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quote:Take twice as many east steps as the hour "the v" could mean the v train I don't know what "isle of the B" would mean though, since the B goes from brooklyn to the bronx; and the Bronx is not an island. edit: maybe not since the train didn't exist when the book was written
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May 31, 2013 17:40
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ruebennase posted:NYC I just remembered that one of the original names for Roosevelt Island was "Blackwell's Island". Seems as reasonable as anything else for "Isle of B".
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Jun 2, 2013 22:43
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I still feel that there's gotta be some connection with the window panes behind the woman. The two solid color panes look like NYU colors. The other ones look like Ishihara plates, but you can't see any numbers or anything in them, which may mean something to do with assuming color-blindness? Like look as if you were color blind? edit: also I have to think that the Charleston verse must be the one that mentions the Citadel... I mean c'mon edit2: Lane Two twenty two You'll see an arc of lights Weight and roots extended Together saved the site Of granite walls Wind swept halls Citadel in the night A wingless bird ascended Born of ancient dreams of flight Beneath the only standing member Of a forest To the south White stone closest At twelve paces From the west side Get permission To dig out. the other reason that makes me think this is Charleston is the abundance of uninhabited islands that require permission to enter around Charleston Emacs Headroom fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 05:33
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Assuming the NYC verse was wrong and it's actually verse 2, we might get: At the place where jewels abound --- The diamond district; w 47th st between 5th and 6th? Fifteen rows down to the ground --- A building with 15 floors? or maybe just 15 w 47th, which is a jewel exchange? In the middle of twenty-one --- 21 w 47th st is adjascent to 15, and has a loan office and some jewel stores From end to end Only three stand watch As the sound of friends Fills the afternoon hours Here is a sovereign people Who build palaces to shelter Their heads for a night! Gnomes admire Fays delight The namesakes meeting Near this site. No idea about most of the other lines, except obviously the connection with jewels and the fact that gnomes love jewels! edit: if anyone wants to play around -- 21 is the roof with the big 21 on it
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Jun 3, 2013 05:55
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plaguedoctor posted:
There's at Atlas at Rockefeller Center, but it's bronze not grey.
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Jun 3, 2013 06:16
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There's a nice onion domed Russian Orthodox church on Driggs Ave in Williamsburg; the view of it from McCarren Park would match the silhouette of the NYC image decently.
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Jun 3, 2013 06:52
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Someone needs to hit up the strand to see if they have a copy of this thing, and re-scan all the images in higher resolution.
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Jun 3, 2013 15:36
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Scooter_McCabe posted:So Eastern Parkway famous for its West Indies parade is of no interest to anyone? With that in mind would we have any interest in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden? I thought about that and made some really tenuous connections. The colorblind thing would point to where the red and green subways come together (brooklyn and the bronx), and in Brooklyn there's a place where the make a branch / v-shape. In the middle of the upper branch, there's a Kingston Ave stop, which is of course a place in the Indies, and it's on Eastern Parkway in Flatbush right where the indies parade is. It all seems pretty fast and loose though.
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Jun 3, 2013 18:56
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And the poem is really not guaranteed to be New York-relevant
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Jun 3, 2013 22:34
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The part I don't get is how anything historical around NYC, poem or picture or whatever, can exist without a Robert Moses reference.
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Jun 3, 2013 22:57
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StinkyMeat posted:I thought the same thing today, and came to realize that most of the subway mosaics are with square tiles and done in a very structured pattern, as opposed to these mess of circles. Seems too big a difference if they are meant to represent them. Some of the IND line trains have a small circle-looking pattern in their tiles. E.g. the A train and the G train (look inside the square tiles)  
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Jun 3, 2013 23:22
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There's a 74 and 41 in the waves, nyc has latitude / longitude roughly 41, -74 edit: the 41 is backwards and sideways above the 74. You can see it a lot better if you play with the levels in photoshop I also think all the latitudes are horizontal in the other ones also where they're included, which kind of makes sense
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Jun 3, 2013 23:50
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Another neat thing if the NY public library is the focus, is that 41st street East of the library has lots of little neat brik-a-brak and trivia in the sidewalk, and there are bars and hotels with a literary theme. Some of them have little curios in them like monkey skulls or globes or whatnot. I mean who's to say this thing isn't buried in plain sight, like behind a bottle of Lagavulin 20 at a bar next to the library?
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Jun 3, 2013 23:56
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Plaid Jacket posted:I'm working on a big spreadsheet with a few locations I've been thinking about and some other suggestions I've read. Share it on a Google Doc! The best suggestions so far IMO have been the Verazzano over Fort Hamilton (Hamilton being an indies native, helicopters being around there making a whirring sound, the Verazzano being an arm that strethces over a slender path -- the narrows), the library thing (the arches, proximity to the optometry school?), and someplace near Prospect Park (Indies parade, Indies natives, etc.)
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Jun 4, 2013 02:19
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The Walking Dad posted:Stuff about Bryant Park This is really convincing. As I mentioned before, I thought the 74 and 42 referred to NYC latitude/longitude, but there's no reason they can't get re-used cleverly as a street address...
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Jun 4, 2013 14:11
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What if we work backwards, and assume that the author would 1) have to be burying these things, and 2) would have to assume that they wouldn't get dug up or destroyed accidentally for the forseeable future (say 50-100 years). In NYC, that doesn't leave too many options with the constant development. Even the parks (like Bryant Park) are liable to be dug up occasionally. If it were me, I'd go either with heritage sites or national parkland or endowed land (like the Cloisters -- endowed by Rockefeller, who might be "he of Hard word?"). It would also have to be somewhere the author had sneaky physical access to though.
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Jun 4, 2013 17:07
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What if the grey giant is NYC itself, and the cask is in NJ somewhere since they're, you know, in our shadow?
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Jun 4, 2013 18:37
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Anybody feel like a trip to the library? http://www.worldcat.org/title/secret/oclc/9023019&referer=brief_results No copies in the NYPL system apparently, but there are some in various places. edit: people are selling used copies on Amazon for $50-$100. Does someone have a really good scanner they want to use, and the rest of us will buy a copy and ship it to you? Emacs Headroom fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jun 4, 2013 |
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Jun 4, 2013 19:13
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NYC I still can't get past the Russian connection being important, since the Greece clue was such a big deal for the Cleveland one. And the park with the clearest view of an important Russian landmark (with onion domes!) is McCarren Park: 
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Jun 4, 2013 22:13
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NYC I made a meet-up thread to organize outings so we can go look for stuff. It would be better to keep the sluething, discussion, and speculation in here I think, but the other thread is there so we can coordinate schedules and vote on where to look next. Should be fun!
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Jun 4, 2013 22:35
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Occams taser posted:The photoshop tricks are cool and everything, guys. I bet we've lost a lot of contrast going from old book to old scanner to image compression to our monitors. Simple stuff like a level adjustment can bring some of that contrast back out (i.e. it makes the 42 and 74 really apparent in the nyc waves).
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Jun 4, 2013 23:22
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Grave $avings posted:Maybe I'm all crazy and this has been disproven or the evidence for New York is all but overtowering but I can't help but feel Preiss would leave Philly out of the hunt, especially since he lived here. AFAIK there's nothing definitive linking the verse to NYC or the picture. I'm not sure which picture would be philly though.
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Jun 5, 2013 01:14
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Can we go dig up the cask in Ft. Sumter on July 13th? I'll be there that weekend!
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Jun 5, 2013 15:28
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SheepNameKiller posted:I feel like of all the unfound casks the Roanoke one seems the closest to being found, especially since we can't even agree on which picture or verse is for New York yet. The picture is definitely NYC greater area imo, since it's got the latitude/longitude in it. I agree that the verse is not definitively linked to the picture though. The Edwin/Edwina verse has some weight to it being NYC I think, especially since the citadel verse is almost definitely Charleston which would rule out Edwin/Edwina as a Charleston candidate based solely on the SC connection.
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Jun 5, 2013 16:39
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TheLastManStanding posted:How the gently caress do you confuse a daisy with a palm tree. That's a Palmetto!  edit: but yeah I agree and i'm sure the original author would have known the significance of the Palmetto specifically (as being a sturdy tree that deflected cannon rounds from the British in the revolutionary war) and not snubbed it. Emacs Headroom fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 00:21
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Puzzle solving needs branching (trying out new ideas) and pruning (tossing out ideas that won't work). There's no point in trying to knock people doing either process. We need both.
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Jun 6, 2013 01:11
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NYC Is anyone Russian or Eastern Orthodox? I've given up on the poem, and am trying to just work off the picture. We know it's connected with November, and with Russia, so I was looking at the Russian Orthodox liturgical calendar, and it looks like the most important date in November is "The Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple", a feast day. Basically what I'm trying to do is find a connection through the known stuff (November, Russia, the onion-domed church in the picture) to link it to some unknown stuff like say one of the poems.
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Jun 6, 2013 02:33
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Charleston The aquarium was later than the book sure, but flounder are common in the shallow areas around Charleston (and the whole coast of SC), so it might be a real thing. Also flounder is tasty.
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Jun 6, 2013 15:03
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Here's what I get (just playing slightly with levels to bring out the contrast): 
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Jun 8, 2013 17:02
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I'd agree it was a stretch if it wasn't next to the 74, or if there weren't other things in the picture pointing to nyc (whose lat / long can be rounded to 41, -74)
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Jun 8, 2013 17:06
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I guess I'm on board with it maybe not being 41, but if it's not 41 I doubt there's anything else it'll look more like than a 41. Either it's a backwards wavy 41, or I'd say it's probably nothing 
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Jun 8, 2013 17:39
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Charleston Does anyone have an idea why that pear (or whatever) fruit is growing on what looks like a spruce pine? Is there anyway it's a stylized pine cone and not actually a fruit at all?
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Jun 10, 2013 15:33
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Viking Blood posted:NYC It's "him of Hard word" with Hard capitalized and singular. I'm pretty sure that must mean something (my pet theory is still that's it's Rockefeller, rocks being hard and Rockefeller being someone the natives still speak of)
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Jun 10, 2013 16:11
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GWBBQ posted:Iit's not an exact match. Here's a quick approximation of what it would look like unfolded. Plus they're a pair -- Patience and Fortitude. They're meant to be together. The same reason I don't think the rectangle could be one of the old Twin Towers. Their identity was always as part of the duo; if it was meant to represent the old WTC there would have to be two of them. Otherwise you might as well have a brick or a window or piece of rebar and call that representative of the buildings.
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Jun 10, 2013 19:04
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NYC Out of interest I measure the approximate dimensions of the rectangle on the left pane of the window-thing. Assuming the scan kept the proportions relatively intact, they come out as about 2.72:1 (I used photoshop since not all monitors display things in 1:1 horizontal:vertical proportions). 2.72 is just about the natural logarithm base, or "Euler's number". Since Euclid featured in the other solution, maybe Euler features in this one? Except there's no Euler St. as far as I can tell. There's also a possibility that the proportions match some other rectangular shape in NYC (Central Park was already out, but out of interest I checked and it's closer to 5:1). Emacs Headroom fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 19:17
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Viking Blood posted:UN Headquarters I couldn't find the width on the UN Headquarters online, so I had to open Google Earth. If Google Earth is correct, then the UN Headquarters is ~85m across, which gives the dimensional ratio of 155:85 ~ 1.8:1 Still a lot closer than one of the Twin Towers!
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Jun 10, 2013 20:39
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45 Degrees posted:I scanned in the first section of the book and uploaded the pages to a Flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/45degreesSA This is awesome, thanks a ton.
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Jun 11, 2013 03:13
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Devyl posted:GENERAL No way I'm working on decrypting the secret map hidden in the 4509834th printing dot on image 2
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Jun 11, 2013 05:46
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HJE-Cobra posted:NYC That would have to put the cask west of Jersey City then wouldn't it? There's no bridges over the PATH elsewhere (since it's underground).
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Jun 12, 2013 14:45
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I don't buy that the cask is in Jersey City. Not enough references to garbage or the smell of human feces.
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Jun 12, 2013 15:21
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