"Winter Fall" - December 17, 2021

[hoover]

Maybe Taylor is in a different time zone again.

Is Taylor the WSJ intern of the week?

[boharr]

The puzzle, or a puzzle, seems to be up on fleeting image. No prompt though.

https://www.fleetingimage.com/wij/xyzzy/21-wsj.html

[LadyBird]

I'm running out of emails to clean out as I sit here at the computer and hit refresh.

[hcbirker]

I couldn't open the .puz file. PDF anyone?

[hcbirker]

And just like that, it's up!

[hoover]

Prompt: The answer to this week's contest crossword is a word related to Christmas.

[hoover]

I'm running out of emails to clean out as I sit here at the computer and hit refresh.

You could come over and clean out mine. I'm at 9970+ unread.

[Chantellebeal]

HERE you go!

Thanks! I am just wondering about the odds of ever winning a mug.....

@Chantellebeal Your odds are better than winning the lottery but don't plan on having a mug for the holidays. And they are not getting better because the WSJ has more submissions. From the beginning of the contests the average number of correct answers is 992. Over the past 52 weeks, the average number of correct answers is 1181.

So ballpark, your odds are about 1 in 1000. Given that there are 52 contests in a year, that means that might win a mug every 20 years (not mathematically rigorous but good enough)

Thanks! This is the ballpark info I was interested in.

[Chantellebeal]

@Chantellebeal Your odds are better than winning the lottery but don't plan on having a mug for the holidays. And they are not getting better because the WSJ has more submissions. From the beginning of the contests the average number of correct answers is 992. Over the past 52 weeks, the average number of correct answers is 1181.

So ballpark, your odds are about 1 in 1000. Given that there are 52 contests in a year, that means that might win a mug every 20 years (not mathematically rigorous but good enough)

More rigorously, assuming that you solve the meta every week, that the probability is 999/1000 that you will not win the mug in a week given that you have solved the meta, and that winners are chosen randomly, and accounting for 52 weeks in a year, then the probability is (999/1000)^52 or about 0.949 that you will not win the mug in a year, so you have about a 5% chance of winning the mug in a given year if you solve all the metas that year.

You have a 50% chance of winning a mug if you solve every meta for 693 weeks (13+ years).
You have a 65% chance of winning a mug if you solve every meta for 1040 weeks (20ish years).
You have a 95% chance of winning a mug if you solve every meta for 2995 weeks (57+ years).

Can we agree that we're here for the company?

So you are saying I have a chance?

At least there are only around 1,000 correct answers per week. I figured I'd be lucky to ever win a mug given my age! So I was right on that! But I didn't know if there might be thousands of correct answers every week. At least there is a little hope! I am enjoying the forum as is the point of this! Thanks all for the replies.

[Kas]

Some weeks, it just all comes together, and the process as well as the feeling at the end of it is a thing of joy and beauty..
Some weeks, it doesn't all (or at all) come together, and there's the ritual banging of head against wall around Sunday 9pm when the solution is revealed (here on W. Coast time) ..
And then, there are those weeks (too many in my case), where there's a fog all around, and when the solution comes out Sunday night, just a reverent shake of the head in wonder at the folks who got it ...
I assume that's the Kas scoring levels!

Yep. The Meta experience is strangely universal. What's really weird is that the experience varies *widely* from puzzle to puzzle, i.e., one person's Kas 1 is another's Kas 5, and as far as I can tell, there's no rhyme or reason to how, why or when my brain will pull out the answer.