Gilliat, that is absolutely fantastic, what a selection. This puzzle is very much on the verge of being solved by someone, and it'll likely be because of your labor on that part right there.
Gilliat, that is absolutely fantastic, what a selection. This puzzle is very much on the verge of being solved by someone, and it'll likely be because of your labor on that part right there.
Are you embedding clues again billl ?Originally Posted by billl
ay up
It'd be a mistake to make a lot of hay about clues in that post, Mick. There's only one there, and it's pretty indirect, although the rest of it looks "clue-y", I admit.
Actually, I am, at this moment, NOT providing two clues that would possibly make this all too easy (but would make me look "clever"). Instead, here is an official clue that might be OK, I guess:
Longest word(s) in the song title = three letters long.
Last edited by billl; 05-13-2012 at 05:13 PM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQi4CAzmrA
If that's it, I should say that I got it by a process of rearrangement and google, because I'm not sure I've ever heard of the song.
And this is probably why...
[The single] went on to reach number one in the USA and number 45 in the UK in 1982...
Yeah, that's it (for the record: Men At Work's "Who Can It Be Now")--and I'm surprised at it only reaching 45 in the UK, that's a crime. Come on, they aren't Americans, just like you guys!
What did you use to make the pictures?
A couple years ago (or so?) I encountered this "demonstration" called Grids Of Lines.
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/GridsOfLines/
It's free to download the player, and there's tons of other interesting things to mess around with--but this one in particular got me thinking… What if, instead of black and white, I used images? I wanted to see if it was possible to simultaneously recognize two images in the same space.
Earlier this year, I realized that 1) finally upgrading my Mac to a particular OS (Snow Leopard) would be extremely inexpensive, and 2) it would come with a suite of professional-grade programming tools, absolutely free.
So, after a month of reviewing "how to program" stuff (I used to do it as a hobby back in the day), my second "interesting" project was to make this image compositing program, based on that grid demo. The most difficult parts are taken care of by the amazing programming environment, and the concept is pretty straightforward--but it did take some time to find some shortcuts and get little technicalities ironed out.
Anyhow, this has been pretty fun finally using it here for the puzzles (it's been on my agenda for a while now), and in some cases it seemed to work pretty well. The needs of the letter-scramble sort of "forced" things in a couple cases, and there was the warping issue, as well, so… But finding a "right" balance of images ended up making it a decent challenge in each case--the roughest part was our limited knowledge of author portraits, of course.
By the way--images made from 3 or 4 originals are actually the result of combining two, and then combining that result with another image (or another combination of two images). So, if you look at the top-left corner area of the 4-album image, you might be able to recognize how Thriller and Abraxas were combined together before being mixed with the other combo-image (which had slightly more narrow gridding).
Anyhow, some of them I really thought were pretty nice-looking. Portraits have certain obvious conventions, but they are an "artistic" form, and so combining them creates some nice "artistic accidents", when the mix is just right. I thought the Orwell/Woolf combo was beautiful, and the three-in-one looked even more like some kind of "difficult" cubist painting.
Ahh, Men At Work...featuring Colin Hay.
Your use of the word hay was obviously a hint, but all it did was fool me into thinking that the word cow was in the song title.
__________________
"If it is honorable for you to disturb the dead, I shall consider it an honor and will make it my ambition to disturb your living." - Captain Miles Hazzard
Also, "It's a Mistake" and the earlier lame attempt to paint Gilliat as just one of a group of Men At Work on the solution.
I thought it was a pretty lucky break when I started putting names and faces together and "Who can it be now" eventually presented itself as a possibility!
You're looking for a placename that's the title of a novel. As ever, I can't tell whether this is much too easy or completely impossible.
To begin with, I need to point to the narrow black bar near the end, right between the "n" with an umlaut over it and the white "s" at the end… It's just part of the image cut out for the "s", i.e. it is a section of black bordering, not an "i" or "l"--but it did have me scratching my head for a minute, so in case anyone else wonders about it…
You're looking for a placename that's the title of a novel. As ever, I can't tell whether this is much too easy or completely impossible.
So, here's the letters I see. The ones I recognize are all letters from the printed name of a band, on the cover of an album…
1. "S" from a Genesis album called "The Lamb Lies DOwn On Broadway".
2. "B" It's backwards, and I'm pretty sure it is from "ABBA" don't know which album yet.
3. "P"
4. "S" from Aerosmith. "Toys in the Attic" album maybe?
5. "K" for Pink Floyd, definitely off of the album called "The Wall"
6. "c" and this one is on the tip of my brain, but I haven't pulled it yet. (Sonic Youth? EDIT: no, I don't think so...)
7. "A" is from Green Day's album called "America Is It!"
8. "s" is from the band named "Oasis", not sure which album.
9. "n" is from Spinal Tap, I guess it would necessarily be from their second album, "Breaking Like The Wind"
My gut is initially telling me that we are going to be using the first letter of the band names to solve this one, because tracking down the albums might lead to more than one use of the particular form/font of the letter. Until I've given this strategy a fair shot, I'm not going to bother with finding the album names.
Anyhow, so far, I have
Genesis, Abba, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, Green Day, Oasis, and Spinal Tarp, with three unknown.
initial letters = A, A, G, G, O, P, S, with 3 and 6 to go.
Last edited by billl; 05-16-2012 at 12:34 AM.
Damn. Much too easy then.
They're all (nearly all) logos that were used over some time, rather than for one album - because, as you say, it would have been cruel to expect people to find the specific album.
I was going to do something with Wolfram, but having downloaded it, I couldn't figure out how to make it work.
Number 3 looks Led Zeppelinny, but I couldn't find an example, so... Maybe not. Number 6, man, maybe I'm just imagining that I know it.
RE: the Wolfram download (CDF Player)
I just now downloaded it myself (I used to have it, but ditched it for disk space a while back), and I also had trouble with it. Basically, once you start it up, it expects us to choose a CDF document to view. But we don't have any CDF documents on our computer yet, and the program doesn't seem to be pointing to any, or suggesting how to get them. (I think the idea is that this is supposed to be like Adobe PDF reader or something, which similarly wouldn't be suggesting links for pdf files. But it really hasn't quite reached that level of usage...)
So, I went back in this thread and clicked on the link I had posted a few posts ago, visited that webpage, and downloaded the demonstration for Grids and Lines from there. The link to download it is on the right side of the page, look for "Download Demonstration as CDF »"...
There are also more Demonstration pages right below that button/link ("Related Demonstrations"), and you can really get yourself completely overwhelmed by clicking on TOPICS at the top, and then browsing all of the available demonstrations.
ANYHOW, after downloading any one of these, you'll end up with a file of type ".cdf" (e.g. GridsOfLines.cdf). It might be on your desktop, or in a "Downloads" folder somewhere, wherever downloads usually end up for you probably... All that remains to be done is to open that file using the player.
Last edited by billl; 05-16-2012 at 12:27 PM.
A, A, G, G, O, P, S plus 2 more... looks like Galapogos. Guessing the Led Zeppelin was right. And whatever number 6 is, the band/artist starts with O.
Just discovered it's a Kurt Vonnegut novel.
Credit goes to billl of course.
Last edited by jajdude; 05-17-2012 at 04:50 AM. Reason: O not A
GalapAgos.
The missing one is Atomic Kitten. I thought that might throw you.
Over to you, j.
Last edited by MarkBastable; 05-17-2012 at 05:29 AM.
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