1.) There are just over 2,000 strips in the Sheldon archives to search through to find the hidden image.
2.) We had roughly 260 people find the hidden image -- which I think is pretty impressive.
3.) Among some of the methods used to find the hidden image, this qualifies for the "Easiest Possible Search Technique" Award. Sheldonista Dani W. found the hidden image by hitting the blue Random button underneath the strip...and "boink", up came the scavenger-hunt item!
4.) Easily qualifying for the "Least Best Use of Lab Time, But Still Arguably An Inventive Use of Leisure Time" Award was Sheldonista Carlos Z., from Sao Paulo. He's a software developer who works with computational vision and image processing, and wrote a small program to "check if a given strip had the square."
5.) I had lots of folks e-mail me to say that, after they started searching, they got lost in actually *reading* the archives...and looked up five hours later not remembering what they were looking for. That's awesome! My secret hope was that you'd have fun reading through the archives again -- and a lot of you clearly did. Interestingly, lots of those folks ended up buying Sheldon Books this week. If it's all right with you, I'll take that as a compliment. You had fun readin' the archives and wanted to read more -- so thank you for that!
6.) I won't (yet) reveal which strip holds the hidden image, as I know a half-dozen folks are still looking.
7.) And the winner is....ta-dum! Greg Schatzman! Greg, e-mail me to talk over your prize sketch!
8.) Greg, by the way, found the image 14 minutes after my blog post went live.
