"Significant Digits" Oct. 13, 2023

[The XWord Rabbit]

What’s the best way to describe this week’s “Significant Digits” puzzle?
Please allow your Rabbit to paraphrase the opening of a Tina Turner tune…

“You know, every now and then you might like to see a puzzle from Patrick Berry
Somethin’ from him, nice and easy
There’s just one thing, you see…
He never, ever does nothin’ nice and easy.
He always does it nice and rough.
He’s gonna take the beginning of this puzzle and do it easy
But then he’s gonna do the finish rough
That’s the way he does Proud Metas…”

Well, it certainly turned out that way. The phrase PERFECT SQUARES in the center across entries had everyone scrambling
to make sense of 1,4,9,16,25,36,49, 64 … and beyond. The trick was taking the digits in those numbers singly and finding them in that/those position(s) in the corresponding entries.

Nominees? Oh yes, unsurprisingly, we got a couple of dandies.

First, we have moron (and no, the Rabbit does not intend to poke any fun at that moniker).
This relatively new Muggle to the Forum quickly proved his/her worth with a choice derailment (Post #218), assigning everything from talc on the hardness scale (1) to Death of a Salesman (Loman) being released in ’49. Stellar work, moron!

Second, we have BarbaraK with her second nomination since our new review period began in August. She recounted a number of dead ends, but your Rabbit was particularly impressed when she REMOVED the letters in the perfect squares and attempted to make sense of it all. (Post #220). An absolutely lovely way of getting nowhere.

In closing, it is your Rabbit’s extreme pleasure to be able to finally tap one of his hitherto unutilized creative geniuses for his exit this week: The inimitable Tom Lehrer, singing a song he wrote for the Children’s Television Workshop but never used: “That’s Mathematics!”

[Colin]

…

Somehow it never occurred to me that the "digits" in the title was relevant. I just assumed digits were somehow related to numbers in most people minds and would impress most people as being most equivalent. Realizing that "digits" was actually instructions to apply the offensively arbitrary step of numerologically taking the digits of the perfect squares, I don't dislike the puzzle as much.

Me neither, although I even consulted the dictionary (ok, I googled it) to read the definitions of number and digit to see if I was missing something… which I was, of course.

[woozy]

Google led me astray on this one. I did a search of 'perfect squares' and it told me they were 4, 9, 16, 25, etc., totally skipping 1. So I couldn't figure out how to get 11 letters out of 6 words.

I'm not a math guy, is 1 being a perfect square common knowledge? It makes sense that it is, but I think I've read somewhere that 1 is not a prime number, so maybe I assumed it worked that way for perfect squares, too.

Ugh. Math.

Ho, Ho!

Get me started!

Yes, 1 = 1 x 1 being a square is common knowledge. As is 0 = 0 x 0.

That 1 is not considered a prime is also common knowledge but *why* it isn't, is not.

Thing is when factoring 105 = 7 x 3 x 5 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x1 ..... we have to ignore the 1's or else we get into infinite loops.

But when dealing with squares .... well, there's no infinite loop in consider a square with a side of 1. Indeed! A unit square is fundamental and necessary and we most certainly don't won't to ignore it just because it is trivial.

[Joe Ross]

What tripped me up for a bit was counting the "1" M twice, for Across & Down, before realizing the order of MATHEMATICS was taken from the Clue order, without regard to Across or Down. A simpler way to think of it is, natch, "in Perfect Square order."

That someone had to pint this out to me is my shame.

(Actually, I found MATHEMATICS via anagramming, after deciding not to count that M twice. My thought: "Patrick Berry wanting solvers to anagram? Not a chance!")

[LadyBird]

We went to the National Tile Museum in Lisbon on Saturday. One display showed the increasing complexity of designs over the years. From a design of 1 tile (1x1) to 4 tiles (2x2) and up to 64 tiles (8x8). Didn't help! Kas 5 for me. PB is so good at putting words inside words that I wasted most of my time looking for square-shaped words in the grid.

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I finally solved it this morning with nudges from my brother, who must have been completely frustrated with my weird wanderings...

The first thing I did was list out the answers of the answers corresponding to the perfect square clue numbers and then pull letters using the roots of the squares (1 to 7) to get MOLDAIA. One thing I've learned from solving is that when one approach doesn't work, you need to try something new instead of banging your head on the same wall, so I went looking just about everywhere else, including at grid entries whose numbers only have perfect squares as digits: 1,4,9,11,14,19,41,44,49, trying any combination that would get me to 11 words or answers to work with.

The rabbit hole that looked the most like an "Aha" was when I noticed that the single digit perfect squares ONE, FOUR, and NINE have a total of eleven letters when written out.

The rabbit holes that belong on the crazy corkboard wall were seeing the letters for ALPHA in the very odd PHARLAP when I had already been looking at OMEGA, and the odd clue "Hairy twin brother in Genesis" having the initials BIGHT, one off of EIGHT, its clue number.

I finally had to be told that something I had tried earlier was close for me to revisit the idea of indexing perfect square grid entries again.

[LadyBird]

The streets of Coimbra are mocking me!

[sharkicicles]

Google led me astray on this one. I did a search of 'perfect squares' and it told me they were 4, 9, 16, 25, etc., totally skipping 1. So I couldn't figure out how to get 11 letters out of 6 words.

I'm not a math guy, is 1 being a perfect square common knowledge? It makes sense that it is, but I think I've read somewhere that 1 is not a prime number, so maybe I assumed it worked that way for perfect squares, too.

Ugh. Math.

Ho, Ho!

Get me started!

Yes, 1 = 1 x 1 being a square is common knowledge. As is 0 = 0 x 0.

That 1 is not considered a prime is also common knowledge but *why* it isn't, is not.

Thing is when factoring 105 = 7 x 3 x 5 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 x1 ..... we have to ignore the 1's or else we get into infinite loops.

But when dealing with squares .... well, there's no infinite loop in consider a square with a side of 1. Indeed! A unit square is fundamental and necessary and we most certainly don't won't to ignore it just because it is trivial.

I tried to put this into google translate, but it didn’t help.

[DrTom]

I was trying to do this on a phone and that was just not working. I did get a nudge and still could not figure it out. Amazing construction; I think we are pushing our creators to come up with wilder things. I am trying to think if that is good or bad, but I am leaning toward good.