New York Times, Thursday, February 4, 2016

You know you're an engineer when:

1.) You assume everyone knows the abbreviation SQRT. It's on every scientific calculator, by Newton's Apple! (I can just hear all the youngsters asking what a calculator is. And what the heck "by Newton's Apple!" means.)

2.) You work a square root symbol into your original grid, assuming that everyone will follow the "blatantly obvious" S Q R T sequence formed by the vertices. Blatant. BLAAAAA-TANT! (Or, maybe not.)

3.) You think DID THE MATH is absolutely perfect to tie the puzzle concept together. The theme answers are under the square root symbol, thus the puzzle DID THE MATH! Unless ... wait … the presence of the SQRT symbol means that the theme answers should be SQUARED in order to produce an accurate final result, i.e. THE FAB SIXTEEN then becomes the THE FAB FOUR after the puzzle DID THE MATH. Wait. Maybe it should be the other way around. Which is more logical? There is no logic! (brain lock shutdown initiated)

We engineers are a funny bunch.

These days, I've been spending a lot of time figuring out ways to work in more and more bonus long fill into puzzles. It's important to me to always give the solver more than they expect, and with the bar being raised higher and higher by strong constructors, this is not an easy task.

It used to be enough for me to shoot for six good bonus entries, but I've been experimenting with eight or even ten. This can really strain a grid, and trade-offs crop up often. As with today's grid, I find that using a bunch of long downs staggered through the grid, each one intersecting no more than two themers (but ideally, just one), can often work wonders.

Once I fixed R O O T in place — Will and Joel's second choice for a revealer — I filled around that corner as cleanly as possible, which led me to BLACKLIST as one of the only good possibilities at 34-Down. That reduced my flexibility at 4-Down, but after trying a bunch of things, THE MAFIA seemed to work well. Basically, I repeated this process from left to right in the grid, stopping and restarting dozens of times when I was forced into trade-offs I thought solvers would groan at.

I wasn't happy with SLEEPS IN, as it feels more neutral than an asset, but having something great in that slot meant a couple of gluey bits holding it in the grid. Always the trade-offs — I pity the fool who has to make them.

(I so badly wanted the full A TEAM intro, but my original clue might have been too long for Will: ["In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... the ___."] Ah, well.)