| Page 54 of 64 [947 Posts] | Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, ..., 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, ..., 62, 63, 64 Next |
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| Sylvia |
you know, you could be on to something there. After all, that is the only comprehensible part of the whole thing.
The ____ was not a ____. and again, according to the wikipedia
 Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 1:22 am |
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| zizka |
maybe upper/lower case shows the sie of the letter. Hence, all initial sentence letters are large Xs. the remainder would something like l's (lower case L) t h j k b d i (give or take a few) would all be upper case X's, while a, c, v, e, w, u, g, s, etc would be lower cases.
Other thn that, I have no idea about the significance of letter case. I;m liking # to equal spaces more and more, but (of course) surf has some reasonable ideas. "The king was not a _____" is awfully damned tempting... And, as petunia said, the past tense makes little sense if that is just a line ot help clarify the code. Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 12:31 am |
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| Sylvia |
# in the wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign
Here is a couple things that wikipedia says about the #. Proving that it can be used as a space. On the wiki page there is more uses for it as well.
Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 12:06 am |
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| Sylvia |
looking at it from a different angel
I'm going to break this down another way, see if we can see anything.
to me it looks like a space could take the place of the #. Also notice that the last word in each sentence is the same. XxXxXxxXx
It does look like a poem.
this shows how the last two words seem to be the same. Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:53 pm |
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| yellowcard |
I like Pipakin's theory that capital X's denote the beginning of a word. It looks like good English poetry when done that way.
Given that, I don't think #'s look like spaces since X's already provide space, X's begin each line, and there aren't enough #'s to justify translation as a space. "The # was not a #," reads to me that the character "#" was not intended to represent what "#" traditionally represents. Either a keyword or homophonic word to a number (as has already been suggested) makes sense to me. The big key to me is the hyphens. My guess is that the punctuation needs no decoding, and therefore makes the hyphenated words valuable. What kinds of words begin with "X-..."? Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 11:14 pm |
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| surfzoned |
MSG1`
6 #'s
and 6 words gained from MSG2. Coincidence? (Meta- our PMs have a affinity for well thought out and yet still horrible prose) Taking into consideration that there are only 4 non-punctuation character types theres a small chance it could be translation to binary then converted to ascii. Each X or x could also stand for a single word. It's also possible that the 6 words from MSG2 replace the 6# in MSG1. Which begs the question, "what about MSG3". Sidenote: Thank you to everyone, too many to list, throwing idea's out there... Collaboration is how we usually get these solved. 
Could be morse or hex.. or.... SO many possibilities... Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 9:13 pm |
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| petunia |
Like something to do with ancient Sumeria perhaps? Sumerian poetry maybe?
I still have to get my brain around the # = space idea, but in the meantime - when I look at this and imagine it being read aloud, it kind of feels like the commas are being used to make a list. As in, "This, that, the other are like so. Whatsit, thingy are otherwise." It's curious that the last line says "The # was not a #." Why specify past tense?? It's funny about that tape... Makes total sense that it was used to tape the envelope to Whitechapel's door, where it of course fell off and blew down the street into the bushes by the lawyer's office. What doesn't make sense is why somebody clever enough to come up with these codes doesn't know that painter's tape sucks unless you're painting! I was going to suggest getting the NY guys to check their door to see if they could see evidence of anything having been taped there, but then I realized that not leaving marks is the one thing painter's tape IS supposed to be good at, so... nevermind. 
How well does it stick to paper, though? Maybe we can get them to steam open the next one (assuming there is one). Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 8:21 pm |
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| Coffeebean |
What about morse code? X = dot x = dash (since we are including all of our farfetched ideas
 ) skip the #s....and it looks like this:(with punctuation in brackets)
. - - . (--) - - - -(,) . - - . (--) - - - - - -(,) . - . . - - -(,) . - - . . - - - - . - . - . - - . -(.) That's just the first half: and not able to make any real words yet. Somehow, I think we have to change this message into a different code. And the reason we received this message AFTER the second and third, may be important: meaning, there is something in the other messages that will help us solve this one. Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:20 pm |
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| zizka |
The two ideas I like so far (and I prefer Coffee's idea, 1, over mine, 2) are that 1) it means the # (symbol in the coded text) is not a symbol in the plain text (ie it's an empty space). 2) it stood for a number that isn't a number--a homophone of a number, like too or to. In that wacky little system, it would stand for a word rather than a letter or a space. So if you had X#xx it could be Stone, where the # = to. Admitedly, a bit far fetched. idea 1 makes more sense. (much more) Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:02 pm |
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| Coffeebean |
more random thoughts
maybe, the number is not a number?
and what does X stand for? 10 and small x? dont know (maybe zero?) 100010000010001000000010010100001000101000001001001000100100000100001000000000001001001000100 or 10 0010-0000, 100010-000000, 1001010000, 100010100000 1001001000100. 10 0000, 10 000, 10 0000000000 1001001000100. no luck so far decoding that to mean anything tho. Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 6:00 pm |
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| WolfHawk |
What does # stand for? Number, pound, etc. Meaning it is a weight not a measure? Or a game (tic tac toe) not a number? Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:55 pm |
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| zizka |
'scuse me while I...
...step out on this here limb:
If it is a poem, this would be my guess at the ryme scheme: A B A B A B or C B or C A Is that some recognized form? I'm a total phillistine, I'm afraid.
i wonder if he'd have restrained himself t oonly two hyphens? Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:31 pm |
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| THESB |
Shakespeare was a big "hyphen-ater"
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:20 pm |
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| zizka |
So, then, we'd have word breaks at #s, at the ends of lines, and after punctuation? I can live with that (providing it works out to be correct ).
That gives us, using pip's notation (i'll us two spaces between "words") X xxX-xxxx, XxxX-xxxxxx, XxXXxxx, XxxXXxxxx XxXxXxxXx. X xxxx, X xxx, X xxxxxxxxxx XxXxXxxXx. Now, assuming correct punctuation, there's two things that stick out: hyphens are pretty rare, when used correctly (at least more rare than, say, no hyphens), and again the mass of comma-separated words at the beginnings of our two sentences is a little odd. These are the only two things I'd consider "leads" at this point, unless I am missing something, which I almost certainly am... Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:11 pm |
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| Andh |
A poem seems likely. The structure would be a quintet first and then a tercet.
Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2007 5:10 pm |
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