put the puzzle of the organs back together in the wake of a werewolf attack. While Miller is quoted in the article as saying, “Nobody makes anatomy puzzles,” the use of puzzles to teach anatomy is actually a very old concept, dating at least back to the 18th century. Dissectible wax models known as “anatomical venuses” provided medical students with an alternative to illustrations or cadavers when learning the body’s workings.

An ivory obstetrical model.

Although these models were strangely idealized in their femininity as compared to a bare-bones wooden rendering like Miller’s, they were undeniably puzzles—one essay opines, “18th century obstetrical models represent women simultaneously as ideals of graceful femininity and as puzzle boxes of removable parts.” Here in the 21st century, three-dimensional models representing humans as puzzle boxes of removable parts are readily available online, luckily with fewer misogynist undertones; for a lower price, you can download a digital human anatomy puzzle with timed challenges. Between models, computer games, and jigsaw puzzles, anatomical knowledge today is much more accessible than it would have been in the 18th century.

Still, there is perhaps no better manifestation of the theory that the map is not the territory. If you know how to put an alphabet puzzle in order, then we can likely say that you know the alphabet. A talent for piecing together a representational puzzle of a human’s internal organs, however, does not indicate that you’re equipped to put a real human’s intestines back where they belong. Unless you’re a surgeon—AKA a next-level puzzler—if you’re ever in the company of someone who has been eviscerated by a werewolf, I don’t recommend trying to transfer your skills to a flesh-and-blood context. Miller presents his jigsaw puzzles as a simple starting point for biological education. Ahead of that starting point lies a long and winding path, infinitely more complex than any map of the path could ever be.

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Puzzles in Pop Culture: Ten-Letter Word for “Fundamental”

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Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes have myriad adaptations, some with a cast of mice, some medical dramas, some featuring aliens and government conspiracies. Still others hew closer to the original nineteenth-century stories, whether in the form of a period piece, like the films starring Robert Downey Jr., or a modernization, like BBC’s Sherlock. My favorite of this genre is the undersung CBS police procedural/drama Elementary, which ran from 2012 to 2019. Starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu as Joan Watson, Elementary is set in modern-day New York, with Sherlock acting as a pro-bono consultant to the NYPD (he describes himself as a specialist in “deductive reasoning”). While former surgeon Joan Watson eventually becomes Sherlock’s partner in crime-solving, initially, her role is to be his sober companion.

Elementary stays faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle’s depiction of his protagonist as a drug user, opening with Sherlock escaping early from rehab, only to find Joan waiting for him, as she was hired by his father to help him stay sober. His struggles with addiction, time in 12-step meetings, and relationships with other addicts remain mainstays of the series throughout all seven seasons. The work that Sherlock performs, using his deductive reasoning skills for the police, is considered by both him and Joan to be an integral part of his recovery process. Crime-solving keeps his mind busy, giving him constant puzzles to solve.

At its heart, this is a show about solving puzzles. Sherlock’s job is putting together murder motives and methods; his hobbies are picking locks and stockpiling trivia. He gazes at the world as though it is one big jigsaw puzzle and everything needs to be placed just so to make sense. All the pieces are there; you just need to know how to look at them correctly. One episode even hinges on a love of crosswords.

Season one, episode eight, “The Long Fuse,” depicts a bomb going off in the vent of a web design firm’s office. When Sherlock and Joan are called to consult, they discover that the bomb was built four years prior to detonation. The episode is set in 2012, but the logo on the bomb’s battery is from October 2008, as are the newspaper pieces that were stuffed inside. Pieced together, the newspaper shows a Barack Obama who was still only a senator. The man who detonated the bomb did so by mistake: intending to order a sandwich, he called the detonating pager instead of the deli.

Meanwhile, the specter of Sherlock’s addiction reappears. He goes to investigate the company that rented the bombed office four years prior, rifling through the threatening letters they’ve received from ecoterrorists. The company’s head, Heather Vanowen—played by House’s Lisa Edelstein—walks in on Sherlock’s research and says that she recognizes him as a fellow addict. The moment is tense, until she clarifies, “Crosswords.” She used to have her habit under control, but ever since The New York Times put their archives online, she can’t get enough.

This confession is her undoing. Sherlock didn’t just discover the October 2008 date on the newspaper; he also found the imprints of someone writing on a page above—the word NOVOCAINE, which happened to be the answer to the clue “Pain’s enemy” in that day’s crossword. NOVOCAINE serves as a sufficient sample of the perpetrator’s handwriting; all it takes is asking Heather to fill out a few forms, and presto! Her handwriting can be matched to the crossword, clearly identifying her as the bomb’s builder.

The episode comes to an end with Sherlock’s new 12-step sponsor, Alfredo (Ato Essandoh) pulling up to Sherlock and Joan’s brownstone with a shiny new car. A former carjacker and current security consultant, he’s been tasked with trying to break into the car’s security system. Knowing Sherlock’s love of puzzles, he figured he would first let Sherlock take a crack at it.

Earlier in the episode, Alfredo explained the key to being Sherlock’s sponsor: patience. He needs someone to be patient and methodical, the way anyone solving a puzzle must be. As I said, puzzles are the heart of the show, not just in the sense that they’re at its core, but that they permeate the emotional aspects as well. In the world of Elementary, one must be patient and methodical to solve a murder, to solve a crossword, to break into a car’s security system, and to grow and heal.

To think, a prison sentence could have been avoided had Heather simply stuck to solving digital crosswords like Daily POP’s. No ink-stained muss, no legal fuss, no trace of handwriting or physical evidence left lying around in an office vent, waiting to explode.

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Puzzly Podcasts: 99% Invisible and Revisiting the “Average Solver”

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A geodesic dome.

Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome and the World Game, once said, “Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.” This quotation inspired the title of 99% Invisible, a podcast about aspects of the designed and built world that typically go overlooked. Hosted by journalist Roman Mars, 99% Invisible began in 2010 as a joint effort between the San Francisco-based American Institute of Architects and SF public radio station KALW. Since April 2021, the podcast has been owned by broadcasting giant Sirius XM, but has remained essentially the same. On a weekly basis, Mars continues to provide listeners with calmly narrated explorations of topics like efforts to track the pandemic, the history of grocery store “ethnic food” aisles, and the skull logo representing Marvel’s Punisher character, including its memetic use among reactionaries.

It might sound counterintuitive, or in Mars’ words, like a “perversity,” to break down elements of design in a purely sound-based format. Without accompanying visuals, how are we meant to truly appreciate a discussion of graphic design in film and television, or the history of Hawaiian shirts? Mars considers the absence of images a boon, saying, “I thought the concept of doing a design radio show where you strip away the visual aesthetics actually made sense, it got to the parts of design I really loved, which was the problem solving.”

This element of problem solving at the core of every episode will likely appeal to any die-hard puzzler. If you’re interested in episodes more explicitly aligned with your love of puzzles and games, I would recommend starting with episode 189, “The Landlord’s Game,” about Monopoly, or episode 335, “Gathering the Magic,” about—you may have guessed—Magic the Gathering, or even episode 349, “Froebel’s Gifts,” which more broadly considers the history of play as a tool of intellectual development.

In Community, the attempt to represent an average human being led to this terrifying mascot.

Then there’s episode 226, “On Average.” My predecessor on the blog previously discussed the issues with the concept of the “average” crossword solver, questioning popular ideas that the average solver might not be familiar with spoon theory or arepas, and what these assumptions imply about the average solver’s identity. “On Average” takes Glenn’s questioning a step further, walking listeners through a nineteenth-century astronomer’s innovation of reducing human populations to statistical averages. The episode focuses most closely on the practice of flattening people out to bodily averages, but also discusses average calculation for social phenomena like marriages and murders, and the rise of the idea that the “average” is “morally the way to think about people.”

99% Invisible‘s host and guests take the stance of critiquing the average as ideal. One example the episode traces is the WWII design of Air Force planes for the average pilot. Most WWII pilots were not anywhere near average; in fact, zero of the 4,063 pilots measured in one study came anywhere close to perfectly fitting the average, and even when standards were relaxed, only a meager handful had average measurements. Todd Rose, author of The End of Average, sums the issue up thusly: “If you are designing something for an average pilot, it’s literally designed to fit nobody.”

The same might be said of puzzles. If we construct a puzzle for the average solver, are we really constructing a puzzle for anyone at all? Or has all the life been sucked out of the puzzle, all the potential for anyone to connect with its quirks? To settle into the cockpit and soar? If ninety-nine percent of who we are is invisible and untouchable, then ninety-nine percent of who we are cannot be reduced to statistics, cannot be turned into averages. Whether physically or mentally, people are more than patterns, more than perfectly proportioned crash test dummies, and every aspect of the world should be designed with this in mind, from planes to puzzles.

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Puzzly Podcasts: Song Exploder as Truth Window

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There’s no place like home . . . especially if your home has a truth window installed.

“A truth window,” Wikipedia tells us, “is an opening in a wall surface, created to reveal the layers or components within the wall.” The inner workings of a house become elevated to the status of a treasured possession, displayed in a structure reminiscent of a small china cabinet or an oil portrait’s frame. Often, though not always, the material seen through the window’s glass pane is straw, simultaneously intricate in its multiplicity (a straw bale is made up of so many individual strands) and deceptively simple, rustic. Reminiscent of how The Wizard of Oz‘s scarecrow thought that his straw construction necessarily meant the absence of a brain, only to find out at the story’s end that he had been a brilliant, complex thinker all along.

A 2011 blog post by Geoff Manaugh compares truth windows to cannulas installed in the sides of cows to make their digestive systems accessible, and to the purely hypothetical idea of installing an upside-down periscope into the sidewalk of a dense urban area, showing off the infrastructure below (“subways, cellars, plague pits, crypts, sewers”). A truth window is a bloodless dissection, an invitation to contemplate—even treasure—the buried mechanics that we normally take for granted.

Hrishikesh Hirway began the music podcast Song Exploder in 2014 with a similar invitation in mind. His recent TED Talk, “What you discover when you really listen,” begins with Hirway drawing a comparison between a song and a house. The musical artist puts all this work, all these materials (all these bales of straw!) into a song, and while the listener is able to appreciate the beauty of the finished product as they walk past it on the sidewalk, they are not usually able to appreciate the work or the materials, the insides, the layers. They need a truth window. They need a skilled interviewer to join the musical artist in breaking down the song into its component parts.

An example of a truth window showing off straw.

Hirway explains, “Inside a song, there are all these parts that get imagined, and written, and recorded, that are so full of thought and beauty, but only the people who made the song ever get to hear those pieces on their own. All those pieces get smushed together in the final version that comes out.” Enter Song Exploder, in which Hirway sits down with a different musical artist each episode to trace the evolution of one of their songs. Raw clips of individual elements from the song—a beat here, a backing vocal track there—are interspersed throughout explanations from the artists of how the song grew, layers locking together into fantastical, never-before-seen structures like in a game of Tetris.

Continuing the house metaphor, Hirway says, “I thought this way, an artist could bring a listener in, and give them a guided tour of this house they made. They could point to the foundation and say, ‘This is how the song got started,’ and then as more and more layers get built on top, eventually the full song gets revealed.” Over the course of eight years, Song Exploder has featured a wide range of musical artists, including Willow Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Nine Inch Nails, The Microphones, and The Roots. The staggering array of guests spans genres, fame levels, and stylistic approaches to music’s creation. Similarly, there are a variety of approaches to thinking about music’s creation; each artist tackles the challenge of co-constructing their truth window with Hirway differently.

Neko Case, in the episode on her song “Last Lion of Albion,” is focused on the technical details, the use of vocoder and reverb and the inability to harmonize successfully with herself. She tells guest host Thao Nguyen (of Thao With the Get Down Stay Down), “I like reverb because it’s showing what your human voice is vibrating, and how that reacts to that surroundings. Like how far am I from that wall? Or is this room made of concrete? Is there a lot of glass in here? Is there wood? . . . It kind of reminds you that the room is an instrument in a way.” Christine and the Queens takes a slightly different tack when dissecting “Doesn’t Matter,” speaking in heaps of figurative language. She compares the song as a whole to a Greek tragedy complete with choral input, compares distortion to “doing lace details,” and says that the mistakes she heard on the track and chose to keep, “To me, sounds like a spine . . . It feels like if you remove that, everything crumbles.”

Regardless of whether an artist is speaking about the nitty-gritty technical behind-the-scenes of a song or the more emotive, poetic work that went into its construction, a common thread of attention to structure is sewn throughout these podcast episodes. The structure of a house, the structure of a room, the structure of a skeleton. Without fail, in each episode, Song Exploder opens up a little door in a song’s wall and waves listeners through, taking us on a tour of the subways, cellars, plague pits, crypts, and sewers contained within, showing us first the haystacks and then the needles strewn throughout, sharp and shining, prizes you might never have thought to look for otherwise.

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Puzzles, Poems, Problem-Solving, & Productivity

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How is a poem like a puzzle? That question’s easier to answer than the Mad Hatter’s classic “How is a raven like a writing desk?” From crosswords to cryptograms, many beloved puzzles do, if nothing else, resemble poems in their mutual wordiness. However, some forms of poetry are more puzzly than others—compare a sprawling collection of free and blank verse like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to the concise machinery of a syllabically limited haiku, the boundaries of which are as strict as the edges of a crossword puzzle.

Like Nancy, though, you can always break the boundaries of form to create new meaning.

When you start to write a haiku, your possibilities are wide-open; with each word you set down, though, the potential choices for what might follow narrow. In effect, your “word bank” shrinks, and if three syllables already occupy the first line, then any words longer than two syllables are ineligible for that line’s continuation. The poet’s puzzling brain must kick into action, considering words for their dimensions and how they might lock into place with the words directly alongside them.

Haikus aren’t the only poetic forms that require this type of geometric thinking. Similarly brainteasery in their construction are sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas. Concrete poems take the shape of objects relevant to their contents, and erasure poetry—much like a word seek—highlights hidden messages by winnowing the chaos of a pre-existing text.

An erasure poem by Jen Bervin, made from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

What about a more sprawling, less tightly organized work like “The Waste Land,” then? Beyond the wordiness it has in common with cryptograms et al, is it left out of our riddle’s answer? Roddy Howland Jackson, in the recent essay, “Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword,” appears to argue that no, such works are very much like puzzles.

Jackson takes us back to the 1920s, when “The Waste Land” first appeared in print, and modernist poetry and puzzles alike were derided by critics. He locates “a question asked about labour and idleness in this period: are crosswords and difficult poems worth the efforts required to elicit literary pleasure and linguistic revitalisation? Or merely a waste of time?”

As a poet and puzzler, this question resonates with me a century later. Swimming in the high-pressure waters of hustle culture makes us highly sensitive to the terror of “wasting time,” as in doing anything that doesn’t build our personal brands. Writing and reading poetry that isn’t tidily instagrammable? Solving puzzles that aren’t social media fads? By hustle culture’s standards, both of these things are wastes of time.

So how is a poem like a puzzle? Both present us with opportunities to take back our time, to carve out pockets of our days where we exert mental energy purely for the joy of thinking. Instead of being just a bullet point on your resume, your problem-solving skills can be part of how you resist the pressure to always have your nose to the grindstone.

Next week, we’ll encourage you to find joy in poetry by more closely examining one particular puzzly form. In the meantime . . .

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A Spooky Video Game Urban Legend: Solved!

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It’s strange that puzzles and games don’t seem to have urban legends attached to them, even though they’ve been with us for so long.

I mean, sure, there’s palindromes believed to have magical powers… and cursed puzzle boxes like in the Hellraiser films… but I can’t think of any pervasive urban legends around modern puzzles and games.

It strikes me as odd because there are plenty about video games, which are a relatively new art form, generally speaking. There are stories about haunted Legend of Zelda cartridges and sinister destructive secret characters in Minecraft.

There’s the supposed Madden Curse (where athletes who appear on the cover of Madden games end up suffering poor seasons or getting injured), and even the conspiracy stories about an arcade game called Polybius that government agents used to download game data from in the 1980s.

Recently, an urban video game legend was put to rest.

It starts, as many urban legends, bits of folklore, and spooky stories do, with a hazy recollection. There’s a forum on Reddit cleverly titled “Tip of my joystick,” where people can post details about a game whose name they don’t remember, and the other posters help them remember it.

The post was about one of those complete-a-task/farming-style games, like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or Farmville.

Except it had an appropriately sinister twist, like something out of a Hitchcock movie or an episode of a weekly crime drama like Criminal Minds or Bones.

At one point, the player gets into an argument with their wife and kills her. The game continues as a farm simulator, except you periodically have to hide the body from police.

This was clearly meant to be a darkly tongue-in-cheek game mechanic, almost Weekend at Bernie’s-esque. Obviously, this game wouldn’t be for everyone. You might even think people were purposely creating a dark urban legend of their own by making this post in the first place.

But the fellow posters of r/tipofmyjoystick tried their darnest to figure out the identity of this game. Some asked questions for further details, while others suggested possible games, but were quickly proved wrong.

The game remained unidentified for several years, coming to be known as “that evil farming game,” even getting its own dedicated reddit forum.

The original poster, at one point, finally concluded at one point that they must have dreamt the game, or misremembered something while half-asleep.

In the years before the Internet became the prolific searching and information tool it is now, I had plenty of experiences describing random TV episodes or b-movies that people presumed I had made up or dreamt up while home sick on the couch from school. (One particular episode of MacGyver involving a hidden temple with traps and a giant blue gemstone, for instance, was a joke in my group of friends for years until I could finally point to the episode on Netflix or the episode page on IMDb to prove its existence.)

So what was this “evil farming game” the original poster remembered? Was it real? Or a sleepy invention?

Well, it turns out it was neither.

Diligent posters and game fans went looking through the video library of a YouTuber called Vinesauce after the original poster mentioned watching it often. And they found a video where Vinesauce jokingly suggested a farming style game with the grim addition to the gameplay.

The original poster misremembered this as a real game, and started the ball rolling on an Internet video game urban legend that lasted half a decade.

It turns out, our brains are good at this sort of thing — convincing ourselves that what we half-remember is real — and this urban legend evolved as something similar to the Mandela Effect, a mass misremembering of something.

Two prominent examples of the Mandela Effect from recent history are the Berenstain Bears (which many people swear should be the BerenSTEIN bears) and the movie Shazaam staring Sinbad, which never existed. (They’re misremembering the Shaquille O’Neal genie movie Kazaam from 1996.)

So, this spooky mystery was solved, but perhaps a more interesting mystery — how the original poster’s brain created this fake game in his memory — stands in its place.

I found this story both fascinating and charming — if a little morbid — and I thought it would be the perfect puzzly conclusion to the Halloween season.

Have you ever misremembered something like this, fellow puzzlers, or experienced something similar to the Mandela Effect? Or are there any urban legends about puzzles and games that we should know about? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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