IMPORTANT NOTE: As of February 2020 MGWCC is available only to subscribers at my Patreon page. A subscription costs $3/month.
LAST WEEK’S RESULTS:
Title: “Transcendental Meditation”
Instructions: What is the answer to the question in this puzzle? (Hint: Z = 26)
Answer: PI DAY
Number of correct entries: 563
Last week’s puzzle featured one of the most striking pieces of wordplay I’ve ever seen. The great Peter Gordon asked us in the grid:
THE LETTERS WHOSE / POSITIONS ARE / PERFECT / SQUARES / CAN SPELL WHAT / MARCH OBSERVANCE?
Our instructions hinted us that Z=26, so let’s look at the perfect squares before that in the alphabet:
1² = 1 (A)
2² = 4 (D)
3² = 9 (I)
4² =16 (P)
5² = 25 (Y)
Which, amazingly, anagram to PI DAY, which is March 14th (a.k.a. 3/14). PI DAY being especially relevant to squares because the area of a circle is measured as π r². What a find!
JustinW says:
What a neat observation!
DIS writes:
Nice having CIRCLE as one of the entries.
Jed writes:
From memory: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998
Someone check his work!
wasoxygen claims:
nothing is a coincidence
markta writes:
As a math teacher I would be be shamed by my friends if I didn’t get this one.
And finally, AdamSimonLevine points out:
If you have a pizza pie with radius z and thickness a, then its volume will be pi z z a!
Math you can use!
Thanks to Peter for sharing this fantastic find with us, and remember that you can subscribe to his Fireball Crosswords here and/or his Fireball Newsflash Crosswords here. Both are highly recommended (as is pretty much any puzzle that Peter writes, proof of which you’ve just witnessed firsthand).
PATREON SWITCHOVER UPDATE:
1) We’re up to 864 solvers who’ve made the switch over to Patreon! Join them at the link. Thanks to everyone who’s made the jump so far; If you have any trouble with it, please e-mail me at crosswordcontest@gmail.com or via Patreon messaging.
2) About two-thirds of January and February’s refunds are done for those who have months left on their pre-Patreon subscriptions. Almost there!
3) If you would like to keep solving but truly do not want to have a Patreon account, please e-mail me (crosswordcontest@gmail.com) and we can work out alternate payment. I have a list of about 25 solvers who can’t or don’t want to go the Patreon route, and I have a separate mailing list to get the puzzle to them each week. I’m trying to keep this list very small for logistical reasons, though, so please do sign up at Patreon unless you really have strong feelings against it.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is 14 letters long.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.