Entries in the Category "puzzles"
When Nerdiness Knows No Bounds
Jeremy and I once went to a casino, and I was playing slot machines, mostly unsuccessfully (what a money suck, for real). The ones where you just press a button are so pointless; the computer poker games involve some skill, but I mostly didn't have any skill, and so that money disappeared very quickly as well.
An hour or so into that trip, I had the epiphany about what would make me enjoy casinos. Logic puzzles, for money. In fact, if such a casino existed, I know of two things for sure: 1. I would never leave that place 2. because it would be my new career. Puzzles, mostly of the online variety, are responsible for the majority of my time management issues. Just get me engrossed in some kind of puzzle, and I will forget that I have a Shakespeare paper due, or the dog needs to get walked, or I have laundry in the dryer. Or I'll forget that it's time to sleep. Or that outside is a place where people go sometimes.
Word searches are too easy, as well as too arbitrary--you see it or you don't see it. Crossword puzzles vary in difficulty, of course, but again, there's a lot of arbitrariness involved (in whether or not you know that fact or not). Especially annoying is the fact that a lot of the clues in your average crossword puzzle make cultural references I'm about fifty years too young to know about.
My favorite puzzles are those which don't require any outside knowledge, but do require reasoning skills. I started with Fill-Ins--they can have numbers or letters, and basically you start with one keystone entry, and all the other words (or numbers) need to be slotted in around it.
Of course, I spent a good two years of my life (give or take) doing Sudoku, which is undeniably amazing. In my heyday, I could do a hard puzzle in maybe ten minutes. Mediums (and needless to say, easies) could be done as quickly as I could get all the numbers filled in. (There's a great puzzle online here--I used to do this puzzle first thing every morning when I still worked in an office.)
The newest puzzle trend is KenKen, which I've finally figured out. It's like Sudoku but with basic math. I'm still kind of slow at this, but I can finish the medium puzzle pretty much every day.
I love logic puzzles, also, even though the stories that go along with them can be ridiculous. (Five people enter a gardening contest! Determine which person grew which plant using which magic ingredient! Suzie didn't use plant food. The person who used milk was not Brad. The person who used olive oil was not female.) Jeremy makes fun of these puzzles, but he was the one who hooked me on them a few years ago when he bought me a book of them because the grocery store was out of Sudoku. I found the online cache of them myself. Have I done all the puzzles on that page? I won't answer that question, but I will say this: I was unemployed last summer. For the whole summer.
How about good, old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles? There's a daily puzzle here, where the pictures are sometimes strange, but where you can change the shapes and the number of the pieces. Mostly I do Pogo's Jigsaw Treasure Hunter. That site has figured out the draw: compound wins. Every puzzle contributes to raising you up level by level. I'm at like, level thirty-five and I will be playing this thing until I hit the ceiling.
I even like the old-fashioned kinds of puzzles, where you fit the little pieces together with your hands! On the occasions when my kitchen table is not covered in books and mail and whatever Jeremy has emptied out of his pockets that day, it's usually got a puzzle on it.
I think this is why I'm getting along with my engineers so well. They are also puzzlers, though of very specific kinds. I understand how they want to learn, by piecing together the details until they can see the whole picture. It makes sense to me.
I caught a kid doing Sudoku in my class the other day, incidentally, at the same site I linked to above. I told him to close it down or go for the five-star level, because he was doing two-star and that was just lame.