Tim Smith

The clue for 98 down, “Lead-in to Tech” should have been “Lead-in to tech”. The school it is referring to is Caltech, not CalTech or Cal Tech.

I'm not sure the clue for NO TRUE SCOTSMAN (NTS) works. NTS is when someone makes an assertion of the form P->Q, someone else offers an instance of P that is not Q as a counterexample, and the first person claims that p is not really an instance of P. The clue lacks the back and forth between two parties that NTS involves. The two assertions in the clue are of the forms P->Q and !Q->!P respectively. Thats not NTS, nor is it even a fallacy. The second statement is simply the contrapositive of the first, which is logically equivalent. That kind of rewriting a statement in its contrapositive form is very common in mathematical logic.

I didn’t notice the circles. They are very hard to see in dark mode. They should be a lighter color, such as the color of the letters.

Abaci are generally considered to be digital, not analog, because they represent numbers discretely.

I got stuck thinking the clue for 45 down was trying to be clever, and maybe “Down Under band” didn’t necessarily mean a band from Australia. Google informed me that ABBA in 1976 had an iconic TV special titled “Down Under” filmed during a tour of Australia, and I spent approximately forever trying to make that work. Anyone else fall for this?

I never got the theme because I missed some of the circles. They can be very hard to see in dark mode. Maybe make circles white in dark mode?

Tip for people for whom this puzzle is not showing up in the mobile app: you can get to it from the archives.

I didn’t realize there were circles until reading the column after solving. Night mode makes them hard to see.