Constructor: Ross Trudeau
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: THE BRONTËS (28D: Literary trio found in the answers to this puzzle's starred clues) — Emily, Charlotte, and Anne are all in there:
Theme answers:
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The concept is basic enough that I would be surprised if it hadn't been done a bunch before over the years. The problem would normally be that just having other women with those first names as the themers would be kind of dull. This puzzle seems to try to get around that problem by featuring the women's names as they are found in various titles (and always in the possessive). They're still women's names, obviously, but this expression of the theme is probably better than if the themers had simply EMILY POST, ANNE RICE, and CHARLOTTE ... RAMPLING? Why can't I think of any famous Charlottes. Weird. Anyway, this theme gets a lift from having the themers be titles instead of mere names, as well as from the unusual grid shape, which makes the whole thing feel like some kind of Monday / Friday hybrid. Lots of wide-open space and long answers alongside long answers, more characteristic of late-week than early-week grids. Also, mirror symmetry, which is increasingly common but still relatively uncommon and visually striking. I struggled most with CHARLOTTE'S WEB, as I was expecting a human "title character," and with CHAR- up front, I was thinking CHARLIE BROWN or CHARLIE whatever his name is from Willie Wonka, or CHARLES somebody. Wrong species, wrong gender. After I sorted that out, everything seemed pretty easy and typically Tuesdayish.
Here's how I opened the puzzle. JAMB was pretty straightforward, but I was even more certain than usual with JAMB because any time my first guess involves a high-value Scrabble tile (esp. "J" or "Q") being slotted into the primary position for both an Across and a Down, my faith in my first guess spikes—that is precisely where those letter want to live. If you wanna jam a "J" in your grid, that's typically where you jam(b) it:
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Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- CHARLOTTE'S WEB (19A: *Children's book whose title character says "If I can fool a bug, I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs")
- EMILY'S LIST (25D: *Prominent left-leaning political action committee)
- AUNTIE ANNE'S (6D: *Chain known for its soft pretzels)
Data binning, also called discrete binning or bucketing, is a data pre-processing technique used to reduce the effects of minor observation errors. The original data values which fall into a given small interval, a bin, are replaced by a value representative of that interval, often the central value. It is a form of quantization.
Statistical data binning is a way to group numbers of more or less continuous values into a smaller number of "bins". For example, if you have data about a group of people, you might want to arrange their ages into a smaller number of age intervals (for example, grouping every five years together). It can also be used in multivariate statistics, binning in several dimensions at once. (wikipedia)
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As you can (maybe) see, I was not certain of 4-Down at first, so I dropped down and checked the crosses on the latter half of the answer to see if my guess was correct (it was—>4D: Downloads in the testing phase = BETA APPS). I inferred the existence of BETA APPS from "beta-testing," a concept I'm familiar with. You can see here that we get a lot of repeaters right up front, some of them everyday (ALOE, ALEC) one of them a bit crustier (RLS), and then ERIS, which is the next thing I wrote into the grid after I took this screenshot (just under LAMP). We also run into MAA HEA SST SOU ESSO APU THA ESSO. It's a lot, but none of it makes me ILL, and this theme has such an odd and possibly demanding structure to it that I'm going to assume those repeaters were largely necessary to hold the thing together. Like glue. It would be great if the glue were a little less noticeable, but the theme concept is interesting enough, and the grid showy enough, that it doesn't really matter.
There are two UPs in the grid (ALL TIED UP, PILE UP), which is legal, it's just that I definitely noticed the repetition mid-solve (as opposed to after, when I'm taking inventory), so it was definitely a distraction ("Didn't we already...?"), if only a brief one. It's a pretty clean grid (aforementioned short repeaters notwithstanding), and the bonus long answers give it a liveliness a regular early-week themed puzzle might not have. I especially like SNOW PACK, which isn't flashy, but does feel original. OK, this EARLY RISER has to go put the coffee on. Maybe I'll pull a Brontë off the shelf. Something by Anne, whom I haven't read. Villette? Is that something? Whoops, nope. I mean, yes, it is, but it's Charlotte. Anne wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Well, I know we don't have those in the house. Off to the library, I guess. Take care.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]