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01:05
Kent Brockman is the Simpsons anchorman, and Jimmy Olsen is from Superman.
Springfield/Metropolis (related to Gotham and NYC) don't seem to lead anywhere that could fit the clue.
Jimmy Olsen is a reporter, I guess, not an anchorman
I also thought it could be Popeye, since he has a big anchor tattoo (doesn't fit the "n" clue)
01:24
@ffao 10^k-10^{k/})<=2^x5^y<10^k implies 10^{k-1}-10^{(k-1)/2}<=2^{x-1}5^{y-1}<10^k etc. and earlier we proved (n,0) doesn't work for n>=4 so that means n<=3
@Wen1now only reason it doesn`t work for n>=4 is because of the 3k restriction
but that doesn't apply for the reduction
01:47
What have you guys been working on for the past few days
It seems interesting whatever it is
02:19
0
Q: Find the value of the addition of dice

John DoeGiven these: Find the rule, and provide the answer to "?" (the last row).

02:37
Random fact: my puzzling reputation graph looks like a logistic curve that has (unfortunately) a carrying capacity of 1500.
Get out there and ask/solve some more questions, then :-).
 
4 hours later…
06:15
Will Shortz :)
Sid
Sid
@ABcDexter pretty cool. :)
07:07
-1
Q: What will be the answer?

DIPANJAN HAZRAWhat is the answer of the given puzzle? Please send solution.

07:25
@puzzledPig you around?
<insert explodey noises>
 
2 hours later…
09:34
0
Q: How Many Policemen?

BassA friend of mine presented this nifty little puzzle, he said it's from Round Britain. It goes like this: An athletics competition, arranged periodically, rewards a medal to 79 winners, 47 runners-up, and an indeterminate number of third places. 50 cans of drink are served as refreshment. By t...

 
1 hour later…
10:48
@humn Wait, what? :-o
Also, sorry @humn - quite a few pings from you that I haven't responded to now.
11:24
Heh, @Rubio nagging me to accept answers :-) You should know better than that - I may be a slow bugger, but I always get there in the end. (I also need to post more questions here.)
 
1 hour later…
12:38
@Randal'Thor , nev'r too late! Jump in at The troll and let your hair down.
13:21
third C4 hint: there are three elements of wordplay involved, two of which operate on the same word
Wait, what?
Oh.
14:11
2
Q: The murder of the captain

user_194421One day, in the interstellar space near the system "Calibri"... The battleship B15, controlled from the control ship and flagship "Wielder", has just destroyed an opposing control ship with a long-range shot from a range of 1 light-second, killing all its crew. The crew of the Wielder rejoiced i...

almost definition, "home to anchorman at heart" is double wordplay, but not quite is third one? Hmmmmmmmm
 
1 hour later…
15:36
@Randal'Thor I know better but your answerers shouldn’t have to know or care about your rep idiosyncrasies - they answered correctly and, over a month later, are still waiting for the site’s top user to give them a check mark. At some point maybe it’s time to draw the line :)
good $timezone, TSL
15:50
@Randal'Thor here, let's compromise: i'll give you a downvote, you accept the answer :P
Nah, you'd have to downvote 4 things ;)
16:09
0
Q: I got a lot of weird answers for this riddle!

MessiDragoI found this riddle on the internet and there were some really weird answers. I wanted to see what you would say. I have three brothers. Each brother has three brothers. How many are we?

16:24
Ew. Clickbait title, obvious answer, and OP adds a completely superfluous self-answer after accepting basically the same answer from someone else. Reviewers
16:37
@Rubio I always leave comments to let them know if they've got it right or what's still to get.
What're you going to do, suspend me for not accepting answers quickly enough? :-P
@Rubio Downvoted ... I can't think of any good reason to close it, unfortunately.
@Randal'Thor well since you asked so nicely ... <suspends Rand>
And yeah I’m not actually sure what to do with that puzzle - I don’t really feel like hammering it but I think someone needs more guidance than I care to offer today. Not feeling all that well this morning, alas.
Feel better soon!
Have lots of doggy treats.
I think that’d have the opposite effect hehe
16:56
1
Q: Single Speak - Meta Edition

HugoBDesignerFollowup to my previous Single Speak puzzle, this time I decided to follow the path of the original Double Speak puzzle by adding a metapuzzle. Like in the previous time, the answer to each riddle corresponds to a pair of identical words. Terminate the last part Talk to where it touches ...

Escape escape
@Randal'Thor your “blowing into” words aren’t the same word. Minor fix needed.
@Rubio AH!
@Rubio I couldn't figure out how to make them exactly the same while preserving the grammar. I assume INFLATE is what's sought.
No - it’s inflation for both
Also it’s [Escape] escape
Pedant :-)
Similarly “Earth earth” works
Pedant? Sure, but - here I’m pretty sure the intent is that, maybe with minor overlooking of grammatical awkwardness, the answer to each is exactly and only a single word written twice (module capitalization if needed)
17:06
Ah, a second answer.
Gnome?
I don't get it.
Neither do I.
Apparently it’s right. A gnome is a moral or maxim.
And, of course, garden statuary.
Or fantasy race, in your neck of the SE woods
Their inflate and rotate ones are wrong, and the ethnic dispute is iffy. Rest seem correct.
And Tom with the win.
17:52
1
Q: Soldiers in the Parade Ground

Rand al'ThorTwenty-five soldiers are standing in a parade ground consisting of a five-by-five grid of large concrete slabs, laid out in a neat north-to-south, east-to-west square array. Each soldier is standing on his own slab, but there's space for more than one on the same slab. Their sergeant yells an or...

 
3 hours later…
21:10
The Voynich Manuscript's secret has possibly been cracked.
21:23
We have that posted somewhere here don't we? Go post :)
I can't access their info... I wanted to download the paper but it won't :(
Yeah I was trying to read it too
I could send the professor an email, I suppose.
They used Google Translate to translate their Hebrew. *facepalm* I speak Hebrew...
well. I think they were speculatively trying bits of text to see if anything would translate in any language, for a while there. That doesn't scale well without machine assistance.
> After unsuccessfully seeking Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to Google Translate.
21:34
Given the paper title is “Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script” I think it's a fair guess they ended up anagramming chunks to see if it was parsable, and found that rearranging things enough made a valid Hebrew sentence. that's ... scary.
> Kondrak and Hauer hypothesized the manuscript was created using alphagrams, defining one phrase with another, exemplary of the ambiguities in human language. Assuming that, they tried to come up with an algorithm to decipher that type of scrambled text.

“It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together,” said Kondrak.
> After unsuccessfully seeking Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to Google Translate. “It came up with a sentence that is grammatical, and you can interpret it,” said Kondrak, “she made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people. It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense.”
Reviewers: Find the value of the addition of dice seems to be pretty over-broad.
@Mithrandir Yeah I was finally able to get through on transacl.org's site, though it took a long time
Yeah; it's been sitting half-downloaded on my laptop for the past 20 minutes.
Until I gave up on it and just used that other link.
They probably forgot to feed the hamster this morning.
Anyway - maybe fodder for a new, "partial" self-answered Unsolved Mysteries post about the Voynich manuscript.
hm. that should work.
oh, bah. I didn't even notice the tag for that ;)
> And made her the priest a man on him to shame him and on me his men the flatbread.
That's my translation of the Hebrew text they provide in their paper.
"After unsuccessfully seeking Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to Google Translate." ... they said we were wrong, but Google Translate gave us stuff that looked sensible, so we went with that instead.
Sooo tempted to email the professor with that now
I don't think it should be hard to find Hebrew speakers
More inclined to believe Rubio's hypothesis at this point
22:20
You, er, forgot to account for the "spelling corrections" they did. (heh)
Having read the relevant bits of the PDF, they don't really make any particular claims of deciphering much of anything. They admit to no parsing of any appreciable length; they point out having found, well, a small handful of words in one section that, at least, don't seem wildly out of in the context; but you could probably rearrange letters in almost any (say) English text and at pure random find the resultant mess had identifiable words that weren't wildly out of place some random context
I was thinking about making a puzzle based on a video game i will make (hopefully)
Did anyone notice that the CCCC archive hasn't been updated in a few months?
exactly how liberal can you be with cryptic crossword word play? should i post a possibly unstrict cryptic crossword clue again?
@DestructibleLemon Judgment call, really. Follow the basic rules. You don't need to have intuitive or predictable indicators, so an "iffy" indicator can usually slide.
Like all puzzles, try to solve it backward and see if the solution is consistent to the rules.
Ordinal Per Western City (5)
it uses word play i haven't seen used before though
i think its better without "An"
tbh i think it might be pretty difficult for the reason that the word play isn't used often
also the definition isn't totally strict
also the answer is a proper noun
that's allowed, right?
22:34
Usually, and in most of those cases, as the definition
sorry please explain what you mean
Like, if I said "Duos in mixed city" and the solution is PAIRS (from anagram of PARIS), then that's kind of bending the rules because Paris is not a synonym of City.
paris is a hyponym of city?
Right. I'm not entirely sure that hyponyms are legal as part of the wordplay.
I used that in a clue and nobody yelled at me (but it was a cryptic definition)
22:38
Really? Huh. I learn something new every day.
It was "City with famous building listing (4)"
please tell me if the clue is too hard to guess, I guess
@DestructibleLemon Is it SUMER? Def is city, wordplay is SUM + ("RE:" backwards)
no
sum is ordinal?
yeah, the word play is probably not something encountered before
hyponyms are generally fine, hypernyms should be indicated
(of course, Mike's example is still an indirect anagram)
you could potentially not indicate a hypernym if it is really obvious, but it's best to stay on the safe side I think
especially since puzzle creators always think their puzzle is simpler than it actually is
22:48
does that mean my puzzle is very very hard then :P
should i post the solution?
what if I post the solution and let you figure out why it is the solution?
@DestructibleLemon There's no need, but you can if you want to. @ffao or @EricTressler, do you have any ideas?
I'm gonna flip a coin
coin says not to reveal
I don't have any idea. Paris (the man) is important in ordinal theory, but I don't know.
ok tbh I think maybe it would be best to reveal
answer: Perth
it's still rather difficult
If you can't solve it, i might post to main
it's just playing on "nth"?
22:59
Perth = Western (Australia) city, wordplay is _th + per... somehow reversed? It needs something to indicate this reversal.
ok yeah maybe not as difficult as i though
the vast majority of people wouldn't classify Perth as a western city
that's just confusing
the ordinal for n is nth, ordinal for per is perth
Australia is a western country, even if not physically western
and Perth is the capital of western australia
But the wordplay works out to THPER, unless there is some unspecified joke about Australia being upside-down
no, the joke is that "ordinal per" is "per-th"
23:02
ordinal form of per
23:36
0
Q: The missing elements

Kit-GinevraDr.Trout the brilliant,but rather erratic chemist is preparing for his Amazing American Chemistry Extravaganza. He's spent so much time preparing for it,that he's forgotten to feed the lab mice. They've started chomping through the nearest sheet of papers. That's unfortunate,as it happens to be ...


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