CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

Before I continue  mydiscussion of the thought of Karl Marx, let me offer a little expression of praise for the online version of the New York Times crossword puzzle. For about 13 months now I have been doing the puzzle online rather than on paper, as had been my custom for 20 years or more. The great virtue of doing the puzzle online is that the app keeps track of how you do day by day, week by week, month by month. As everybody knows who is addicted to the Times puzzle, it starts very easy on Monday, gets progressively harder until Thursday, which always has a special tricky gimmick in it, and then continues getting harder until Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is not harder, it is just longer – in difficulty it is roughly equal to the Wednesday puzzle. Today the app told me that I completed the puzzle in less than my average time but not as quickly as my best time. The app also purports to keep track of my global average of successful solutions but there is a flaw in the app which makes its calculation incorrect. I think I have successfully solved the puzzle roughly 95 or 96% of the time in the past 13 months but the app claims that my success rate is 99.5%. The problem is that when I fail and ask to see the completed puzzle so that I can find where I made my mistake, the app records that my streak of successful solutions is ended but then incorrectly treats the revealed puzzle as a successful solution. Oh well, nothing is perfect, but the New York Times puzzle online comes close.  On to Marx.