What's most intriguing about a crossword puzzle? Not knowing an 'across' word and then slowly seeing it appear, letter by letter, as you fill in the 'down' words.
What about the times when you don't get enough of the down clues either? What wouldn't you do to get out of the rut? You probably take down your dictionary - that little used object - from the loft. And just as you begin blowing dust off the cover, you realise that you don't even know where to start since you haven't got the very first letter of the word!
No dictionary would help you there… But psst! The Internet will.
The Crossword Solver (sorta) is one of many interesting things found on OjoHaven. The creator has appended 'sorta' because it helps you with only 'single English words, not phrases, names, or proper nouns (yet), and it only supports words up to 10 letters long (so far)'.
The interface presents ten fields, each with drop-down menus containing the letters of the alphabet and a question mark. All you do is set the number of characters that your mystery word comprises and fill in the corresponding fields with the letters that you already know, leaving question marks in the remaining places.
Hit the 'What is it?' button and get a list of potential matches.
Believe me, it works. I tried finding the word 'instruct' by keying in 'n', 'r' and 'c', and it threw up just four options: indirect, instruct, interact and underact. As you can see, the right answer was among them. I then tried finding the same word using only two letters and that worked just as well.
Next time the crossword clues stump you, log on. And -- just between you and me -- we won't call it cheating!
OjoHaven also offers The ColorText Brain Teaser, a riot of colour names, some written in the colour they spell and most in different shades. It's a test of focus and discrimination as you've got to read aloud the colour of each word and not the colour that it spells out. Most people start out well but go off-track after coming across a word written in the same colour. So be on your guard.
webPlayer
Would you like to listen to music in the background when you're visiting a site? I'm not referring to those annoyingly familiar tunes that play on some sites, making you feel as if someone on the phone has put you on hold. This one's different.
Type the URL of your favourite site into the webPlayer. It will then use the HTML of that site to generate a soundtrack: 'Content is stripped into sentences, then processed through an ASCII-based filter to result in a 'base sequence' of 8 numbers.'
Next, the numbers are converted to music using a 'well-known series of transformations adapted from the processes used by Schoenburg'. Schoenberg, for his part, had adapted this process from earlier ones by Machaut, Bach and Beethoven. So the sounds you hear could be indirectly influenced by some of the world's greatest composers!
As the HTML differs from site to site, each one will produce different music. Consecutive visits to the same site will also result in variations because the webPlayer is influenced by the time and date too.
And while the music you hear won't make you feel like dancing, the webPlayer is still an interesting project and worth a try.
Shakespeare vs Britney Spears
At an art exhibition at NGMA Mumbai, I stood before a gigantic painting of a cross-section of a cow. "That's one painting I'll never display in my living room!" I couldn't help remarking. But does a work have to be aesthetically pleasing to qualify as art?
On a visit to a photography exhibition at the NCPA, I gazed at the works on display and then told the photographer I liked her snaps. "They're not snaps but imageographs," she said, sounding deeply hurt. But they look just like snaps, I insisted. "No they are imageographs. It's a new genre, pioneered by me!" There was no arguing with the lady. Yet, while the photographs were indeed nice, I saw no reason for the fancy appellation.
We have different conceptions of art. Here's one site that doesn't force anyone else's notions on you. It asks you to rate various criteria on a scale of one to five. You can indicate how important it is for art to have beauty, technical ability, convey feelings or offer moral lessons.
There are no right and wrong answers. You state your views without fearing criticism from the so-called elite.
After that the site lets you play a game in which you pick two artists and see how they fare head to head on the basis of your very own evaluation. Choose from pop icons, dramatist, painters and novelists.
I matched Britney against Shakespeare and the teen idol lost to the long-dead bard by seven points!