Financial Times 14,840 by MONK

24 comments on “Financial Times 14,840 by MONK”

1. An enjoyable tussle achieved without noticing the Nina – but then when did I ever notice a Nina?

   thanks to Monk and PeeDee

2. Thanks Monk and PeeDee

   Tiny typo in the parsing of 2dn: I think you meant fUNDEd not fUNDED, as both ends are removed.

3. I would not have spotted the grid joke, which does seem a little fussy anyway, but the clues are very good. I enjoyed this.

4. Another excellent crossword from Monk that I found hard to finish without dictionaries etc.

   Nina? I don’t think we solvers can blame ourselves for not finding it.
   I was looking for a nina (as there is most of the time something going in Monk’s puzzles), notably around the edges. Alas.
   Not 100% sure whether the nina is a nina or just coincidence.
   If it is, well, then he surely made the grid construction harder for himself but solving not significantly easier for us.

   I was a bit surprised to see that both homophone clues (12ac, 24ac) had the same indicator. Usually Monk tries to avoid these things.

   Clever crossword.

5. Re 3d: a “strawberry blonde” would not actually be fair-haired but reddish; it’s only “blonde” (“what may follow strawberry”) that is fair

6. I Liked 22ac, but I wasn’t enamoured of the rest of it. 12ac is ridiculously obscure.

7. Tend to agree wondering if this a Nina or just coincidence, you can extrapolate anything from a few data points.
   Thanks PD & Monk, didn’t find this easy and probably made worse by looking for the Nina PD mentioned in his preamble…

8. Found this one quite tough and ultimately failed on 21dn. IDIOT as an adjective delayed me for some time too.

   Thanks to Monk and PeeDee

9. Sil and flashling: Every answer contains an A or a D, but not both. Exactly 26 answers contains As, and exactly 26 contain Ds. Just given the last of these facts, the probability that a random allocation would put all the A-answers into across positions and all the D-answers into down positions is approximately 0.00000 00000 00002. Strictly in assessing the probability of a coincidence, we should double this last probability, because it would be equally surprising if all the A-answers were in down positions and all the D-answers in across positions.

   I think this is a nina.

10. Apologies – my figures at 9 were absurdly wrong. I should have said 13 A-answers and 13 D-answers. That makes the probability approximately 0.00000 01.

    I still think this is a nina.

11. PB, be careful, Monk’s a mathematician ….
    So watch what you say! 🙂

12. A little late to the party here .. Thanks PD and Monk for a fine puzzle.

    I didn’t manage to complete it but did come dangerously close. Well spotted on the Nina – PD!!!

    A query on 2d – I solved the clue but was wondering whether ‘endlessly’ should typically mean only one end removed or can it be used to signify both ends, as in the clue here?

    Cheers
    TL

13. TL @12 – I think the setter can use endlessly to mean missing any or all of the ends as he chooses. I can’t see anything in the word that makes it more specific.

    PB @9 – surely the probability that that particular letter pattern appears in this crossword is 1, it is a certainty since it has already happened. Now if you are talking about the probability of the pattern appearing in another future crossword then you start to make sense.

14. Thanks to PeeDee for the usual immensely thorough blog, and to all for comments. Popping in — at PeeDee‘s request — to confirm that the Nina was actually an unchecked A/D in each across/down respectively. I had indeed considered MARTELLO at 20ac, but only long after submitting (blast!); and that was even having visited the Martello Tower on Hoy in recent years. Sorry about BEAU-PERE, Novice@6, but that seemed fair game to me as I knew it from French O-level as “father-in-law”. Just to reply to Hedgehoggy@3 that this wasn’t really meant to be a joke; the setting Ninascenti use such things simply to seed a single grid from the countless available options, even if it increases the challenge of the grid fill. Finally, Turbolegs@12, I’m in the camp that uses “endlessly” to remove either one or two ends, as the clue context dictates.

15. PeeDee@13: I was really responding to flashling’s comment@7 “you can extrapolate anything from a few data points” and trying to show that the internal evidence for a nina here is really very strong indeed.

    One way of doing this is to assess the probability that the observed pattern or something at least as remarkable would have occurred if Monk had not actually been trying to do anything special with the As and Ds in the grid. If this probability is very low, then we can confidently say that the pattern of As and Ds was deliberate.

    However, I think I have made a complete mess of my attempt to estimate this probability, and any attempt to put it right is likely to dig me even deeper into a hole, so at this point I will stop digging.

16. PS Sil@11, I’ll gladly yield to PB@10 when it comes to probability, as the last time I studied it we were asked to compute the odds of finding matching pairs of socks from a pile in a darkened room. That’s precisely why undergrad male mathematicians possess only one pair of socks.

17. PB – you can’t apply statistical tests like that retrospectively. You would be basing your hypothesis “Monk had been doing something with As and Ds” on the data you are trying to test (which had a lot of As and Ds in it).

    It would be like throwing the lottery winner in jail each week because the chances of him/her winning was so small that it could not have happened by chance.

18. PeeDee@17: It is a matter of correct application of the notion “something at least as remarkable”. In the lottery case, any other ticket holder winning would be as remarkable as the actual winner.

19. Exactly, you would need to calculate the likelihood of every possible nina or otherwise notable grid, not just the As and Ds. An enormous task even to think what they might be let alone how to quantify them.

    Even then the test would still be flawed as the reason we are testing this particular data set is that we have already noticed a possible nina, so you could not think of the data as selected randomly.

    You couldn’t confidently deduce anything statistically from this.

20. Fair enough pb,pd et al, seems I was wrong but as ninas go this was pretty obscure, and I’m sure someone could find other coincidences in the grid or clues.
    Monk I’m not knocking anything, maybe enigma level Ninas are OTT for the FT. I’ll shut up now. There’s a Nina in this comment…

21. Not sure how the probability estimates are being worked out here – I’d say it would be complex, almost impossible. This is not like tossing a coin, or selecting socks in the dark. It would depend on how frequently letters appear in words etc etc and as the words interlink (it is a ‘crossword’), all the entries (unlike say choices of lottery numbers) are not independent.

22. nmsindy@21: I fully agree that most of the calculations that are implicit in my reasoning are impossible to carry out with any claim to accuracy. This certainly applies to anything based on letter frequency. For a start, the overall letter frequencies in crosswords are not going to be the same as in normal written English, before beginning to factor in the fact that each letter is in a particular place in a crossword grid.

    The only calculations I attempted related to the fact that all the answers with an A were in across positions and all the answers with a D were in down positions. The answers would be correct to 1 significant figure as given if grid effects could be ignored. My gut feeling is that grid effects would lower these probabilities slightly.

23. Apropos of Flashling@20‘s comment, I don’t think a Nina can be either “obscure” or “OTT” (for any organ) if, as here, the puzzle can be completed without even spotting it. All I can do is to reiterate the Monk@14 comment: that the Nina was used “simply to seed a single grid from the countless available options” (with, perhaps, the proviso that the Nina should not introduce more than a couple of less common words).

24. Thanks Monk and PeeDee

    Only got to this Saturday AUS time – and it took most of the day on and off to get it finished. Thought it pretty enjoyable with a couple of little niggles – but probably unfounded if hedgehoppy was happy!

    Although a ROAN can have a background bay colouring, it can be also chestnut, brown or black with the distinguishing sprinkling of white hairs being the differentiator – so can’t see how they are synonyms here.

    RIBBING, which I didn’t get, I thought was a bit tenuously defined as ‘with rods’. I had gone with ROBBED (held up with rods (guns)) with BED = sink (ground where water collects) and ROB = deliver (from ‘stand and deliver’) – both of which were a stretch. I often get caught out with one clue from Monk and this was it.

    Couldn’t find the clerical reference of BEAU-PERE – had the step father / father-in-law literal translations only. Also didn’t work out the nina despite noticing lots of A’s and D’s.

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