Tali

@Bill there's an XKCD webcomic that proposes resolving the debate between pi and tau by introducing a new compromise constant, pau, which is 1.5 times the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference.

@Captain Quahog - and for those trying to suss out the answer etymologically, the "columb-" in "columbarium" is from the Latin "columba," meaning dove or pigeon. Seems a bit non-funerary, but the rows of niches in which the ashes are placed resemble the nesting boxes in a dovecote.

@Dave - yeah, figuring out BEAUT (not BEAST) and SOURS ON was responsible for like a third of my overall time...

@Kevin D The single largest purchaser of kale in the US used to be, of all places, Pizza Hut - not to eat, but to serve as decoration around the bowls in the salad bars.

@Joe no, because the colloquial name of the institution is Caltech, not Cal Tech.

@Bob T. - there's an old joke about how tennis champion Andy Murray was (at least according to the UK press) British whenever he won but Scottish whenever he lost

@Confused Kiwi "Bill and Coo" is a movie, apparently, but it's nearly 80 years old at this point and I have never heard of it before tonight.

@Steve L Which led to a great clue a couple years ago - something like "Best part of mayo?" solving to CINCO. And as with this one, there was some griping from solvers who didn't know that Spanish capitalization rules differ from English.

@William Kash Californian here, it's also ScARF. (Tbh, I don't think I've ever seen or heard SNARF outside of the NYT XW.)

@LJADZ - funnily enough, I had identical solve times on Tuesday and Friday this week

@Nick - re: 1D, my approach was - "well, I don't remember the details of BTTF, but this is clearly a reference to Biff betting on future sports events. So I'm looking for a 4-letter sports team." And once I had the U from URLS, it became clear pretty quickly - no pro teams would fit, this is U as in "university," and the most famous 4-letter college that fits (and that was a fellow Pac-10 team with U of Washington) is UCLA.

@Darren I only got that one because I played in the pit orchestra for The Mikado in college, and got to hear Ko-Ko sing about how "I drew my snickersnee" (spoiler alert: he didn't actually do that)

@The X-Phile - travel/aviation YouTuber Noel Phillips did a video about his visit to Nauru recently. Definitely worth checking out to see a bit of what the island looks like!

@Catherine I was really hoping we were going to get a Schrodinger puzzle there. Alas.

@jennie - to elaborate a bit on ALFA - apparently the NATO alphabet's creators found that some of their member countries' languages did not necessarily pronounce PHs as F, so they switched it to ALFA to avoid anyone reading it as alp-ha likewise, the word for J is officially spelled "Juliett," with two Ts, to make sure the French wouldn't say "zhoo-lee-AY"

@Peter C. I knew SNEES for a very similar reason - except that in my case it was playing cello in the pit orchestra for our university's Gilbert & Sullivan group! (Which made ROSINED in the same quadrant quite appropriate, for me at least.)

@Fritz I had CAT SCAN at first, as i'm sure many others did - but upon reflection, surely a CAT SCAN is a subtype of PET SCAN?

@N.E. Body It's like solving the purple set in Connections - you could just submit the last four and finish the puzzle, but doesn't it feel better to pause for a bit to work out the link?

@Jill - IIRC, W HOTELs were a Starwood brand (the Westin folks) before Marriott acquired them, and I'd assume the name was meant in the sense of "like Westins, but chic-er," so you weren't *that* far off!

@Stylus Happenstance - tbh, I just clicked back through Saturday puzzles in the Archive feature of the app until I found one with a longer time! (Not the most efficient method, I'm sure, but sometimes a question just grabs your attention and you can't let it go... yes, I do work in data analysis, why do you ask?)