Tag Archives: Pop culture

Teasing your brain (and your job applicants)

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Did you ever have a job interview where someone posed a mental test or brain teaser?

These were all the rage a few years ago and I’ve heard plenty of stories from friends and acquaintances who applied for jobs only to find themselves wandering down tangential rabbit holes instead of presenting their credentials in the best light.

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus? How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? Why are manhole covers round? How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

Google (among other companies) became notorious for this sort of on-the-spot cognitive analysis, but in an interview with The New York Times, senior vice president of people operations at Google Laszlo Bock admitted that these kinds of questions proved completely worthless as predictors of employee creativity or performance.

As a puzzle guy, I can appreciate the spirit behind asking these questions. When you present a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, you’re not really looking for the solution, you’re looking for the resourcefulness of the solver. When you present a brain teaser that demands great results with only two tries, you’re examining the interview’s insightfulness and efficiency.

The problem is… abstract problem-solving isn’t the same as actual problem-solving. I daresay the interview is the most stressful part of many jobs, so the pressure you endure sitting in the hot seat and trying to earn a job overshadows the pressure you’ll endure actually doing that job. After all, there’s not a yes-or-no implied after each question when you’ve got the job, but that uncertainty permeates the interview process.

But, Bock also explains how properly-framed questions about problem-solving can be more useful indicators:

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

I’ve never had to answer a brain teaser like the ones listed above, not even when I interviewed to be a puzzle guy. Of course, if you ask me how many golf balls can fit in a school bus, my first answer would probably be “more than I could ever need.” Plus I don’t do windows.

[Check out this io9 article for greater detail, including source links and list of former Google interview questions.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Palindromic answers for all and sundry!

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As promised, here are the answers to Friday’s PuzzleNation live game, a.k.a. the Palindromes challenge! Thank you to everyone who gave it a shot. I look forward to doing another live puzzle game soon!

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1.) Forgetful cats. (2 words)

Answer: Senile felines

2.) Love in the Italian capital. (2 words)

Answer: Amore, Roma

3.) First-person speaker favors a particular mathematical constant. (3 words)

Answer: I prefer pi.

4.) Instructions to hoist in conjunction with the speaker. (6 words)

Answer: Pull up if I pull up.

5.) A fencing challenge offered to a reluctant opponent. (3 words)

Answer: Draw, o coward!

6.) Young Mr. Hawthorne attacked a lama. (4 words)

Answer: Nate bit a Tibetan.

7.) Orders to retreat, given to one’s distant pixie. (5 words)

Answer: Flee to me, remote elf.

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1.) Television premiere (2 words)

Answer: Tube debut.

2.) Young comic strip miscreant did wrong. (2 words)

Answer: Dennis sinned.

3.) Exclamation to grab the attention of the lad toting certain fruit. (3 words)

Answer: Yo, banana boy!

4.) Weather unsuitable for cheering or owl noise. (4 words)

Answer: Too hot to hoot.

5.) Question a Gotham City resident might ask after the caped crusader’s first appearance. (6 words)

Answer: Was it a bat I saw?

6.) Post’s indecorous citrus fruit (3 words)

Answer: Emily’s sassy lime.

7.) Show boredom in a manner akin to Caesar. (5 words)

Answer: Yawn a more Roman way.

And if there’s some kind of live game puzzle challenge you’d like to see, be sure to let us know! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

On the hunt for ambitious silliness…

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From the Great Urban Race to Leslie’s Valentine’s Day puzzle challenge on Parks & Rec, we’ve covered scavenger hunts and puzzle-game quests on the blog several times in the past.

Scavenger hunts have a special place in my heart as a puzzler, because they’re the pinnacle of puzzly thinking on the fly. Deductive reasoning, creativity, ingenuity, a penchant for plotting and executing step-by-step moves to conquer a challenge… scavenger hunts combine all of these features (and throw in some exercise, for better or for worse).

Now, for the uninitiated, scavenger hunts at their simplest are games where individuals (or, more often, teams) are assigned a list of items to obtain or actions to perform, and the first person or team who completes the list is the winner.

Scavenger hunts by definition incorporate a spirit of silliness, lightheartedness, and frivolity. Whether you’re hunting down the gaudiest things you can find at a tag sale or photographing yourself getting a piggyback ride from a police officer, the goal of most scavenger hunts is to have fun.

And it seems like scavenger hunts are becoming more creative and more diabolical with every passing day. Let’s take a look at two of the most ambitious scavenger hunts challenging players these days.

The first is GISHWHES, a.k.a. The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen.

GISHWHES combines the playfulness of scavenger hunts with a humanitarian ideal, challenging players to make the world a better and more interesting place through their challenges.

Designed to be played around the world through the Internet, GISHWHES has previously tasked its players to perform such varied feats as performing puppet shows for sick kids and documenting a session of ski yoga. Creating art, doing good, and being gloriously silly is what GISHWHES is all about.

The second scavenger hunt is called Midnight Madness, and was recently profiled on Quartz.com.

A high-concept game that became a brilliantly-clever fundraiser when Goldman Sachs got involved, Midnight Madness is a fiendishly challenging series of puzzles and activities scattered throughout New York City.

Goldman Sachs employees — every division of the company is represented — race around the city, unraveling electrical puzzles, playing laser mini golf, and deciphering complex clues, all in the hopes of determining the location of the next challenge.

The most recent edition of the game lasted fifteen hours and raised over a million dollars for charity. While it’s much more exclusive than GISHWHES, Midnight Madness has the same humanitarian spirit and the same sense of ambitious lunacy at its heart.

For puzzly fun on the run, scavenger hunts can’t be beat.

“I have the solution,” Tom answered.

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As promised, here are the answers to Friday’s PuzzleNation live game, a.k.a. the Tom Swifties challenge! Thank you to everyone who gave it a shot. I look forward to doing another live puzzle game soon!

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1.) “This is all from memory,” Tom… wrote.

2.) “That just doesn’t add up,” said Tom… nonplussed.

3.) “There’s no need for silence,” Tom… allowed.

4.) “Little devils don’t always tell the truth,” Tom… implied.

5.) “You don’t see the point, do you?” asked Tom… stabbing in the dark.

6.) “No test throw,” thought Tom… triflingly.

7.) “The exit is right there,” Tom… pointed out.

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1.) “I can take photographs if I want to!” Tom… snapped.

2.) “That’s already been taken care of,” Tom… pretended.

3.) “She’s repeating an SOS message,” said Tom… remorsefully.

4.) “I only have diamonds, clubs and spades,” said Tom… heartlessly.

5.) “I’m covering the neighborhood with heavy cotton cloth,” said Tom… canvassing the area.

6.) “I’ve deduced that this is the right way,” said Tom… pathologically.

7.) “I have a split personality,” said Tom… being frank.

And if there’s some kind of live game puzzle challenge you’d like to see, be sure to let us know! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or contact us here!

Where brilliance meets joyous frivolity…

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Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 29th birthday of Tetris in a blog post, and I referenced the famous MIT prank where a giant game of Tetris was played on the side of a building.

This prank is one of the most recent in a long line of “hacks”, and MIT students have performed some impressive feats of creative whimsy along the way.

From a fire hose drinking fountain in 1991 to the installation of a shower stall in a common area in 1996, from turning the dome into R2-D2 (as pictured in our opening picture) to the “discovery” of an elevator in the remains of the demolished Building 20 (purportedly leading to a secret subbasement), these are top-tier pranks executed by some of the cleverest students in the world.

The Great Dome is often the palette of choice for MIT hacks, having featured a Triforce from the Legend of Zelda video games, the TARDIS from Doctor Who (which appeared all around campus), a fire truck, the Batman symbol, and numerous other Hack endeavors.

Here, the Apollo lunar lander looks down on a statue of Athena also added by industrious students. (Apollo watching over Athena, how apropos.)

One year, board games invaded campus. Giant versions of Cranium, Mousetrap, and Settlers of Catan appeared around campus, and all of the helpful maps around campus were altered to feature Risk gameplay.

Another time, an enormous game of Scrabble appeared on the wall, complete with MIT-inspired words fluttering in the breeze.

To honor the posting of XKCD’s 1000th comic — a comic that has also made appearances on this blog — XKCD comics appeared all over campus, often spelling out “1000”.

A Newton’s Cradle with imagery inspired by the Portal video game series appeared in 2012

But the best part of MIT hacks? Wondering just how the heck they managed to pull it off without anyone seeing. Like the urban legends behind stories of cars disassembled and reassembled in a professor’s office, the technological wizardry and sneaky cunning required for these marvelous pranks makes MIT Hack enthusiasts fellow puzzlers in spirit AND practice.

Puzzle News… comin’ at ya!

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PuzzleNation is just one part of a much greater puzzle community — our Diggin’ Words dog Copernicus up there is always surfing the Internet for puzzle news — so in today’s blog post, I’d like to turn the spotlight toward some of our fellow puzzlers.

First off, let’s give some hale and hearty congratulations to crossword puzzler Matt Gaffney, who recently celebrated his Weekly Crossword Contest’s five-year anniversary! (His metapuzzles are a real treat!)

In other crossword news, there are only three days left to pitch in on Peter Gordon’s kickstarter!

Infamous for the difficulty of his Fireball Crosswords, Gordon is looking to expand into a weekly series called Fireball Newsweekly Crosswords, which he promises will be timely, well-constructed, and challenging (but not demoralizingly so). Here’s hoping he meets his goal!

And finally, a magazine produced by our pals at PennyDellPuzzles made a surprising cameo in a recent Twitter post by comedian Bo Burnham. (Vine videos allow for quick loops of a few seconds, and they’re a recent addition to the arsenal of many celebrities and comedians on Twitter.)

If there’s anything puzzle-noteworthy going on in your neck of the Internet woods, please let us know so we can spread the word!