[Coffeebean]

X#xxxx, X#xxx, X#xxxxxxxxxx

My first thought to this section, I came, I saw, I conquered (but one too many x's)

I am thinking the # is a space.

[pipakin]

zizka wrote:

Another idea: The capped Xs mark the beginnings of words. Not sure what that means about the #s, the dashes, or the underlining, but it would explain why the first letter of each line and the first letter after punctuation (only occurs on line 6) are capitalized.

For reference, that would look like this:

X#xx X-xxxx,
Xxx X-xxxxxx,
Xx X Xxxx,
Xxx X Xxxxx
Xx Xx Xxx Xx.
X#xxxx,X#xxx,
X#xxxxxxxxxx
Xx Xx Xxx Xx.

[mortality]

My first thought was poem, especially since we have punctuation.

[zizka]

petunia wrote:

The 8 lines could really be 4 long lines that wrapped around and indented themselves. Or it could be a poem - does this structure look familiar to anybody?

Good idea.

Seems like we need ot find text to fit the character length. my initial guess is that the capital Xs may indicate letters that spell a message. If so, the #s may be word breaks. That schema gives a one letter word, 14-letter word, one-letter, one-letter, and four-letter. Despite my fondness for four-letter words, that combination seems unlikely to produce meaning.

If we're right about it being about finding the proper text, given the lenght, then what of the #s and what of the underlining? They appear to have been done with a straightedge, for what it's worth.

ps: I told you that tape was useless for any purpose but masking. There's a reason no one's written books about the myriad uses of blue painters' tape...


ETA:

Anyone think the punctuation is meant to be grammatical? If so, we have some oddly constructed sentences: "word-word, word-word, word, word word. word, word, word word." That kind of idiosyncracy seems to point to a poem.


Another idea: The capped Xs mark the beginnings of words. Not sure what that means about the #s, the dashes, or the underlining, but it would explain why the first letter of each line and the first letter after punctuation (only occurs on line 6) are capitalized.

Perhaps the #s stand for the homophone of a number--"won," "to," "too," "tin," "for," "sics," "thou sand" (for the old english clam digger, perhaps) are not #s.

Just thinking into the forum. Perhaps something will shake loose.

[Sylvia]

I'm curious what it means where it says

Quote:

The # was not a #.

What does it mean?

Gotta run, be back in about 6 to 8 hours.

[wkelly42]

Off-hand, I'd say that the other tape was meant to tape it to the door. Didn't work too well, and the envelope was lost.

[THESB]

Having no storyline and no questions to be answered sure makes these puzzles a bit harder to solve. I've been kicking the idea around that this may be binary, but the # and indentations make for a lot of combinations. Hopefully the answers to these questions will bring on more questions, and hopefully a story.

[pipakin]

had been looking at it and came up with this crazy thing. (This is most definitely wrong):

Only-king,
only-??????,
Wallace,
commanded
Ahasuerus.
Enlil, wise,
???????????
Ahasuerus.

but i think the X may represent accent, where the "x" is an unaccented letter. I dunno. Also, I was ignoring the #, going on a hunch.

[petunia]

Good Lord.

First thoughts:

There's a second piece of tape on this one, on the side. What for?
This letter was addressed by the same person as the first letter.
The "1" has a circle around it. So we have a circle, a caret, and a triangle.

On this letter, just counting the number of characters per line (not including the last line):

5-4,
4-6,
7,
9
9.
6,5 (6 underlined)
12 (7 underlined, then 2 underlined)
9

Totals: 21 big Xs, 51 little xs, 4 #s. 8 lines total; lines 2, 4, 6 & 7 are indented.

Possible connections with what we already have: "commanded" and "Ahasuerus" each have 9 letters. "W.Wallace" has 9 characters if you count the period. "Three" and "Enlil" each have five letters.

It doesn't look like this is going to be a simple thing where, for example, the big Xs could be vowels and the little xs could be consonants, because then the next to last line would have 10 consonants in a row.

The 8 lines could really be 4 long lines that wrapped around and indented themselves. Or it could be a poem - does this structure look familiar to anybody?

[THESB]

There is a new letter!

http://whitechapelfoundation.org/opencases/?p=3

[Sylvia]

throwing out some more ideas

[surfzoned]

And now on a completely unrelated note.

[mortality]

Here's the text of the update to Ethan's personal blog

Quote:

…'cause it feels like Wednesday morning. After all the excitement of the past week, with it's extreme OJT [ed. on-the-job-training] on OC [ed. Open Cases] and some pretty lengthy meetings on other stuff, followed by a fairly tame round of visiting a couple of the old haunts last night (and into the wee hours of this morning) I have just awoken to find that I feel at least 78% human. So, I shall now brew some coffee and spend a couple hours with my friends from Hamburg (up to number 6 of the 8 that appeared the first year). Also, got a note from Sylvia with a little more insight on that Simson line idea related to MSG3. Can't really rule anything out at this point, but that kind of complex math just seems out of place next to the fairly simple nature of the puzzle in MSG2 [ed. typo, means MSG3](as if I solved it, right? ). My thoughts only, Christopher is not discounting the Simson idea. Regardless, though, all the talk about geometry got me to thinking about how common math, and especially geometry, is in much of what we run across. And that reminded me of the memo that came across from Shannon last week. Didn't even get a chance to read it, but there was a diagram of some sort on it. Have to take a look at that tonight too if I can. Hopefully tomorrow will be at least a little more calm.

A few thoughts. The memo probably isn't significant to us, but maybe someone should follow-up just to make sure. The Open Cases are pretty clearly Ethan's baby with Christopher's oversight. Have they sought opinions from any of the other employees?

I think that confirms we should probably view this as a logic puzzle more than a mathematical puzzle. But given that there was a William Wallace who helped develop Simson Lines, it might be too soon to give up.

Perhaps the significance is that we only need to look for Simson Lines having to do with Enlil and Ahasuerus, the two names that have a connection.

[Sylvia]

update

[Sylvia]

I started at the bottom center approx. at the center L in ENLIL then traveled to the right making the first letter to fall on the line an "L"

What I have above is totally wrong. I couldn't remember exactly what I had gotten and couldn't read my own notes and did not won't to redo it and was not exactly sure if I missed some of them. I did my best using an image editing software, because, right now, my printer is totally out of ink and I don't have a compass or a protractor.

The first part "LILSUREUSW." and the last ".WEN" I'm almost positive is right. It's the stuff in the center, "WALLACHASUERUSECALLAW" that I messed up on big time.

Below are some examples of how I did it.