[Redacted A], New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Louisiana, [Redacted B], Kentucky, Maine, Alabama, South Carolina, West Virginia, Michigan, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, [Redacted C], Delaware, Washington, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, New York, [Redacted E], Idaho, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Massachusetts, [Redacted F], Montana, South Dakota, Maryland, Virginia, Connecticut, California, Kansas, [Redacted G], Minnesota, Nebraska, Colorado, New Jersey, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Wyoming.
For fear that [Redacted A] might give it away, I redacted some random states.
Spend a rather large amount of time trying to find out what the seventh missing state was before I realized there’s no [Redacted D].
The redacted states are Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, Utah, and Vermont. I suspect [Redacted A] is Hawaii. What else would give away the game merely by being at the top of the list?
Owing to the low placement of Nevada on the non-redacted list, it seems safe to exclude anything to do with the LDS. But I’m not at all convinced that Utah wouldn’t be [Redacted A] rather than Hawaii, despite Hawaii’s distinctiveness.
My first guess is percentage of state agencies that maintain interactive websites. I know Tennessee is very well-wired on the web, much more so than the states you would have expected to be super-wired (California and New York). Utah — at least SLC — is a major tech center also, a fact some people seem to forget focusing on more-glamorous coastal-state tech cities.
I have a slight correction. I was going to randomly pull states and redact them, but decided to target states that might show up very conspicuously at the top of a list. This is not quite as obvious as redacting Utah from a list about the LDS church, but it’s a state that is very often association with something.
[Redacted D] was actually Missouri, but I decided to unredact it and forgot to change the following letters. Sorry for the confusion.
I’m curious: are any of you other readers as clueless as I am about what’s going on here? Are we supposed to supply a separate answer for each (redacted??) letter, or is there some overriding theme to the whole list?
In other words, is it him or is it me?
It seems an awkward way to go about it, but really only the state on top of the list is what counts. The other redacts are a bit of noise to obscure what Will thinks would otherwise be too-obvious of a question to meet our exacting standards for Monday Trivia.
My man Will is willing to be tricky and obscure, but he’s not going to be intentionally unfair, so I’m willing to bet that once we reach the final answer, we’ll understand why the noise is needed to keep the puzzle challenging. But as for me, yeah, I’m gonna have to wait for a Tuesday hint; I took my best guess for today already and clearly that wasn’t right.
Burt is so much better than I am.
The quick answer is that I wanted to conceal a particular state. But if I list 49 states, it’s not hard to figure out which state I am concealing. so I omitted a handful of states. To solve this trivia question, just look at the states that are there and go from there.
Still scratching head. Is there a discreet answer for each letter (in which case Redacted A would relate only to category A [and redacted B to category B, etc]) or are the different state groups connected in some way (in which case Redacted A would relate to all groups)?
The bigger question is: why do I even care about the details? I won’t be anywhere near the right answer anyway.
It’s not you, it’s me.
The trivia question is more or less, ‘what statistic or phenomenon is represented by this ordered list of states’ – the redacted portions exist only because knowing the identity of [redacted A] is thought to make finding the answer too easy.
So far, I have no fishing clue, I think the Mr. Scott is right that [redacted A] is probably Hawaii, but I feel like Utah is a strong contender. Beyond that I’m clueless.
Hint: Hawaii is Redacted F, Utah is Redacted G.
The first thing I always look at is how far away are North and South Dakota. 11 states between them. (If you *REALLY* wanted to mess me up, you would have redacted one of those… well, not that doing that ever actually *HELPS*.)
Thank you Jaybird! Until your comment I didn’t realize that his list is sequential and not categorized by letter! Good golly, what an idiot resides here; it’s time to crawl off to the elephants’ graveyard of web-users.
Tuesday Hint: It involves a percentage of the population and is a fluid number.
Lepers?
I would love the answer to have something to do with hot sauce. Hot sauce is fluid, mostly.
If it’s “considering hot sauce a tool of Satan”, Utah would be first. Maybe that’s why it’s redacted.
New Mexico wouldn’t be second, though. (And, honestly, I understand that Hawaii would be neck and neck with Utah anyway.)
I was assuming Vermont as #1; that would lead to the obvious heading, “states with the highest percentage of workers in the manufacture and distribution of artisanal hot sauces with cute-but-not-too-offputting names.”
I was going to go with that one but Kentucky seemed too high.
“Put hot sauce on that? It’s poi, son.”
Percentage of population that donates blood?
And [Redacted A] is Transylvania.
Transylvania never achieved statehood. It almost made it into Trumanverse, though.
Wednesday Hint: New Mexico is at about 21%, Idaho at 15.1%, and Wyoming at 6.1%. North Dakota, next up, is at 8.8%, making Wyoming a bit of an outlier.
Number of households who have one or more family members in out-of-home care facilities.
Your latest hint gave the game away — it’s states which contain percentages of their populations. You shouldn’t have made it so easy.
Hint!
Redacted A: Mississippi
Redacted B: Georgia
Redacted C: Arkansas
Redacted D: Oops
Redacted E: Vermont
Redacted F: Hawaii
Redacted E: Utah
People who refused to cooperate with the U.S. Census.
Hint:
Washington DC would be #1, at a little over 23%, if it were included on the list. Statistics for the territories are not directly comparable.
People who were born in a state and still live in it? The percentages seem very low all around for that. Maybe the opposite — people who moved to the state from somewhere else? DC would have a very high number of people moving in (and out) based on the ebb and flow of politics. But I’ve no idea why Mississippi of all places would have the highest influx percentage — lowest would make sense, but Wyoming ought to be pretty low too, and it’s on the opposite end of the list.
Percentage of people age 18-64 who lack health insurance?
So when does the correct answer get posted?
I’m going to keep throwing more hints throughout the day. If nobody gets it, this evening.
Hint: There is a positive spin you can put on being towards the top of this list, if you’re so inclined, but I think most people would be more proud of their states if it were towards the bottom rather than the top of this list.
(“Yup” meaning a confirmation of suspicion, not in agreement to MS’s hypocrisy.)
Missing hint: Err, there was a comment above the above one that said:
Liberals might look at Mississippi’s stat and say “hypocrisy” while conservatives might look at DC’s and say “yup!”
Oh, *that* MS.
Receiving some kind of federal assistance, perhaps need-based scholarships?
Yes, no.
I was thinking either SNAP (food stamps) or Medicaid?
Food stamps. Sorry guys, I should have just included Mississippi. I guess I internally associate Mississippi with government assistance that I thought it would be more of a giveaway than it was (since Mississippi isn’t known for much else that can be quantified with statistics…).
I’m not so sure, I don’t think I would have been the only one to jump right to poverty if you’d said Mississippi and New Mexico were # 1 and #2 right from the get go.
One of the big things I think of when I think of New Mexico is tribal reservations. Government benefits follow from that. On the other hand, Oregon as #3 might have had me trying to think of something else.
This is not the first time Oregon has been oddly placed.
I never know if it’s a political question or if it’s something having to do with the number of fruits visible in the state tree pictured on the state flag.
Of course, it’s not like knowing that beforehand has ever helped me.
I’m puzzles. What’s the positive spin on receiving food stamps? (That’s the criterion that made me think scholarships.)
When more people are getting food stamps, more people who need help are getting help.
I didn’t want to go near this one. Except for Oregon and a few others, there was a strong correlation with ethnicity by %.