Today's Puzzle
Thursday, December 10
This is a shirt someone has made. Yep.
UTF-8, I know, is a character encoding—a system that represents letters, numbers, and symbols by sequences of one or more bytes. There are several such encodings competing with each other, which can lead to computers not always displaying things exactly like they should. (I learned long ago that if a random "J" appears in an email from one of my Outlook-using friends, it's probably supposed to be a smiley face.)
But what, exactly, is ♥ ? Explain this nerdy joke to me, please!
Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution
|
S |
A |
| San Francisco |
30 |
48 |
| Oakland |
67 |
109 |
| Manhattan |
220 |
12 |
| Proof Teachers |
1 |
0 |
What do the two columns in the table represent?
And that one Proof teacher referred to in the last row—what does he teach?
Solution
S and A stand for Streets and Avenues. For example, San Francisco has numbered streets up to 30th Street, and numbered avenues up to 48th Avenue. I hoped that the example of Manhattan might click for some of you; Manhattan is long and skinny, which partially accounts for the very different numbers of Streets and Avenues in its grid (it's also relevant that the Streets are much closer together than the Avenues).
There is one Street at Proof School, of course—Joel Street, who teaches Latin and literature!
Congratulations to yesterday's solvers Atticus, Maddy, Yana, Charlie, Jason, Kate, and Mr. Gregg. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!
About This Site
Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."
Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.
Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to November 2020.