Recent Puzzles

General
1

Typing this ina bit of a rush, as I’m going out. However, thanks to the 20 or so people who replied. Naomi got all three right. I think one or two others did two, but she got three in a row, bang bang, bang.

No one got any of them wrong. That suggests either a big general knowledge gap between the few who answered and the many who didn’t, or that the questions are too easy.

Opinions? Is this game worth continuing?

Mike

2

I think the games are great. I think your questions also have quite a good balance: some seem fairly easy to spot and others are quite subtle and satisfying to pick out.

I hope you’ll continue - it’s fun!

Cheers,
Mark

3

The accounts of the rides are well worth reading, and to have the questions thrown in is a welcome bonus. You probably need to hide the erroneous sentence better, camouflage it a bit, as it tends to shout “Me,Me,Me”. So it is then merely a question of working out what is wrong with one sentence, and not the whole piece. Maybe have an unspecified number of errors in a piece.

“There are a number of factual errors in this tale”…and of course that number could be one, three, or even for a particularly evil test, zero. People find all sorts of interesting things when there is no needle in the stack to look for.

Nao

4

i always see those posts, but dont know what the game is? anyone want to fill me in?

5

How about posting a ride that is completely fictitious.

6

How do you know I haven’t already? :thinking: :slight_smile: :wink:

A completely fictitious write up would take away the whole point of write ups. I’m not quite sure why I write them, but people keep thanking me and asking for more, and I vaguely feel that they might inspire people to ride a bit more often, or a bit further, and help people through periods when they don’t have much chance to ride.

7

I love them, but they are long posts, but I dont mind reading them.

8

I always put something at the end to remind people of the game.

It works like this: there is one incorrect “fact” in the story. That is a general knowledge fact, that a first time reader with no knowledge of unicycling or of the area where I’m riding should be able to spot.

Examples from previous ride write ups:

  • A puffin soaring high overhead, feeding on insects on the wing. (Puffins are sea birds that fly low, and dive to catch fish.)
  • A Roman road sign with the modern road number (A614) in Roman numerals (A DCXIV). Of course, the Romans wouldn't have used the same road number as we use nearly 2,000 years later.
  • A badger's nest, complete with eggs. (Badgers are mammals and give birth to live young.)
  • A Tudor railway bridge, dated 1593. (The railways weren't built until after the steam train was invented - in the 1800s.)
  • A Christian monument, 2,030 years old. (In 2006 AD!)
  • A bronze mine, where ingots of pure bronze can sometimes be found. (Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. You can't have a bronze mine.)
  • The grave of Sherlock Holmes's colleague, Dr. Watson. (Watson was a fictional character, and therefore isn't buried anywhere.)

The game is simply to spot the deliberate mistake and pm me with the answer - as amusingly worded as you can manage. Where appropriate, I post the “winner” and sometimes one or two of the funniest (correct) answers.

Sometimes the “bogus facts” are multi-layered. For example, teh Tudor railway bridge. 1593 would make it Elizabethan. I also had it built int he high arched Norman style. It is unlikely that the Tudors/Elizabethans would indulge in retro architecture like that anyway.

I always try to make the facts relevant to the real ride - hence the Holmes/Watson connection to Princetown; there really are tin mines and bronze age ruins on Dartmoor; there really are Christian crosses on the moor (but much later); and so on.

9

I only found those threads today, been a bit busy at work, so I kinda missed out on the game a bit, but am looking forward to more of the same.
Please continue with the write-ups and the puzzles.

10

Out of interest, would you still write them if you didn’t get so much positive feedback?

I write ride reports primarily for my own benefit. I enjoy coming back and reading them a few years later, giving me the chance to reminisce about some of my more enjoyable rides.

Then, of course, having gone to the trouble of writing them, I figure I might as well share them. So I put them on my website and I post them to uk.rec.cycling. If it happens to be a unicycle ride report then I’ll also post it here, but I haven’t unicycled much in recent years.

11

awesome, now those posts make much more sense haha.
i will be attempting to play next time:)

12

Interesting.

When I was a diver, I used to log every dive, complete with route, depths, wildlife seen etc. - far more detail than would be needed to maintain a qualification record. I occasionally used to re-read them, but often couldn’t remember the events. It was like looking at old photos of myself as a child - I remember seeing the photos last time, but I can’t remember them being taken.

But in the dive write ups, for my own interest only, I didn’t include the excruciating puns, the cod philosophy, the arch social comment and the soul searching. (Sometimes, when diving on a sandy sea bed, I wrote about sole searching, but everything has its plaice.)

13

I like the puzzles, and I definitely think you should keep doing them. I usually read all the ride reports anyway, and having puzzles makes me concentrate more while reading them. I hate not knowing the answers to things and if I don’t know the answer to the puzzles I’ll go and look it up, so they are making me learn something too, which is always good!