Category — News

Here’s the links to things I covered in my talk about Puzzle Solving 101 at the 2011 Mensa Regional Gathering.

Geocaches

• Puzzle Solving 101
• Puzzle Solving Education Network
• Off the Deep End
• Geocaching.com

People

• OB Jets
• skiplondon
• lorriebird
• antimony13
• WINSLMA
• FLPirate
• The Wench

Other Stuff

Like all other blogs, this one receives its share of spam from time to time. Fortunately, Akismet happily eliminates just about all of it, but it leaves it in a queue for me to sift through just in case it flags something important as spam.

In the spam queue today, I received what I believe is my favorite spam ever in the history of this blog. Someone from the site asianwomenonline.tk (don’t go there – you’ll regret it) tried to post this:

The paste stomachs the level developer near the cheese. The family reassures the stare. The wreck gates Puzzle Solving 101 with the coming chocolate. My distasteful laughter pops opposite the advertised intelligence.

I believe that last sentence says it all.

Puzzlehead is back. In my misguided attempt to upgrade the site to the latest version of WordPress right before I went on vacation, I broke the site. It’s now fixed … mostly. There’s still an error under the search widget that doesn’t seem to affect the rest of the site, so I’m ignoring it until I can switch to a better theme.

Rock on.

I just learned of a new site called The Geocaching Puzzle of the Day from a person who found the PS101 Remote Solver TB. If you’re a geocaching puzzlehead and need your daily fix, this seems like the place for you to visit.

The PS101 Series was named the GPotD for Friday, May 20, 2011.

No Help Coming…

This intriguing AP story was printed in the Naples Daily News today.  A 147 year old secret Civil War message was finally opened and decrypted.  Here is the content of the story…

___________________________________________________________

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.

The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton’s surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.

The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.

“He’s saying, ‘I can’t help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,’ ” Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. “It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was.”

The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.

It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly wrapped note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.

“Just sort of a curiosity thing,” said Wright. “This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?”

The answer was no.

Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle’s mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.

The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.

But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.

Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher. She had no success.

A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks.

A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy’s interpretation. Cmdr. John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.

“To me, it was not that difficult,” he said. “I had fun with this and it took me longer than I should have.”

The code is called the “Vigenere cipher,” a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an “a” would become a “d” — essentially, creating words with different letter combinations.

The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.

The source of the message was likely Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.

The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:

“Gen’l Pemberton:

You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen’l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy’s lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston.”

The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.

“The date of this message clearly indicates that this person has no idea that the city is about to be surrendered,” she said.

The Johnston mention in the dispatch is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, whose 32,000 troops were encamped south of Vicksburg and prevented from assisting Pemberton by Grant’s 35,000 Union troops. Pemberton had held out hope that Johnston would eventually come to his aid.

The message was dispatched during an especially terrible time in Vicksburg. Grant was unsuccessful in defeating Pemberton’s troops on two occasions, so the Union commander instead decided to encircle the city and block the flow of supplies or support.

Many in the city resorted to eating cats, dogs and leather. Soup was made from wallpaper paste.

After a six-week siege, Pemberton relented. Vicksburg, so scarred by the experience, refused to celebrate July 4 for the next 80 years.

So what about the bullet in the bottom of the bottle?

Wright suspects the messenger was instructed to toss the bottle into the river if Union troops intercepted his passage. The weight of the bullet would have carried the corked bottle to the bottom, she said.

For Pemberton, the bottle is symbolic of his lost cause: the bad news never made it to him.

The Confederate messenger probably arrived to the river’s edge and saw a U.S. flag flying over the city.

“He figured out what was going on and said, ‘Well, this is pointless,’ and turned back,” Wright said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iGz3gDwkqeW9mTB-5dhbfO6Ns67A?docId=2c762dfe397c42529f5ffe0af391430b

DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST

Fellow Puzzlehead Child of Atom sent this note to me the other day …

One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 20th century (and now the 21st century) is Kryptos. This sculpture – in the courtyard of CIA headquarters – contains a cipher, 3/4ths of which has been cracked. The story of its

On November 20, 2010, the artist released a clue to the remaining unsolved section – that six letters in the ciphertext translate to the word “BERLIN”. For a far better write-up than I can provide, check out the New York Times article.

My Puzzle Solving 101 Series was mentioned on Show 255 of Podcacher. Whoo-hoo! Take a listen to all of their geocaching (and puzzling) goodness! (free!)

I saw a link on Amy Reynaldo’s blog today about a new blog by Merl Reagle, one of the best crossword puzzle constructors around. (Those of you who listen to NPR’s Puzzle on the Air or have seen the movie Wordplay know who he is.) Specifically, Amy referred her readers to Merl’s Pet Peeve No. 1:

[...] It’s something I’m tempted to call a “flansir,” which stands for “familiar looking although never seen in reality” (pronounced “flancer,” let’s say).

Merl goes on to clarify:

I tend to differentiate this from a traditional “crosswordese” word, which is generally a short, obscure word that occurs often in puzzles because of its handy letter combinations, like ERN(E), ODA(H), and PROA. And one reason that these words have truly earned their crosswordese badges is because there’s no way to know what they mean simply by looking at them. However, they do exist in the real world, outside of puzzles. If you were online doing research on a sea eagle or a harem room or a Malayan canoe, you would probably come across these words. Odd as they are, they are the actual terms for these unusual things. A flansir, though, not only is something that only occurs in crosswords, it virtually never occurs outside of crosswords — it’s an entirely crosswordcentric thing.

Amen, brother! Read the entire article here. And while you’re at it, check out the rest of Merl’s blog.

This week our new non-puzzle-related feature called “Stuff We Never Thought We’d Have to Deal With”, we feature a story on a new form of precipitation peculiar to South Florida this week: a rain of frozen iguanas.

We take you now to a news story that appeared on MSNBC:

… the prolonged freeze could doom some of the nonnative iguanas that have called Florida home since being illegally introduced from South America by pet owners.

“It’s almost like they go totally to sleep,” Ron Magill of Miami Metrozoo told WPLG TV, referring to the fact that once temperatures drop into the 40s, iguanas shut down with very little blood flow and only their heart beating.

On Wednesday, many iguanas were spotted in “frozen” states, clinging from trees or stuck on the ground.

“Generally speaking, if it warms up afterwards, they can recover,” Magill added, but a long cold snap can also kill iguanas.

Magill warned against trying to remove iguanas since they might quickly spring back to life.

“I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck,” Magill said.