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[cassandra]

[UPDATE] Scarlett Kite - 8 Sept 06 - Success!

[thalamus]

well done to brian and claire

the revealed puzzle could be pretty much anything, but at first glance it reminded me of a bit of neal stephenson's 'cryptonomicon' where one character is walking around london and notes that he could draw a map of london based on stepping up and down kerbs...

it's probably something else entirely, but that's what popped into my head when i saw that image, so there...

[rose]

congrats

[jonc]

Re: congrats

[AtionSong]

The new puzzle reminds me of a warioware game where you are a circular figure. There is an indented line above you, and one beneath you (like the lines in the puzzle). The top one begins falling towards the bottom one. Unless you can get to a spot where the to spike is larger than the bottom one, you will be crushed...

It's hard to explain. I'll try to find a picture...

Acutually, I doubt this will help anyway.

I have a feeling that this is a cryptogram of sorts.

[AtionSong]

Oh! Maybe it's moorse code! I'll check that right now.

[32_footsteps]

This is going to drive me nuts. I've seen something like that before, but for the life of me I can't recall where. I want to say it had something to do with music, but that could just be a faulty memory.

Though I'm somewhat struck by the similarity to a barcode of some sort. However, there's too much "dead space" seemingly to work in that regard.

[makomk]

Interesting; trying to figure out if I can read in the lines using PIL and some clever coding. Unfortunately, I'm not too great at image processing...

[poozle]

I also thought it looked like binary as well, just not sure how to work it out, LOL

[AtionSong]

- - -*-*---
- -- *-* -(continues to next line)
*-** * * **

It's hard to tell what's a dot and what's a dash...so I don't want to translate too much and have it be wrong. See if this is anything first.

[thalamus]

[makomk]

Edit: I think this fits better in the Puzzle thread; I should probably have posted it there (or started it) in the first place.

[TheQuestion]

Some observations:

* It's not a simple binary 'on/ off' code, as the peaks vary in width.

* It's not one continuous line, as line 4 ends at the top and line 5 starts at the bottom.

[Anderian]

I think I know where you may have seen a pattern like this before - I just started rereading Cryptonomicon again, and there is a page full of stuff exactly like this somewhere in the first third of the book. The setup is that Lawrence Waterhouse is musing about the curbs in England and how they're sheer vertical drops, and also how the distances between them are seemingly random, such that a light attached to the feet of a man walking down the street in London would produce patterns like the ones in the Scarlett letter. Hope that helps.

EDIT: Because curbs are higher than streets and people usually walk more on curbs than streets, I guess I should point out that the figures in Cryptonomicon were actually upside-down versions of the one we're provided with here.

[Guin]

just a few ideas for the melting pot.

Let the SPEC begin

I have been wondering if / how Madame B's original hints / predictions might fit in. Originally I had thought the hint: