Thursday, May 12

Item 35, Continued, Continued

Here are my contributions to the puzzle hunt:

"A Trifling Monograph"

My judge bio pics are a .gif of me in various strange positions. A quick google of the title of this puzzle reveals that it's an homage to Sherlock Holmes and the cryptic alphabets in "The Adventure of the Dancing Man." At this point, it was just a job of trying to interpret my slightly-inaccurate positions to get the clue "Sorry won't act" -- meant to imply that the group concerned with the  midwest dialogue is not the culprit. After taking these photos, I have a new-found respect for people who can do unassisted handstands.

"Coordinates"

Well, the pie is pretty good in Chicago, but so is the "pi". The idea of this puzzle was translating Chicago's grid system into polar coordinates. Taking r = 1941.648 and degrees = 101.888 [[**A note: I think in future versions of this puzzle this will be in radians. I think this threw a lot of people off, though I'd be interested to hear your feedback. So take Θ = 1.77828]] and converting using the basic trig functions we get  (-400, 1900). Now, plugging this into the Chicago Grid System of course using Madison and State as (0/0) we get 400W, 1900N which is squarely on Wisconsin Avenue.

So: Wisconsin is especially angry about amazon.com's new tax strategy.

"Clipping"

This was the first one that many of you got. A straight one-to-one cryptogram, the code reveals "Even the juicy tales of corruption in the travel business could not make Assange care about poverty tourism"

"The Recording"

This clue was my baby and I very much enjoyed watching many of you struggle over it. However, I was sad that a lot of people got hung up on the 11 clips/10 spaces problem. Guys, that last bit, where there's a long pause and last bit of audio is not from a NPR report and instead has spliced in audio of the theme song -- that was a JOKE. So yeah, it's just the 10 clips for 10 spaces. Sorry about that. Anyways, here are the anchors/speakers. 

Steve Inskeep
Jad Abrumrad
Nora Raum
Larry Abramson
Liane Hansen
Renee Montagne
Lakshmi Singh
Magliozzi Brother #1
Peter Overby
Magliozzi Brother #2

So you get that the state of IA is concerned with Rahm's Mom.

A lot of people mistook Abrumrad (form WNYC's wonderful Radio Lab) for Ira Glass. A surprising number of people had problems with Liane Hansen, I think. That one you could have identified more easily from the music, which is exclusively used for Sunday Edition. 

1 comment:

  1. Once I guessed what coordinates might be I saw 101.888 and figured degrees were more likely, so I converted out anyway. Worked for me, although despite this puzzle being totally my kind of thing in the end I did not get the joke about the Pi/Pie even just now. I figured there was a good pizza place on that street or whatever. Anyway thanks for making that one. :)

    -BJ scavvie

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