GinohnNews

G: We went to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at Center Stage in Baltimore Friday night, because Rich is in it. He was fabulous. Others were good too. Not my kind of play, tho, the parts that didn't have Rich in them. Still, enjoyable enough. A friendly woman sat next to us and talked to us during intermission. She was a play actress. She also might have been a bit off her rocker.

Afterwards we met Rich in the lobby bar and had a couple of beers with a lot of folks from the cast. That was very nice, we chatted politics with a guy named John who had been cast in the play but had to leave because of and injury. But he came out to hang with the cast that night. Then we stopped by Rich's Baltimore apartment (that he gets with the role)  and then out to eat something before driving home.

Saturday I worked on painting the room a bit more until Dave and Scott came over with Rock Band and we played that. Later we all went out to dinner and to see a movie with TVTom, then we all came back here and played Rock Band a bit more. Fun!

Sunday I went to yoga at RnA's with Izolda, and then back that night for an Oscar watching party. In between I painted more and at some points pulled off some of the masking tape to see how that was going. The same thing happened when I was painting that desk - the paint bled under the masking tape and I will have to do tons of touch up work. I thought I really rubbed the tape down. I guess I just have no idea how hard you have to do that to make it work. What a waste of time.

Nothing else to report.

J: My brother Bill sent this brainteaser:

What 9 letter common English word is still a word each time you remove one letter from it (8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1)? The letters do not have to be removed in order from the beginning or end of the word...

I immediately ignored the "common English word" rule and found this solution:

• Stoppings - fasteners consisting of narrow strips of welded metal used to join steel members
• stopping - as in "there's no stopping me!"
• topping - exceeding or surpassing
• toping - drinking habitually and excessively
• toing - from "toing and froing" - going from one method, idea, or plan to another in a way that wastes time when you are trying to achieve something, such as this.
• ting - a light metallic sound, as of a small bell.
• tin - a malleable, metallic element
• in - within the bounds of
• I - as in "I rock!"

I then realized it's easier to build from 1-letter words (duh). I found more:

• 10-letters: i in sin sing singe singer stinger stringer stringers astringers - (real word- falconers who keep goshawks)
• 9-letters: a at pat pate plate plater platter splatter splatters
• 9-letters: i id rid ride ridge bridge bridges abridges abridgers
• 9-letters: i in pin pine spine spline spliner splinter splintery
• 8-letters: o op cop cope coper cooper coopers
• 11-letters: i in sin sing sting sating stating estating restating restarting prestarting

Then, using my trusty computer and word lists, I found 147 "reducible" 9-letter words. The number of reducible words at first increases as you add letters, reaching a peak at 5-letter words and then descending. Starting with the one-letter words a and i (Karl convinced me not to use "o") and adding letters, we can expand to:

• 39 2-letter words
• 276 3-letter words
• 1387 4-letter words
• 2633 5-letter words
• 2033 6-letter words
• 1618 7-letter words
• 717 8-letter words
• 147 9-letter words
• 12 10-letter words

All twelve of the 10-letter words seemed fairly common. More on "commonness" next week. I found NO 11-letter reducible words. (The computer wouldn't accept "prestarting".)

Here's how I did it. I used a kind of brute-force two-steps-forward-one-step-back method on practically every word in the dictionary.

Starting with two-letter words, I took the entire list of 2-letter words in the English language and removed any that didn't contain "a" or "i". That was an easy step compared to the rest of the task. It left me with a list of 39 words to build my 3-letter word list.

I took the all the 3-letter words in our language and for each word created all three variants of 2-letter possible words, by removing the first letter, second letter, or third letter. I checked this new list of 2-letter possibilities (three times bigger than all 3-letter words in the English language) against my 39 reducible 2-letter words, and threw out the words that didn't construct matches. I was left with a new list of 276 3-letter reducible words. Then I repeated the process to get 4- through 10-letter words. At 11 letters, none of my 10-letter constructed words (11 constructions for each 11-letter word in the English language!) matched any of the reducible 10-letter words (only 12 in all) so that's where I was forced to stop.

Then I found out that somebody else wrote a program and used an even larger list. (Turns out English gets bigger every day. The programmer admitted that half the list contains words you've probably never seen.) He found 18 11-letter reducible words! Here's one:

• sparklingly
• sparkingly
• sparingly
• springly
• springy
• spring
• sprig
• prig
• pig
• pi
• i