Half and Half - Oct 12, 2022

[MikeM000]

(by Peter Gordon)

What 8-letter word is hinted at by this puzzle?

Email answers to xwords@optonline.net by 6 PM Eastern time on Sunday, October 16.

You know the prizes already; they are far too numerous to type here....

[Abide]

Reliable sources tell me this is a very hard one. Updated clue with new information in bold:

New 1-Across clue:
A common one (which you need to use before and after doing the math) is A = 1, B = 2, C = 3 ... Z = 26

[markhr]

No closer, even with the added hint.
This one is tough, at least for me.

[Leslie]

The hint didn’t help me either. I guess I’m just not on the right wavelength this time.

[BarbaraK]

I didn't find the hint particularly helpful either. I'd figured that that clue was important and suspected what the edited version says.

Sometimes, actually knowing, rather than just suspecting, that I'm on the right path is enough to get me to focus and see what I need. Not with this one though. Everything I try, I keep running into ... something that just doesn't work.

[BarbaraK]

I just got this one, using the Rubber Duck viewtopic.php?p=106016#p106016 method.

Definitely fits Matt's SAD description. Simple (to explain) And Difficult (to see).

[HoldThatThought]

Mad props to you for that, because I have so little progress, I could write out every single one of my thoughts on a single bristle of my toothbrush and probably still have room for the toothpaste. At that point, it wouldn't matter if I actually sent it to someone or not.

Except it might be fun to send some random person a bristle from my toothbrush, come to think of it.

[Leslie]

I was so close! Changing the first letter of each part (half) of the long entries to a number and dividing in half was basically the first thing I considered. But even though I noticed they were all odd numbers, I completely failed to make the connection to adding “half” from the title. Instead I went off on some wildly implausible mathematical adventures involving very large numbers.

[Wendy Walker]

I was totally focused on whole numbers!

[BarbaraK]

Definitely a Kas 3 - "3. The Metas I gut through, *eventually* figure out...and then walk around the rest of the weekend like I just solved The Middle East or learned Sanskrit;" viewtopic.php?t=35

Hope I don't sprain my arm patting myself on the back. Thing about metas though is that one will promptly pop up to knock me back down to size. Guaranteed.

[markhr]

Only 6 people solved this -- way, way below average. After seeing the solution, I thought the mechanism was fair, but the hints were just too sketchy. I got hung up on the several late-alphabet letters, PQUVWYZ etc. Oh well.

[Abide]

I got half of it

Friendlier title without the revised clue: Half(/) and Half(+)

[Conrad]

I missed it as well.

One of the things I find distasteful is when people mash the 1 star button on Fiend whenever they miss a meta. I wonder if they realize they're not actually rating the meta: they're rating themselves (spoiler alert: they don't).

This puzzle has five "1" votes, and two "5" (and one of the fives was mine, to compensate for the sour grapes crowd). You can see the votes by hovering over the stars (sometimes it's a bit tricky to get it to show).

https://crosswordfiend.com/2022/10/16/f ... ore-142587

That meta was quite clean, and a million miles from 1-star (IMO). The "add .5" step was a bit unexpected (for me), but fair. And I don't see the point of having easy metas exclusively.

[Leslie]

That meta was quite clean, and a million miles from 1-star (IMO). The "add .5" step was a bit unexpected (for me), but fair. And I don't see the point of having easy metas exclusively.

I blame only myself for missing what was right there in front of me!

[BarbaraK]

I missed it as well.

One of the things I find distasteful is when people mash the 1 star button on Fiend whenever they miss a meta. I wonder if they realize they're not actually rating the meta: they're rating themselves (spoiler alert: they don't).

This puzzle has five "1" votes, and two "5" (and one of the fives was mine, to compensate for the sour grapes crowd). You can see the votes by hovering over the stars (sometimes it's a bit tricky to get it to show).

https://crosswordfiend.com/2022/10/16/f ... ore-142587

That meta was quite clean, and a million miles from 1-star (IMO). The "add .5" step was a bit unexpected (for me), but fair. And I don't see the point of having easy metas exclusively.

The other 5 star was me. I rarely rate puzzles, for one thing because I don't know exactly what the criteria are supposed to be. But when I saw a 1.0 for this one, I was amazed and had to offer a dissenting opinion.

I thought this was super clever. Super difficult - it took me 4 1/2 days to see it. But I have to admit, the title told me exactly what to do and all my attempts to overcomplicate it (16 columns - I'll add up the letters of the entries in each and somehow try to pair up the two halves of the puzzle, just for one) came from my twisted brain.

[MikeM000]

I got half of it

Friendlier title without the revised clue: Half(/) and Half(+)

Or "Half Plus Half", perhaps.

[Abide]

Or "Half Plus Half", perhaps.

I like it, but I was trying to keep MILKMAID relevant.

[HoldThatThought]

I did not rate this, on Fiend, or anywhere else. Had I rated it, I would certainly not have called it a One, because a 1 (to me), means that a puzzle is utterly without merit, and should never have been published. To be utterly honest, I have never come across a puzzle that had no business being published, and I can't imagine that I will ever encounter one, certainly not from a top flight creator like Peter Gordon.

That being said, I thoroughly disagree with the knee jerk reaction to "protect" authors by attacking other users' ratings. First of all, I sincerely doubt that any of our experienced authors are so sensitive as to have their hearts broken by a small handful of unappreciative ratings. Not every puzzle is going to appeal to every solver, and yes, certainly, some raters may rate on criteria that extend beyond technical merit. If someone wants to rate a puzzle with a low mark simply because it frustrated the royal #%$# out of them; well, that might not be what's intended, but that's the freedom of internet commentary, isn't it?

"How dare someone have rated this really good puzzle low?" as an insult of the rater's obvious intelligence and good judgment is, to me, a more damning commentary on which players are worthy of stating an opinion, and more objectionable, than someone who uses their power of rating to simply express that they didn't enjoy doing the puzzle.

Again, I didn't rate this puzzle, and certainly don't think it's worthy of a 1, but if you want to take shots at me now, for defending someone's right to do so, without being branded by the ratings police as a "bear of little brain", have at me. And moderators, I would love to see this ratings police force discouraged, because it fosters nothing but dissension within the community.

Expressing my opinion, just like the people who rate a puzzle with a one.

[ebirnholz]

So we're talking about the star ratings, huh?

If you've seen my (many) comments about this on Fiend, you already know how I feel: The ratings are utterly meaningless and shouldn't even exist. They serve no purpose at all except to give anonymous users a convenient excuse to trash someone's puzzle without having to say what they didn't like about it.

The worst thing is that there have been several commenters on Fiend who have admitted they won't bother solving a puzzle unless it meets some minimum average rating like 4 stars or whatever. I can easily imagine there are many others who do the same thing but haven't said so publicly. It just doesn't make any sense that a site dedicated to reviewing and promoting what it says are the best crosswords out there would have an algorithm that actively dissuades others from solving them.

Even if you believe you rate every puzzle accurately and honestly -- as in, you do a complete review of the theme, the fill, the clues, etc. -- and land on what you think is an appropriate rating out of 5, you're still contributing to an algorithm that other people use to determine which puzzles they solve. No one should make their decisions about which puzzles to solve based on that system, but that's what the star ratings encourage.

As long as those ratings are going to stick around, I just wish people would stop treating them like they're meaningful evidence of a puzzle's quality. They aren't.

(This, by the way, is independent of how I felt about the Fireball meta. Whether I liked it or not wouldn't change my position about the purpose of the star ratings.)

[HoldThatThought]

Evan: I appreciate and respect your comment, but, honestly, what is the difference between "star ratings" given on Fiend and "star ratings" given on Yelp! or Amazon or Food Network, or the thousands of other sites that offer that kind of rating opportunity.

I agree with you that no discerning individual should make decisions based on a handful of star ratings - but, then again, even your comment that you can "trash someone's puzzle without having to say what you don't like about it" only gets you so far. On Yelp!, I can leave a detailed comment criticizing lousy service, watered down drinks, rude management, dirty bathrooms, undersized portions - and I can do all of that without having ever set foot in the restaurant, or someone else can do that because one of the owners is now dating his ex-girlfriend. At their fundamental level, an internet rating is utterly unreliable as a measure of an Amazon product's quality or a hotel's cleanliness; especially (but not only because) it's anonymous.

I can get - let's say - helpful "advice" about a movie by visiting Rotten Tomatoes, because I can sample the reviews of some of the most respected critics in the country - obviously, I'm looking for some sort of consensus, right? If 90% of the professional critics like a movie, I might like it too, but even then, there's no guarantee. It's just a useful data point.

If there are solvers who only solve puzzles with "X-star" reviews and up, then those are people who are just surrendering their self-autonomy to anonymous raters with unknown agendas. But, ultimately, unless the creators are getting paid by the solver, reliance on other people to tell you what puzzles to bother with - that's the solver's loss, isn't it? Not the creator.

I rarely rate, because I inherently don't trust other people's ratings, and I wouldn't expect them to trust mine. Occasionally, I'll have an experience so bad - or so good - that I put a few words out there for the consideration of curious readers. I'm sure tens of thousands of people have bought books that I criticized, maybe, just maybe, three people bought a book because I said it was a "brilliant read".

I'm not sure why star ratings on Fiend are any different, any less reliable, or any more injurious than the gazillions of ratings we encounter everywhere else. I hope everyone takes ratings with the huge honking grain of salt that they deserve.