Rosenbaum's article is yet another example of that increasingly common form of argument which can be stripped down to "You like that?!? Dude!", but apart from being annoying, he's also wrong.

During the recruiting for the top-secret project to crack German codes that was housed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, British Intelligence specifically looked for qualified individuals who regularly (and swiftly) solved the London Times crossword puzzle. American intelligence had similar requirements in its recruiting.

The pattern recognition skills and aptitude for analogous thinking that puzzles develop and encourage proved particularly helpful in cracking the German Enigma code - work which also helped Bletchley scientist Alan Turing understand and express the theoretical problems that not only solved the code, but also laid the foundation for modern computer science.

So the very machine which enabled me to waste so much of my morning reading Rosenbaum's article has an evolutionary history that includes a healthy dose of crossword DNA.

Puzzles also help one develop a sense of irony, Mr. Rosenbaum.