@Alenanno @RosieF I noticed that too, but thought it was more likely that "pyric" had a music-related meaning I didn't know about than that "sil" meant a small mouthful of liquid. I should have pinged Alenanno about it, I guess :-)
@Alenanno There was once a short series on the radio about pieces of music specially written, to evoke particular views. And listeners were invited to write in. So I wrote a 3-minute piece for violin and piano. And it was one of about 12 entries featured on the web site.
@Alenanno And as chance would have it, only yesterday I sent off my entry to a carol-writing competition. If mine is shortlisted, the radio station's choir will perform it and the performance will be put up on the web site. But I don't know how many entries these comps attract so I don't know if my chance is good.
How would you call a steganographic method/steganographic text? "Steganograph", according to this is a synonym for "cipher"... Weird if you ask me, but how else would I call it?
@RosieF Thanks, that works. I just saw Wikipedia also uses "steganogram", which is still a cipher according to the online dictionary definitions I found... I can only assume it's a mistake on their part, since it doesn't make sense that "cipher" is a synonym.
@dcfyj That's especially embarassing because I was talking to him and directly copying his text at the time... I'm basically the worst human to ever human
oooh, but you pointed it out quick enough for a stealth edit, thanks.
Heh, you can tell this stuff comes straight from SO and isn't site-customised:
> We get a lot of requests from product teams about how they can use Puzzling Stack Exchange to support their communities. Puzzling Stack Exchange works really well for technical support and we welcome this, within limits.
@Sconibulus In the list you added for the visually impaired (which I should add too), you are missing number 10 (it became number 2 because it thinks it's a list). Try enclosing the numbers $1.$ like that.
> He was inspired to send warming pans (used to heat sheets in the cold New England winters) for sale to the West Indies, a tropical area. His captain sold them as ladles for the local molasses industry and made a good profit. Next, Dexter sent wool mittens to the same place, where Asian merchants bought them for export to Siberia. People jokingly told him to "ship coal to Newcastle". He did so during a miners' strike at the time, and his cargo was sold at a premium.
If anyone needs help for the gaming answers in the star, the pokemon could be lapras and the arcade fighter can be tekken. Unfortunately my whole English vocabulary is gaming-related, so I don't know any of the rest :p
I am not awfully sure, but I think the answer may be:
The first, the object--
abstract; a guide without a muse.
By itself lives unrestricted,
but here we find it,
linked and woven in.
The second, the tongue--
morphing; with an effortless building
of an ethereal wind;
here one moment, gone...
I think this puzzle is about Latin. It's known for sounding smart, even if meaningless; it's a dead language (see last line of "The third..."); and it's the root of many other languages, "linking" them together. — Deusovi ♦Aug 10 at 19:16
Stupid past me, not noticing that I already almost had the solution...
I'm not going to comment on the accuracy of any of the answers yet, but I will state that around this level of solved, in the last dice star, it was helpful to try to figure out the underlying verbage and work backwards
that would make it very hard to start at the beginning, yes, but Gareth started in the middle, I think he got World first
but really, the very act of trying to piece it together led to noticing things like strange collections of consonants or vowels that only admitted one word, or admitted no words, and implied we had a clue's answer wrong
@Sid Obviously it's not shirt :P that's only five letters, I just meant it sounds more to me like something that's made from fibers like a shirt or pants or a sweater etc
@Sconibulus Ugh. Wonder if the coder shunted all the semicolons and braces off to the right coz he can't bear the sight of them. But why? perhaps he's used to some language with some crazy syntax where you don't use punctuation to separate statements or indicate block structure, so you have to rely on line-breaks and indents?
@Sconibulus I've had a dekko at that code -- not a pretty sight, in more ways than one. permute(n, a) calls permute(n-1, a) n+1 times. Fisher-Yates, ffs. And, rather strangely, if n is odd, each swap is swap(a, 0, n); can that be right?
@Sconibulus I once had to code in an obscure language, Algo-68. It was designed to be compatible with machines with 6-bit bytes, so was miserly on punctuation tokens. Rather than { } it used BEGIN and END. But it had a cute syntax for other sorts of blocks...
Final solution:
Thanks to @Deusovi for help with 9 across and 36 across.
....................................
I am not awfully sure, but I think the answer may be:
The first, the object--
abstract; a guide without a muse.
By itself lives unrestricted,
but here we find it,
linked and woven in.
The second, the tongue--
morphing; with an effortless building
of an ethereal wind;
here one moment, gone...
