communication. community. cognition.
Let’s face it. Catapults and Trebuchets are just plain cool.
There’s something visceral about launching large items great distances. That’s the easy part, though. The hard part is hitting your targets.
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It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.
I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.
You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.
That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”
You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.
A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.
In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.
You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.
And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.
Spam works because it scales.
It costs very little to ramp up from 100,000 addresses to 10,000,000 addresses, and all it takes is a couple of hits to make the effort profitable.
How do I know this? Because it exists.
Here’s another example of the principle at play:
On my recent trip to Las Vegas, my wife and I took a couple of walks down the Miracle Mile. We encountered something we did not see in the tourist information: hundreds of day laborers lining the sidewalks, handing out stiff glossy cards.
The cards had pictures of various professional women, with their various phone numbers. The laborers wore t-shirts bearing the names of the various escort agencies they represented. Some even wore backpack harnesses with lighted signs.
As you walk down the street, they will desperately try to hand you a card. Even if you are walking with your wife, holding her hand on one side and with your other hand intentionally in your pocket. The sidewalk ends up making a crunchy noise as you walk on the thousands of discarded ads.
Rarely do you see someone keep the card. It makes you wonder just how effective the strategy really is.
The night we walked, there must have been 300 workers wearing shirts and trying to sell me and my wife a night we’d never forget. Why 300? Why not 200? Why not 400 or 500?
That is the mystery of the Invisible Hand. Over time, there will be feedback to those hiring the workers for nightly work. 600 might be too many, 100 too few. Over the days and weeks, the formula gets refined, where dollars spent on card-hustlers yields trackable and visible results. It may well be that on Wednesdays, 400 are needed to make it worthwhile, where on Fridays and Saturdays there is less need to boost business.
Or, it might be that enough escort agencies are in the game that it’s market share they are after, not trying to grow the overall market.
Or… just maybe, the spammers are just bad at math. Like the one who sent me an email with this subject line:
Female Orgasm – How to Make a Woman Orgasm in 66 Simple Steps
There’s nothing ‘simple’ about 66. (Or maybe they just know 62 things I don’t…)
