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[firefox]

im seeing double only kidding but intriguing parallels either way. who is who on the other side of the curtain, whats that game where you try to find which face matches which, and you keep on knocking down the ones that don't match? good fun.

[spaceXplorer]

[Leeravitz]

Ah, well, this is blindingly obvious when you think about it, but may be worth pointing out...Anna itself is a palindromic name...I was starting to suspect that, maybe, some of the captions to Anna's entry would be written as a palindrome, but, hey, they aren't...

Looking at the Academy Team more closely, it looks to me like you can work out what their likely 'specialisms' will translate to in our world:

Anna is definitely word games, palindromes, lipograms, anagrams and so on of the OuLIPO type...

Caine (presumably) is music. Musical notation (which I have little expertise at) is nonetheless easily convertible into both letter substitution and/or mathematical notations, and these (surely) must take on relevance. Bach seems to be a strong clue as to the type of thing involved here, because his pieces (particularly the canons and fugues) are extremely complex in terms of patternings (Bach composed inverted canons, crab canons [where the theme gets played backward] etc. etc.). He was notorious for playing musical games with his patrons. Again, I urge anyone with access to a copy to dig out Hofstadter's book 'Godel, Escher, Bach,' for more on this... Caine also likes pop music apparently (well, there have been enough Beatles references thus far...)

To know what Garnet will be up to seems straighforward enough...Cryptography, ciphers, codes (Morse code, Braille, Sempahore...), maybe even pictographic logograms come under his remit (so, Egyptian hieroglpyhs, for instance...). I seem to recollect having come across the name Garnet in reference to a (supposed) U.S. 'black ops' organisation...so maybe it's appropriate that he seems to work for the men with the black helicopters...!

Aiko sounds to me like she deals in the Perplex City version of flash coding...Quite how that would transfer to a card game, however, is anyone's guess...Maybe her contribution will be on - line, rather than in the cards...

Kurt (who I am now starting to assume is named in memory of Kurt Godel) is (presumably) not only the computer maven (we know that already), but I guess is involved with everything that leads back from that...so, binary coding, mathematical logic, flow diagrams [a particularly complicated form of which seem to be displayed on his blackboard in the picture] etc.

The two hardest to place are Von and Tippi...Von may simply be the 'contact point' between Earth and Perplex City (the 'webmaster', I guess) and so maybe he won't have much to do in setting the puzzles per se...although the fact that he's interested in 'earth', and we know that the Academy has departments with ecological interests, might point vaguely to connections in that direction. What sorts of puzzles an ecologist would end up setting though, I have no idea.

Tippi is even more obscure. For a start, her range of interests sounds somewhat like Aiko's, but there must be a discernible difference. My supposition at this time is merely based on the following (slim) leads:

Tippi herself is a very curvaceous gal (now, we've had lots of jokes about this already, but what if it's a clue?). Could it be that her puzzles will involve things to do with symmetry and/or geometry?

What does it mean to say that she is interested in 'recreating' the work of past puzzle masters? Will her 'puzzles' be 'recreations' of famous real - world puzzles (like, say, variants on the work of M.C. Escher?). And is the fact that 'reptition'/'recreation' is being alluded to have any bearing on the symmetry issue?

The final thing I'd say is that there is an interesting further point about puzzles that might play off of the relationship between 'figure' and 'ground' (which is an artistic, but also musical, and mathematical, phenomenon).

So, to sum up, my theory of Academy specialisation is:

Anna - Linguistic puzzles
Caine - Musical puzzles
Tippi - Geometrical puzzles?
Garnet - Cryptological puzzles
Aiko - Artistic/visual puzzles
Kurt - Mathematical/Computing related puzzles
Von - Not sure...

If all of these types of puzzles seem to bleed into one another more generally, then that would be because the systems involved (computing notation, musical notation, visual relations between 'figure' and 'ground' etc. can be considered isomorphic)...

Now, how does any of this relate to what we've already seen on the cards???!

[Leeravitz]

Hmmm. Now, I look at it - seems like the puzzles section of the Sentinel parallels a number of these specialisations...whatever that might mean...

[Seej]

[Leeravitz]

I think that the puzzles are likely to be spread across the cards, too. So that they'll be a hierarchy of each, running from the straightforward sort that most people could solve with a bit of lateral thinking to stuff that might well require either a) a degree of specialist knowledge or b) a considerable amount of man - hours devoted to it in order that we'd be able to solve it.

Another thought I had about geometrical puzzles is that, if you translate the Greek prefix, 'geometry' is literally to do with 'earth' (i.e. 'geo' = 'earth'). Given that Von's specialisation is 'earth' based puzzles, you never know, maybe he's the geometer (and maybe I'm getting too paranoid!! - All will be revealed in time no doubt).

Of the cards we've seen, we only know that Kurt seems to have been responsible for the ones relating to the telephone number and the computers, and Anna to the dictionary definitions. The others were unattributed, although the flag one raised some confusion as Anna's mentioned on it, but it doesn't seem like she set the puzzle. I don't see any indications so far from this that the specialisations don't parallel the type of puzzle being introduced. And we can note that Kurt would appear to have been responsible for both a red card and a blue one, so this does suggest that all the team will be pitching puzzles at different levels of difficulty.

[Violet]

I have to say this, firstly because I have an insane OCD type problem with bad grammar, and secondly because Anna is meant to be great at linguistics but seems unconcerned with a blatant error in her biog.

[Leeravitz]

Perhaps she's one of those erratic geniuses

I think there's a tendency in Perplex City for them to utilise UK English, but I've never heard of anyone in Britain holding spelling bees...anyway, you're quite right about the errors...

Still, maybe we have to give the Academy the benefit of the doubt and assume that the admin staff wrote the prospectus whilst the geniuses were all at lunch...

And then again, Mind Candy are recruiting, aren't they? Possibly they're in need of a proof reader...

And besides, if we weren't pedantic sorts, we'd never be trying to work out what's going on in the first place, would we?

[Violet]

*breathes in the good, exhales the bad*

Thank you Leeravitz, you've helped to calm my otherwise crazy sou. Now, if I continue to be a good little girl they might let me out into the real world at the weekend

[cassandra]

It is not "teacher's." The individual corrected is one out of her (plural) group of teachers. Hence, "teachers'." Admittedly it's awkwardly phrased.

[JebJoya]

cassandra - right you are

yeah, we do have spelling bee's, kind of, depends on the teacher and stuff...

Jeb

[Violet]

[cassandra]

[Violet]

What? How rude of them! They should at least change the things you've pointed out to them! I hate errors in published print because it just looks lazy. The Sentinel is really bad, sometimes I wonder whether it's deliberate, or whether they just can't use commas!

[tanner]

the apostrophe before the s was to signify a missing "e" -- lost during the great vowel drop -- before then both plurals and possessive use of the "s" used "es" -- with the dropping of the "e" apostrophes were used for both - only later did the modern practice of using it only for possessive become standard

so originally you used the apostophe for both and it is therefore perfectly correct