Stanford Engineering Puzzle

February 2009

Unit conversions are a fact of life in engineering, especially if a product is made or sold in more than one market. In the old days one might have done it on paper or whipped out some clever plastic wheel. Nowadays there are calculators and handy Web sites. Here, however, your job is to convert inches to meters, then "cube" those to make lilters and then to convert back too the standard unit quarts. Along the way you'll be forming new words, by changing one letter and rescrambling each turn.

Marge Kastner and David Orenstein created this puzzle.

Directions

Starting with the word "INCHES" change one letter to form a new word suggested by the clue on the next line. Keep going that way until you need to change one more letter to spell METERS and keep going through LITERS to QUARTS. When you are done, send the secret "word" to Marge Kastner, which is to say the first letter of the first row, the second letter of the second row, all the way up to the sixth letter of the sixth line you filled in. Have fun.

INCHES
_ _ _ _ _ _ (doorbells)
_ _ _ _ _ _ (belief in a deity)
_ _ _ _ _ _ (conceptual motifs)

METERS
_ _ _ _ _ _ (these make one deserving)

LITERS
_ _ _ _ _ _ (modifies)
_ _ _ _ _ _ (military gesture of respect)
_ _ _ _ _ _ (family of EE professor emeritus, Cal ______)

QUARTS

"Winning" entries
Here are the folks who get Web credits for their solutions--the first 20 in the gate and every 10th one after that.

1)	Ed Wilson
2)	Mark Perkins
3)	Ratan
4)	Nick Baxter
5)	Rick Doherty
6)	Olivia Williamson
7)	Tony Lillios
8)	Charlie Jackson
9)	Philip James
10)	Jesse Jones
11)	Carl Rosendahl
12)	Chris Herrera
13)	Paul Swenson
14)	Larry Willard
15)	Kevin Koehler
16)	Achim von der Nuell
17)	Lynda Leidiger
18)	William Streeter
19)	Mark Robichek
20)	Julie Newell
30)	Shravan Nargundkar
40)	Carl Farrell
50)	Chi-Ming Chien
60)	Andrew Craze
70)	Trina Flores
80)	Roger Bourke
90)	Peter German
100)	Mark Kahn
110)
120)

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles? Go to our Archive page.