We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.” Mmm. But, I like it, so shut up.

In fact, we just bought the “light” version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original. I can’t figure out whether its name should therefore be:

1. “I Can’t Believe I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”

2. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not Butter”

or

3. _______________________ (fill in the blank)

[Tags: puzzle ]

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Before paper, what did the wings of moths look like?

[Tags: puzzle ]

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Do barefoot cultures have a word for stubbing their toes?

[Tags: puzzle ]

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To be a Most Annoying Nitpick, a comment has to be obvious, predictable, and unimportant.

For example:

“You know, in space an explosion wouldn’t make any noise.”

Runners up include:

“Jeesh. Dinosaurs were dead for hundreds of millions of years before humans came along.”

“Computer viruses are operating-system specific, so one of ours couldn’t infect an alien computer.”

“In the original comic book, he couldn’t fly, just jump.”

In fact, I’d be willing to consider any nitpick that begins with the phrase “In the original comic book” as a candidate for the Most Annoying.

[Tags: doep puzzle cliches nitpicks ]

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Since there are no (?) instances when we are encouraged to scratch ourselves for health reasons (exception: to dislodge bugs from our various pelted patches?), why did natural selection favor near-hairless mammals who scratch themselves inappropriately?

Bonus question: Since it’s well known that we cannot tickle ourselves, why does scratching ourselves feel so darn good? Ahhhh….. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Why do some economically well off cultures have good food and others do not? Wouldn’t making good food — by which I mean delicious food that you love to eat — be a prime directive of every land? They’ve had thousands of years to work on getting some great recipes down. After all, there are poor cultures that have great food. So, why do entire cultures screw up this most basic of human pleasures?

EXTRA CREDIT question: Last night I gave a talk and afterwards was taken to dinner (thank you very much for the food and conversation) at an Italian restaurant at which every dish had at least twelve ingredients: Rare roasted veal stuffed with striped bass crusted in romano crumbs roasted with fennel basted in onion pate fried in the oil of squid grown in olive oil and fed striped bass found inside the gullets of ocean-farmed veal. Question: Is this the sign of a chef who is insecure or imaginative? Creative or bored? (The right answer is probably the right answer to most questions: It depends.) [Tags: food cooking chefs puzzle doep]

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To win this quiz (and receive absolutely nothing), your answers have to be within an order of magnitude.

According to an article in today’s Boston Globe: 1) How many Dunkin Donut stores are there? 2) How many donuts do they serve per year? 3) How many pounds of fat do they use for frying up those donuts? (It’s transfatty oil at this point.)

The answers are in the first comment. [Tags: quiz donuts ]

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How much money do you think is in a typical fully-stocked ATM?

Not that I’m contemplating anything. Just wondering. Also, Any ideas about how to put a false bottom into a duffel bag? Just curious. [Tags: doep puzzle atm]

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During a speech a couple of weeks ago, I characterized the crawl on the bottom of CNN as “news delivered at 4 mph.” I made up the speed, but it seemed like a reasonable approximation, since it seems to go at about walking speed.

This morning I was watching a news channel on the little TV in our bedroom: It took about four seconds to go across a screen about 15″ wide. If I were watching it on, say, a 60″ wide TV, it would have taken four seconds to cover four times the distance and thus would be traveling four times as fast. If it were a 4 mile wide screen, it’d be travelling at a mile per second.

So, how fast does a news crawl (if a news crawl could crawl news)? And why doesn’t it look faster on a big set?

I know it’s so elementary that it’s embarrassing, but I’m sick, ok? Slightly feverish. Really. [Tags: doep puzzle]

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Here’s a question I try to answer in the latest issue of my (free) newsletter: If too much information is noise, what’s too much meaning?

In fact, here’s the table of contents of that issue. (Note: The answer I come up with is not good enough to count as a spoiler.)

 

March 9, 2007 The abundance of meaning: If too much information is noise, what’s too much meaning? The abundance of worthiness and the new relevancy: When there’s an abundance of worthwhile pages on just about any topic, search engines need to evolve.  Book stuff: (1) Why finishing a book sucks, (2) the new book’s site, and (3) the book’s word cloud Why do movies suck?: We don’t make that many movies, we invest heavily in them, and yet most of the comedies aren’t funny, the suspensers aren’t suspenseful, the action ones are incoherently edited. Why is that? Cool Tool: The O’Reilly Hacks series What I’m playing: Dreamfall and Devastation Troopers Bogus Contest: Suggest a Daily Open-Ended Puzzle

[Tags: doep puzzle everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Why do shampoo bottles tells us to wash our hair twice? The stuff we use to clean whitewall tires (well, those of us who clean whitewalls, which definitely seems like a losing proposition) doesn’t tell us to lather, rinse and repeat. Is our hair really that dirty? Or — perish the thought — is this just a way of getting us to use up the shampoo twice as quickly?

Science? Marketing? Just good hygiene? [Tags: doep puzzle]

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In tonight’s State of the Union address, there are some words and phrases that are bound to appear — “prevail,” “work together,” and “that our military leaders have requested” — and we could play Bingo with them, or take a shot of tequila every time they show up.

Instead, let’s play Negative Bingo in which you are given a card with phrases on it (or perhaps you should be allowed to purchase words the way you can buy search terms at Google) and you lose points for every one that does show up. (Caution: Don’t take a shot every time one of your words is not used.)

For example, here are some terms unlikely to show up in the mouth of the Great Decider tonight:

“Victory parade” “As I was reading in the Koran recently…”

“Abu Ghraib” “Raise taxes” and “to pay for” in the same sentence

“The right of women to…” “Osama Bin Laden”

“Maimed” “Thanks to Al Gore…”

Any admission of error expressed in the active voice

The terms have to have some likelihood of showing up, so you don’t get credit for Bush not using the phrases “prolapsed anus” or “I’m sorry.” In fact, different terms should be worth different amounts. A negative words market perhaps?

Anyway, what words would you put on your negative bingo card?

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No need to believe me on this—much less to care—but I think I was one of the inventors of the sort of phrase-bingo people play at speeches like this. In the early 1990s, when I was at Interleaf, I created phrase bingo cards for a company meeting. I even wrote a Lisp script to generate them, which for me was like programming the lunar lander. I thought it was a new idea then, although I’m sure its eventual success was due to someone else inventing it earlier or afterwards. Anyone know the history of this epiphenomenon? [Tags: does politics bush humor bingo]

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WikiLeaks is a Wikipedia-style wiki for people to place leaked documents, untraceably. According to the FAQ, “It combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies with the transparency and simplicity of a wiki interface.” “Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.”

It’s ambitious. The FAQ says:

Wikileaks may become the most powerful “intelligence agency” on earth — an intelligence agency of the people. It will be an open source, democratic intelligence agency. But it will be far more principled, and far less parochial than any governmental intelligence agency; consequently, it will be more accurate, and more relevant. It will have no commercial or national interests at heart; its only interests will be truth and freedom of information. Unlike the covert activities of state intelligence agencies, Wikileaks will rely upon the power of overt fact to inform citizens about the truths of their world.

It’s got a million leaked docs already and expects to surpass Wikipedia in number of entries. But it’s hard to see how it becomes anything like an intelligence agency if it only consists of leaks; if a citizen wants information about a topic, seeing only the leaked material is going to give quite a skewed and incomplete view. On the other hand, if you’re researching a topic, I can see the value of checking in with Wikileaks to see if there’s anything you’re not supposed to know about it.

Here’s another bit from the FAQ:

Couldn’t leaking involve invasions of privacy? Couldn’t mass leaking of documents be irresponsible? Aren’t some leaks deliberately false and misleading?

Providing a forum for freely posting information involves the potential for abuse, but measures can be taken to minimize any potential harm. The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this works out in the edge cases. Does posting the names of covert agents count as a leak? [Tags: wikileaks wikis wikipedia intelligence politics media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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In 2005, how many breast enhancement surgeries were performed in the U.S., excluding reconstructive ones? (Source: Boston Globe)

Getting this answer right means getting it within an order of magnitude.

The answer is in the first comment. [Tags: puzzles medicine surgery]

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The Democratic Congressional Committee has posted a report card you can fill in. (Thanks for the link, Chip.) It’s a pretty bland set of questions. So, what questions would you add?

For example:

How can the Democrats show they’re as strong on terrorism as the Republicans?
a. Have Howard Dean eat Saddam Hussein’s liver on TV.
b. Reveal that Hillary served as a Navy SEAL for four years.
c. Require the candidates to work the word “pussy” into their stump speeches.
d. Prosecute more teenagers for downloading music.

What phrase would you prefer the Democrats use instead of “surge”?
a. Squander.
b. Operation Incapable of Learning.

What strategy is most likely to lead to a Democratic victory in the 2008 Presidential elections?
a. Run a campaign exactly like John Kerry’s but just 4% better this time.
b. Find a charismatic younger person, perhaps from a mixed racial background, who energizes masses of eligible non-voters with a message of hope.
c. Learn how to program electronic voting machines.

Should we impeach the bastard?
a. Yes.
b. And how!
c. And his little dog, too!

[Tags: doep puzzle politics humor]

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I don’t know who came up with the name “Iceland,” but it’s a marketing disaster. Surely such a beautiful and interesting nation deserve better! And you’re just the folks to do it. So, put on your marketing caps (and make sure they’ve got earflaps) and come up with a name that better represents the Iceland brand. E.g.,

“Winterwonderland”

“Frostia”

“Disney Presents Iceland”

[Tags: doep puzzle marketing iceland]

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At the symposium I’m at, we’re discussing how long the conference wiki should be left up and editable, which raises the question: What is the past tense of wiki?

[Tags: doep puzzle wiki]

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What packaging makes your blood boil?

I hate the thick, clear plastic, blister-packaging that’s sealed all the way around and inviolable except with a serious knife or possibly a band saw. And puncturing it isn’t enough. The plastic is so thick that you have to actually carve the product out of its container. Because the cut plastic is itself sharp, I worry about amputating a finger if the knife slips.

I also hate the way the cut plastic smells, but now I’m just piling on.

On the other hand, I find this to be funny to the point of being depressing…

And you? Vent your packaged ire!

[Tags: doep puzzle packaging marketing]

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The Democrats are (smartly) committed to a 100 hours of introducing legislation that defines them as a party, little things such as raising the minimum wage from Debtors Prison level to full Squalor.

But after six years of watching the worst president in our lifetime strut his time upon the stage, don’t you think the Democrats are entitled to a little fun? In those first 100 hours, what legislation could the Democrats pass just for the pure hell of it? Require Bush to deliver the State of the Union topless so we can all see how amazingly buff he’s gotten on our watch? Hold hearings, complete with subpoened witnesses, charts and graphs, to determine which is worse, war or blow jobs? Trade in all presidential limousines for Priuses (Prii?)? Replace the opening prayer at Congress with a Moment of Gloating?

It’s been a long six years… [Tags: doep puzzle politics]

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As I crawl through the jungle of black vines under my desk, I’m led to wonder: If you were able to create a standard—no folksonomies here!—for color coding the cables going into and out of a computer, what sort of scheme would you come up with? [Tags: doep puzzle taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The current issue of Wired has a feature I like a lot: They got 33 sf writers to contribute six-word short stories. So, I’m shamelessly ripping off that idea, but with a twist. Here’s the six-word version of today’s DOEP:

Six-word story. Any genre. Surprise ending.

For example:

Duel to death at noon. Eclipse.

Brother impregnates sister. Disgusting. They’re bees.*

For extra points, make it Web-themed… [Tags: doep puzzle]

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*I know that bees don’t get pregnant, and I’m not sure that the concept of brother and sister really applies, but let’s just say that’s all part of the surprise ending.

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I am so poorly oriented in space that I cannot make a checkers move without first physically moving the piece. I can stand on a marked street corner with a map and a compass and still go wrong 50% of the time. When I take a shirt out of a drawer, I can’t predict which half will be on my left, although I do pride myself on rarely going wrong about which will be the outside.

So, this “procedure” for solving a Rubik’s Cube is to me indistinguishable from gibberish, even though I’m certain that it’s right. [Tags: rubik's_cube puzzles]

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The Republicans are in a concerted way calling Democrats “Defeatocrats.” Forget whether the content is true or not, and ignore how degrading to democracy name-calling is. “Defeatocrat” is just lame. Not only doesn’t it rhyme with “Democrat,” it doesn’t even scan.

Surely we can help the Republicans come up with a better insulting term for the Democrats! [Tags: doep puzzle]

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If The Wizard of Oz were written today, how would it end? [Tags: doep puzzle oz]

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Instructions for cooking in a normal oven tell you how long and how hot. But microwaves rely on unscaled buttons for “power” that vary from machine to machine. Why isn’t there a standard unit of cooking energy for microwaves so instructions could say “Cook in your microwave for ten minutes at 350 joules” (or ohms, watts, newtons, pounds per square inch, parsecs, francs, or whatever the right unit of measurement is…I’m a humanities major, dammit!)? [Tags: doep puzzles]

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What would it take to make a bumble bee happy?

(My answer is the first in the comments.) [Tags: puzzle :doep]

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After three seasons of trying, I finally biked up the big hill that leads to our street. I had to drop into second gear and stand up and pump each half-cycle like Suzanne Pleshette bench pressing her own weight*, but I made it, dammit. Of course, being passed by a twelve-year old on a bike piled with 75 pounds of school books didn’t do anything for my mood. But I made it, dammit.

The hill is named “Corey Road,” but that doesn’t sound very impressive in sentences that begin: “I finally beat _____.” So, I’m looking for a more impressive nickname for the street. “I finally beat Glory Road.” “I finally beat The Widow-Maker.” You know, something like that.

Suggestions? [Tags: doep puzzles]

*That was a completely gratuitous Suzanne Pleshette reference. I just like her name. It sounds like fake fur.

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My son and I were distressed to find out that non-tivo-ed tv is still showing ads. So as we watched the five minutes of The Monkees that we could endure—an infuriating and stupid ripoff of The Beatles’ movies—we were forced to see a 30 second ad that showed an attractive young woman sitting on a bench waiting for a bus. “Don’t you wish everything was soft?” the narrator asks as the bench turns into a comfy couch.

1. Can you guess what this ad advertises? No, this is not the open-ended part of the puzzle, although it does give a new meaning to “open-ended.” The answer is in the first comment.

2. Once you’ve checked the answer, if you were in charge of marketing that product, what would one of your television commercials look like? Keep in mind that it has to be suitable for showing on whatever lame-ass cable station shows Monkee re-runs, although I suppose you could pick some other program to sponsor.

3. For extra credit, how might you market it on the Internet, and how would that change what you say about it? [Tags: doep puzzle]

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If you were asked to list all of the states in the US, which would be the last one you’d think of? And care to say where you’re from? [Added restriction, after the first three entries: You have to think of this state without actually listing them for yourself. That is, which would be the last you list, not which is the last you list.] [Tags: puzzle absurdities doep]

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I leave tonight for a conference in Maastricht devoted to the topic “Markets are conversations.” I give the final keynote, which is also the final speech of the conference. So, since I’m carrying the Cluetrain banner and the attendees—Dutch marketers—will have spent 1.5 days on the topic, it’s tempting to announce in an authoritative tone of voice that Cluetrain was wrong about markets. They’re not conversations. Markets are _________.

The aim is to fill in the blank with the most ridiculous plural noun for which one could still make some type of semi-reasonable case. To enter, you have to give the noun and a brief version of the case. For example, markets are petting zoos because, while they’re fun for a little while, it takes days to wash the stink off your hands.

Ok, so that one didn’t make much sense, but I’m sure you’ll do better. [Tags: puzzle]

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This is from Michael O’Connor Clarke who recalls trying to explain why pipe cleaners are called “pipe cleaners” to a six year old who had never seen anyone smoking. He wonders if there are “other examples of things still in everyday use whose names refer back to functions long since rendered obsolete.” (A quibble: Pipe cleaners are still used to clean pipes, just not as often as twenty years ago.)

Keep in mind that even though this is supposedly an open-ended puzzle, I’m not looking for words whose etymology refers to something obsolete, but words that have current plain-text meanings unrelated to their current use. So the fact that I picked up from my parents the habit of occasionally referring to a refrigerator as an “icebox” doesn’t count because that does not refer to its use, and neither does the quasi-fact that “testify” comes from the Roman practice of men holding their testicles when giving evidence in court. A telephone “dial” is also not a great example because it doesn’t refer to what it’s used for but to how it’s used.

A perfect example would be … ? [Tags: puzzle]

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Here are the lead articles from USA Today, and their evil twin reframings.

Original	Reframed
Liquids not as risky as first feared: TSA will allow air travelers to carrry items onto planes	TSA challenges terrorists: Bet you can’t bring down a plane with just 3-oz bottles of liquid!
Do thin models warp girls’ body image? Even the fashion industry concedes that gaunt is not good. But can an unhealthy trend be reversed?	Adding insult to injury: Fashion industry says to world’s starving “And you’re ugly, too”

Your open-ended challenge: Reframe one of today’s headlines.

(By the way, if you’re wondering why I’m doing these quizzes instead of actual blogging, I am heads down revising my book, so I’m feeling sort of pressed. Plus, for the past couple of days I’ve been at meetings I’m not allowed to blog about.) [Tags: doep puzzles]

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If you had to choose to give up one sense, which one would it be? But I’m really asking so I can ask Part 2: If you had to deprive all humans of one sense, which one would it be? Why? [Tags: puzzles]

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This episode of DOEP is yet another excuse for me to be dumb in public. This time, it’s about rivers.

Why does the mighty Mississippi roar? I’m pretty sure it’s not because of that powerful north-to-south gravity that’s so obvious on globes. Well, at least on globes that, in a fit of blatant hemispheric jingoism, put the north on top. Let me generalize: Why do rivers have currents? And if it’s because they come from melted snow rushing down mountains, then why are there rivers in the summer? And how do you explain the Amazon? Or the Nile? Or the Konkapot? Where’s all that water coming from and why is it in such a hurry to get somewhere? Why doesn’t it stop to smell the flowers, Mr. Businessman?

So, to summarize: Why didn’t I take freshman geography?

[Tags: doep puzzle rivers geography]

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