My puzzling companion and I have been exhausted these past few days, so doing puzzling in the evenings hasn’t been working out. Instead, we carved out our lunch break to delve into the third card of Enigma Emporium’s sequel to Wish You Were Here, Blowback.
The third card front has six Scandinavian researches, under the Swedish (or maybe Norwegian?) phrase: Famous Researches of Scandinavia (huzzah for a study abroad to Sveriges landsbruck universitat!). They are Solander, Nobel, Meitner, Kreyberg, Celsius, Arrhenius.
On the reverse, we have a series of six boxes connected by numbered lines on the left - we expect this has something to do with their discoveries, possibly in Swedish given the last post card. On the right, we have a short message from our pen pal, regarding “cooking” revenge, which sounds odd, two stamps - bread and a book? - and a coded message made up of numbers.
We begin by looking at the stamps, trying the same approach as the last, and run them through Scandinavian languages, finding more logic in Norwegian than Swedish, to my disappointment. Bread-page in Norwegian becomes brød-side. BROADSIDE? As in an attack? Not impossible. Will stick with that.
Then we progress to the scientists:
The third card front has six Scandinavian researches, under the Swedish (or maybe Norwegian?) phrase: Famous Researches of Scandinavia (huzzah for a study abroad to Sveriges landsbruck universitat!). They are Solander, Nobel, Meitner, Kreyberg, Celsius, Arrhenius.
On the reverse, we have a series of six boxes connected by numbered lines on the left - we expect this has something to do with their discoveries, possibly in Swedish given the last post card. On the right, we have a short message from our pen pal, regarding “cooking” revenge, which sounds odd, two stamps - bread and a book? - and a coded message made up of numbers.
We begin by looking at the stamps, trying the same approach as the last, and run them through Scandinavian languages, finding more logic in Norwegian than Swedish, to my disappointment. Bread-page in Norwegian becomes brød-side. BROADSIDE? As in an attack? Not impossible. Will stick with that.
Then we progress to the scientists:
- Daniel Solander - Swedish Naturalist
- Alfred Nobel - Swedish Chemist
- Lise Meitner - Swedish-Austrian Physicist
- Liev Kreyberg - Norwegian Pathologist
- Anders Celsius - Swedish Astronomer
- Svante Arrhenius - Swedish Physicist/Chemist
Moving through, we determined that the boxes may be related to the names of the scientists, in order left to right then top then bottom. Doing that, we find the following words if we connect the lines drawn between the boxes. ALLEN MARK DAVIS. Presumably that is what our pen pal goes by in DALLAS, which we get from the first letter of each scientist’s first name.
Three puzzles down, but the last message is a doozy (and we’re still not sure about Broadside). The message is to D.T. from A.C. A.C. Of all of them could be Anders Celsius, whose most famous work is the Centigrade/Celsius temperature scale. Maybe these reference a book? Thankfully, before I go down a rabbit hole, my puzzling friend proves better at reading text - it’s to D.F. - or Daniel Fahrenheit - German physicist. We expect that we need to convert the temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius, then run a standard number to letter cipher (thank you, dCode). We split up the work - my partner ran the temperature conversion while I plugged it into the letter to number - thankfully it was a simple A=01, not a second encoding with temperature or something as a keyword for a Vigenere cipher, though I would hope we would have figured that out eventually. So, the last tidbit that we learn from our pen pal, Allen Mark Davis, currently of Dallas, is that:
THEIR CHIEF OF EUROPEAN OPERATIONS IS KNOWN AS LEVIATHAN
Thank you, Enigma Emporium and my wonderful puzzling pal for the best lunch break in a long time.
No comments:
Post a Comment