Okay now it can be told. The reason you haven't been able to get to the Mindsport website for the last couple of months is because it had been hacked into. But, wow, is that something or is that something! Looks like MS has finally arrived after a quarter century of trying to no avail. Now we're in the company of NASA, the Bank of England, CERN's Large Hadron Collider superblog and the CIA -- not to mention the White House itself -- who all pride themselves no end each sundown for hosting hackers and often, I understand, show off who has more.

Anyway the way all of us found out the www.mindsport.org presence on the Net was tainted was that those who tried to browse their way in were told by the sublime Google gods who rule over our ineffectual little online lives "proceeding to this website can be dangerous to your pancreas" or "abandon all hope ye who enter for here be demons" or "geddouddahere scumbag" or whatever but the message metaphors were never mixed. As a result, the mailcall dwindled by a warp factor of 10 and, what's more, a lot of people missed a lot of puzzles. Therefore, by comparing normal response loads with what was actually throughput, I've figured out which ones were relegated to cyber oblivion. Two particular weeks were dumped on the hardest. Thus, I'm going to repeat the gist of those e4s for the benefit of our beloved loser-outers. (People who had access to print editions, please bear with us, pretending you have a choice in the matter.)

3. (e4) As you move from place to place during your life, including visits to foreign countries, visualise the corresponding path of your antipodal point -- that's the point traced exactly through the centre of the Earth to the opposite side of the globe. What percentage of the time, would you say, is your antipodal trace on water and what on land? Most people allow for the fact that about two-thirds of the globe is covered by water and so they answer that this antipodal point would be on water anywhere from 65 to 90 percent of the time. But here's something startling: for most Americans the answer's closer to 100%! That's because there are only a few square kilometres of the continental United States that map onto land. Most of western Europe and Israel also map into water, except for parts of Spain. So what are the chances for people in India to exit on the other side of midnight?