Puzzling Success

Nick Baxter’s friends have done some serious thinking lately. Hunched over tables in a Holiday Inn ballroom in Brno, Czech Republic, four very smart guys selected and directed by Baxter, ’79, MS ’80, won the World Puzzle Championships—again.

For more than 15 hours over three days, competitors from 12 countries attempted to figure out mazes, patterns, logical sequences and tricky grid configurations using nothing but brains and a pencil. Points were ascribed according to the difficulty of each puzzle and the total number of correct answers, and team points were based on individual members’ standings. Team USA edged the host Czechs 6,266 to 5,880 to win their fourth consecutive title.

Baxter, who competed on several world champion teams in the ’90s, says he “decided to go into management” to ensure a long-term association with the American puzzling squad. As captain, he administered the qualifying test last June—he designed several of its puzzles—and handled logistical details for the U.S. contingent. And when the team appeared to be wearing down emotionally after a difficult first day of competition, Baxter gave them the equivalent of a locker room pep talk. “I may be giving myself too much credit,” he says, “but they did much better the second day.”

Going After the Bad Guys

RAISING HOPE: Maduro has pledged to curb crime.

AP Wide World

Five years after gunmen kidnapped and murdered his only son, Honduran businessman Ricardo Maduro is now in a position to stem his country’s rampant crime. On January 27, he was sworn in as president.

Maduro, ’69, was elected last November on an anticrime, jobs-growth platform, winning 52 percent of the vote. A former chairman of the Honduran central bank, Maduro earlier was general manager for Xerox Honduras and chief executive of Inversiones La Paz, an import-export company.

He faces an enormous challenge in a country where 40 percent of the population is illiterate and more than 35 percent are unemployed. An estimated 30,000 gang members have overwhelmed law enforcement, a situation Maduro knows from personal experience. “We are going to thoroughly reform the country and enforce its laws,” he said at his swearing-in.

Maduro already has consulted with several foreign leaders, including President Bush. During his Washington visit in mid-January, he also met with another former resident of the Farm—National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Hmmm . . . Where Did He Go?

BACK SOON: The Thinker has hit the road.

Rod Searcey

He sits on the front of the course catalog, graces the cover of the admissions brochure and adorns the Showcase section of this magazine. But Auguste Rodin’s Thinker is not on campus. Not this year, anyway. He’s touring galleries in Australia and Southeast Asia, leaving behind a remarkably naked pedestal on the west side of Meyer Library.

The Thinker’s globe-trotting has increased in recent years, since the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, which co-owns the statue with Stanford, began to organize traveling exhibitions of Rodin sculpture. “It’s part of the mission of all museums to lend out and share art with the world,” explains Noreen Ong, associate registrar for loans and exhibitions at Stanford’s Cantor Center for the Visual Arts.

One of 21 authorized full-size casts of the work, Stanford’s Thinker is expected to return to the Farm next fall, unless his overseas public clamors for a longer stay. Until then, campus fans will have to be content with the Rodin Sculpture Garden’s Gates of Hell—upon which sits a miniature Thinker.

Creature Feature

MEET YOUR COUSIN: The PBS series examines animal origins.

Courtesy Sea Studios Foundation

Your mother is a sponge.

That’s not a strange new epithet, but hard-core science. In an evolutionary sense, your mother is a sponge.

This information comes courtesy of an ambitious television series created by a handful of Stanford scientists and alumni, including Mark Shelley, ’72, Nancy Packard Burnett, ’65, and Stanford lecturer emeritus Charles Baxter. Titled The Shape of Life, the eight-part program airing on PBS this spring chronicles the various ways animals have developed. Sponges, it turns out, gave rise to every creature on earth. According to producer Shelley, new genetic evidence suggests that these multicellular “beautiful blobs” are squarely at the base of all animal life. “Every animal has gone through a sponge ancestor,” he says.

In addition to explaining animal origins, Shelley says, he hopes The Shape of Life will increase awareness of and appreciation for alleged low-lifes such as invertebrates—perhaps in segments like the one about the hunting habits of sea stars or the one in which flatworms engage in penis fencing.

Sea Studios Foundation, founded by Shelley and Burnett, co-produced the series with National Geographic Television.

It airs April 2.

They've Been Around

TRIP MATES: Fonseca and von Lossberg in Argentina.

Courtesy Scott von Lossberg

March 3, 2001: The self-dubbed “Wander Boys” climb the Inca Trail and explore the ancient ruins at Machu Picchu.

July 4: Searching for fireworks and barbecues in Bulgaria—the 21st country on their journey—the boys find solace (and lunch) in a McDonald’s.

September 11: Desperate for news, they camp out in the hotel lobby at a Hilton in Hanoi, Vietnam, and spend the day watching CNN.

December 11: After 341 days, 133 hotels, 89 bus trips, 60 train rides and 31 plane flights, it’s over. Carlos Fonseca and Scott von Lossberg, both ’95, board a flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to Los Angeles and complete their yearlong journey around the world.

“We didn’t like our jobs, didn’t have serious relationships, had the money to do [the trip] and somebody to do it with,” explains Fonseca, a former Los Angeles-based attorney.

Though they had only each other—“I don’t think married couples get along as well as we did,” says Fonseca—he and von Lossberg never lacked moral support. Family, friends and dozens of groupies followed their progress through 40 countries at www.watchuswander.com.

“The website took on a life of its own,” says Fonseca. “People had to get their fix every week. My aunt’s daughter’s third-grade class in Chicago was following our trip, [as was] Scott’s mom’s hairdresser.”

Now the challenge is to find jobs as interesting as their trip. “When I was working, I couldn’t even remember what I did the day before,” Fonseca admits. “I can sit down and tell you what I did every single day last year because each day was so unique.”