November 6th, 2015
7 Nov 2015 · page 537 of 1306
Will the comments section work it out before Izzy does?
Cast: Henry Barber, Isabelle Holt
Comments (61)
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I need a slightly larger version of the picture to make out serif vs. sans-serif.
Adjusted version!
"Obstinateness" is my new favourite word.
Well, now I'll look the fool if I don't solve it…
THESOBSCROGRESISOUNDTHISMEESAANTINHINSIOSIBL?
THE SOB SCROGRESI SOUND THIS ME ESAAN TIN HINS IOSIBL??
yes, you solved it. good work. Here's a cookie (not really, but pretend it's a cookie).
Just the thin excuse I need to go out and buy a box of cookies!
How can we solve this when the zoom-in to the SS has the serif reversed?
Fixed! I blame it being 3am. Many apologies!
I am like, so close to solving this now. You had better post the next comic to beat me. Yeah. I'm gonna crack it like real soon.
Hm Maybe if I'm lucky I'll have the free time to have a go at it, but somehow I doubt it, and I'm not sure where to start in any case. I don't think it's going to be just removing the letters with/without - she was counting them.
No idea what it could possibly mean...but then, I was always rubbish at solving riddles. Love having a go at them, though.
[The obvious link.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_cipher "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_cipher")
My initial attempt at using that cipher got me either "fpsuwioqhucpx" or "spngmztrebnsl"
What I learn from this, is right method or not, I suck at determining the difference between the serif and sans-serif characters.
Some of them seem obvious, like that bolded O being serif, but I have no idea what that M is meant to be.
That said, her counting to five definitely fits with the Bacon Cipher.
I think it's 'forty eighth stair'.
I get 'fortyeimhthstair' eyeballing the serifs using the version with distinct codes for the i/j and u/v pairs. (The m/g is the 'd in th' segment)
I make the same....typo in the lettering? The difference between 'g' and 'm' is (in binary) 110 vs 1100.
Think this is the full Francis Bacon quote:
"But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this — that men despair and think things impossible."
Just in case the missing words are a clue.
Problem is, how can we tell if the O's has serifs or not? They look the same with both fonts. I can only assume that the O in "To" is serifed and the others aren't...
Hmm, I must have screwed up in my assigning fonts as serifs somewhere. Otherwise the answer is "fpsucanhuhtuais".
Ah, I did, but that still leaves me with Fps (u/v) (i/j) e (i/j) nh (u/v) ht (u/v) a (i/j) s. Which doesn't make sense. Unless we then need to unscramble the letters...
EDIT: Ah, so it's using the expanded cipher, not the original. Clever people worked out "Forty-Eighth Stair" before me.
Yes, that's right. The only serifed O is the one in 'TO'.
Isabelle says it's a cipher, so I am going to believe her. As far as I can tell, the letters without serifs are:
THESOBSCLROGRESISOUNDTHISMEESANTINHINGSIPOSSIBLE in that order.
With would be: EGATETTAETOPSFINTHATNDPAIRDHKTM. Since this is a cipher, I am also assuming we have some code word for each of those sets of letters. I am guessing that the code word(s) will be The Liar's Heart, either withThe Liars or Liars for the first set, and Heart for the second.
However, my attempts from there result in gibberish because I don't know what I'm doing. But I'm pretty sure I'm going in the right direction. We can figure this out before the next comic, I know it!
Oh there's a Baconian Cipher? That changes everything. Never mind on my line of thought, guys; we should go for the Bacon first.
This does indeed seem to be a Baconian cipher, up to and including the classic use of two typefaces (one serif, the other sans-serif). Unfortunately for me, my old eyes can't reliably differentiate them, beyond being able to conclude that sans-serif appears to be A and serif appears to be B. (BB never starts any of the Baconian codes, so the first two letters must be AA.) That's supported by the fact that there are exactly 80 characters in the message, and every one of the individual cipher blocks is a valid Baconian block. (There is no block that starts BB in the code or in the message.)
Unfortunately, this seems to read 'f p t (u/v) (i/j) a (i/j) n g (u/v) e (i/j) b' which is nonsense. So I'm going to have to rethink this a bit
You have to use the alternate alphabet which assigns a different code to each letter. The one listed in the Wikipedia entry collapses multiple letters to one code in a couple of places.
Ah, thanks. Yes, that does solve the puzzle.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone going by "JWLM" complaining about how a series of letters must be nonsense.
As far as I can tell, the cipher decodes to 'fortyeimhthstair'. I think the engravers might have made a couple of errors -- if the I in 'IN' were sans, and the T in 'THIS' were serif, then that 'm' would become a 'g', which would give: forty-eighth stair. Quick, Izzy, to the staircase!
(And thanks to Bo Lindbergh for spotting what the cipher had to be.)
AH! It's using the expanded cypher, not the original.
Thanks for your help pointing me in the correct direction! Using 0 and 1 was a much better approach than the original AB. As an aside - how do you post beautifully crafted links without using the full address (http://www.math.cornell.edu....? "http://www.math.cornell.edu/~morris/135/Bacon.pdf).?")
Pasting the instructions for coding html links didn't work (because it applied them instead of showing them), so go [here](http://shell.cas.usf.edu/mccook/uwy/hyperlinks.html "http://shell.cas.usf.edu/mccook/uwy/hyperlinks.html") for an explanation. It's pretty simple.
Argh damn it. I thought there was going to be some other knack to it. I know the html.. but it refused to allow me to post it last time. Murphy's law may work this time though.. [Damn it](http://www.purple.com/purple.html "http://www.purple.com/purple.html") Thanks for the response though!
I'm like, "cool, I'll solve it." Look at the link to Bacon's cipher - immediately give up ;p I'll let those with time and brain cells to spare solve it for me, for I'm feeling quite dumb today.
Soon, they'll realise that France is Bacon.
This. Pun.
But... surely... Denmark is Bacon?
No no. You want Kevin for that.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Something is rotten in Kevin.
Kudos to everyone who solved the bilateral cypher, although I was expecting it to say 'Actually, I wrote Shakespeare'. I suspect the 'm' instead of the 'g' is the next key to the puzzle.
Moving away from the cypher, I like Lord Barber's reaction to the message itself. Here is a man who believes it is nonsense to think that anything is impossible.
Pshaw, aliens wrote Shakespeare. I thought everyone knew that.
You haven't experienced Hamlet until you've read it in the original Klingon.
But Hamlet isn't a Klingon play. If you're a Klingon and the ghost of your father turns up and says 'Your Uncle murdered me so he could grab power and marry your mother', you don't spend 5 acts wondering what to do about it. You pick up your Batleth, cut out your Uncle's Heart and eat it before his dying eyes. Now Macbeth, where an honourable warrior is led down the path to dishonour one small step at a time - that's a play a Klingon would understand.
Wow, that's the best response I've ever heard to that particular quote. Wish the folks who wrote the Star Trek movie that line first appeared in had thought it through like that. Well done!
Aha, seems I misquoted the line since I was going by memory. [imdb.com](http://imdb.com "imdb.com") says the actual quote is "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." That makes more sense.
Klingons would be all about Laertes, though.
If you read or watch the full play, it’s clear that Hamlet didn’t immediately attack his uncle because he wasn’t sure he could trust the apparition. It could be a demon pretending to be his father in order to get him to commit regicide. The guards make it clear that they thought the spirit was too dangerous to even go with it to speak privately as Hamlet did.
Once Hamlet confirmed the ghost’s story using the “play within a play”, he was ready to strike.
Then Hamlet’s first opportunity to kill his uncle was when the latter was at prayer. In Shakespeare’s time, that meant that he was free from sin, and if Hamlet killed him then, he would have gone to Heaven. So Hamlet decided to wait for another opportunity to be sure he would go to Hell, just like his father.
Then Hamlet killed Polonius behind the curtains, thinking that was his uncle. At that point his uncle decided he was dangerously insane and had him shipped off to England. It would have been rather difficult to attack again from there :-)
Etc. I believe even a Klingon would have acted much the same; the ghost could have been a trick of his enemies, etc.
See how beautifully their talents work together.
It has no brain for ciphers. Or much of anything. It will stand back and watch.
As someone whose career has been in publishing for far too long....a code based around serif and sans serif letters is genius.
As always, learn from Uncle Henry: when the attractive person that you fancy is impressed with your accidental observation, do not admit that the observation was accidental. "I meant to do that" works much better on inadvertent success than it does on inadvertent failure.
Personally, I wonder why they left a riddle. I mean, yes, ok, people do that in the adventure serials, but come on. Do you leave your computer password encoded in a complex cipher on a piece of paper taped to your computer?
Personally, I think it might be a trap.
It is also a common story convention that a clue or clues be obscurely placed in a manner that is pretty useless and hard to find, apparently for little more reason than to show how clever the heroes are. So it is probably not a trap.
My computor password is pretty damn obvious from the prompt I set on my computor..... If you have the same obsession with West African history and folklore. And that'll only work if you happen to pick my preferred way of Romanising a bunch of names that really don't mesh with a Roman alphabet. I mean I suppose I could cipher them as well....but it seems a bit much.
It depends on who you want to be able to access the secret, I guess. If you want to make it accessible to people with a certain set of skills and knowledge, using the right riddle is actually a pretty good way of controlling who gets in and who doesn’t.
So I suppose you could say they left a... (applies hypothetical sunglasses)... shod_dy_ serif?
I'm sorry, that was just grotesque, wasn't it? Not well justified at all.
I shod the serif, but I did not shoo' da deputy!
obstinateness is such a bother
"Obstinacy."
Izzn't the word actually "obstinacy"?