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[Rogi Ocnorb]

Taking the first letter of the last names of the people who said the quotes:
Groucho Marx
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Lewis Carroll(White Queen)
Duke Ellington
Susan Sarandon/Betsy Salkind
Vladimir Nabokov
Thomas Edison
Charles Schulz(Linus Van Pelt)
Bob Newart
Yoko Ono
Ogden Nash

you get:
MOCESNESNON

Reverse that and you get:
NONSENSECOM

So, I'd think it was a hint to go to www.nonsense.com

But, almost unbelievably, it's a parked domain

[natas]

Almost spells common sense

[pancito]

Rogi,that's it. I couldn't believe it either...

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I'll give my turn up to anyone who hasn't posted a puzzle, yet.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Prime Parking?

[sixsidedsquare]

Why was I not informed of this thread earlier?

As for the puzzle at hand, kinda like finding a needle in a haystack or more a pixel in a prime spiral. The gif posted is a prime spiral, where 0 is the pixel at the center(ish) and the numbers spiral out around from that. If the number is a prime it gets a black pixel (ala this, though Rogi's starts with 0 in the middle rather than 1, something I've never seen in one before).

Now moving on from that, the highest prime it goes out to is 800029 (the 63592nd prime) and you'll find that in fact 2 of the black dots are not actually black, but hex code #666666. These two being 410903 (4683rd) and 764611 (1326th).

And this is where I'm stuck. Having 2 numbers and looking for a 'place' I first thought long/lat coordinates, but with no indication of where to place decimals or to use E/W or even which was which I soon gave up on this. One thing to note is that using primes means that his number choice would have been limited to what primes there are, so might be better to look at the number prime they are, as with this he could have chosen from any number he wanted.

Time to ponder this some more and hope others are still following this thread.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Good job, Six!
I think you got off on counting spirals, somewhere on the smaller number. You nailed the bigger number, though. And to save you the pain of finding it, again, I'll just tell you that it's 390647.

And I'll volunteer that the numbers share the same "format" (but not necessarily the same sign).

I live in California and wouldn't need to cross any oceans to get to this place.

BTW: I used a tool that generates the spiral, so was kind of locked into it.
I think one of the coolest things about these is that the starting point is pretty much arbitrary. The magic still happens.

[sixsidedsquare]

Huh, I was having issues with that smaller prime, funny that I managed to make my math come out with another number that was actually a prime as well. And it's amazing how first instincts are often right, but I always forget to look at coordinates as hours minutes seconds.

I believe I found your parking space good sir. I heard they banned you from the NSA, so you probably work on the other side of that park at the National Cryptologic Museum, right? Also, how far underground must the NSA go for it to need that many car parks??

I have to ask, how long did it take you to find prime number coordinates that were in the NSA parking lot?

[pancito]

I knew there were three colors in it, but couldn't find anything relevant.

@ sixsidedsquare>> How the heck did you get on to a prime square? Could you elaborate on the solve a bit? And how could you know where to start? I'm impressed, majorly.

[sixsidedsquare]

I've always enjoyed the beauty of patterns in mathematics, so the having seen it before the Ulam prime spiral pattern quite frankly just jumped right out at me (though the really amazing prime spiral is the Sacks Spiral, same sort of thing but more like winding a string).

As for where I went from there, I threw Rogi's GIF into photoshop with another image of a Ulam spiral from the web, though I had to jiggle it a bit because of Rogi's using the 0. I was first expecting it to be an XOR problem, where the difference between the two gave a message, so inverted one of them and dropped it to 50% opacity over the other. Sadly they matched up and everything just came up gray.

I actually hit a break when scanning the edges to find the where the spiral ended, spotting a slightly darker dot just in a ways from the end, this being the 764611 dot. To check if there were any more I just 'magic wanded' the one to select anything else of the same colour on the image and found the other. Looking back the first thing I should have done was check the colours used in the image to try and find anything like this, but now I'll know that for future puzzles.

Fianlly, having two numbers and looking for a location made me think of a longitude latitude pair. After Rogi's hint I saw the majority of the USA falls between latitude -66 to -125 and longitude 24 to 50, and the first two digits of the numbers we had were 76 and 39, nicely falling in this area.

Think that's all of it, but in chatting with Rogi it seems we haven't quite got the final answer yet. The location is right but we need a name that fits with the P theme.

[rose]

I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

Places with the P theme...you mean the prime number theme?

or maybe places starting with the letter P, or possilby P shaped cities...are there any?

can I guess Portland, as that is where ARGfest will be next year?

Or Providence, which is a great name and also a location in EE?

there is also Paradise. of course
and Princeton which has a lot of math fiends at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

And just for me I guess Petosi Peak, an unimportant mountain that looks over one of my favorite places in the world - Yankee Boy Basin in Colorado...photo attached...

[pancito]

[sixsidedsquare]

Wacky, it was doing it for me too. I culled most of the url and now it seems to be working again. Fort Meade is an impressive complex, I was moving the map around looking at it after linking and mayhap that magically changed it?

How about "Puzzlers Heaven"?

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I was looking for Puzzle Palace. Where the answer to one of your questions is "12 acres".
But that's close enough.

As for the other question, it really wasn't hard to find primes that equated to coordinates. Longitude had a good match, already and latitude moved me north to the parking lot to match the closest prime.

Take it away, Six.

BTW: Here's an explanation of Ulam spirals that takes away a lot of the mystery and magic.

[sixsidedsquare]

Right, I'm gonna have to come up some fun new stuff for this thread, but it's late, so for now I shall reach into the Vault and bring out some of THE PUZZLES TIME FORGOT!!

This is one in a set of my first ever puzzles made for a game that never came to fruition. It was when I was still young in my puzzle making and photoshop days, so forgive it for it's silliness. Hopefully it's actually solvable too, I don't even remember the solutions to some of them anymore.. Filename is no relevance, the puzzle is completely self contained in the image. And sorry it's rather small, I think that was a request by the person I made it for, but all important things can seen and read when it's enlarged.