chicagotribune.com — The enigma began last year when a plain envelope with no return address arrived at the world-famous physics laboratory outside Chicago, addressed simply to "Fermilab." Inside was a single sheet marked by pen with a bizarre series of hash marks, numbers and alien-looking symbols. No one knew what it was. A joke? A threat? So they posted it online...
Jul 11, 2008 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJul 12, 2008
yeah i'm sure they never thought of that.
levithesmithJul 12, 2008
Kinda how Rick never does?Quote from his blog"Never gonna give you upNever gonna let you downNever gonna run around and desert youNever gonna make you cryNever gonna say goodbyeNever gonna tell a lie and hurt you"
bitbytebitJul 12, 2008
you got it in 1
Closed AccountJul 12, 2008
Maybe somebody got stuck on the last level of that puzzle game not pron and sent it in to see it they'd figure it out?
grason1129Jul 12, 2008
science is about sharing and verifying results via independent sources.
matt79Jul 13, 2008
Ok, after a day of thought, I have one last post with a full summary of my thoughts. Does this register with anyone else? "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE.""EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN." ..IS.. From the center section, the first two lines are key mapped to hex numerals, with the 3rd line being the employee #, or "message".Sym #1 = 0, because:-In order for the sentence to be valid, one s should be dropped from "BASSE." ie: it equals "NOISE". The same should be done with Sym #1.-BASSE = LOW in French. Note the existence of Basse-Normandie, aka "Lower Normandy" Zero is damn low, too.-i and s are the only two keys that are also lower case letters (emphasis on "lower") i = s = 0 = NOISE. -A is another possibility for Sym #1, but I'm going with 0. -Syms #2 and #3 are then straight mapped to f and c respectively using their keys. Sym #2 appears three times, with #3 once (*1). -So, this forms 0fc hex or 252 dec. As shown in a previous post, employee 00252V at Fermilab = "Pierre Piroue" He's working on the Large Hadron Collider. His name is French, so the French use of "BASSE" should once again be noted. -'fc' could correspond to areas on the LHC. Just through examination of LHC imagry, it is *very* visibly divided into 16 distinct regions (look around the perimeters of the outer framing and inner "core"). This explains the use of hex. Positioning hex digits clockwise around the LHC (There is a noticeable area at the top of the "core" that I think should mark the location of zero) Regions f & c (again....the employee #) seem "special." -The original symbol for f is a counter clockwise pointing arrow. This could relate to the direction attached to position f. c should of course then be pointing clockwise (how does Sym #3 relate to direction?). (*1): Could 3 and 1 represent settings of some sort? Beam crossing angles for f and c?
ryebryeJul 14, 2008
Then you could prove that there was no solution... which is pretty hard to prove - but you'd get mad props for doing it.