I'm from Italy, yet I speak English
On top of that, my name is French
I hail back from the late nineties galore
Last in 2016 did I release lore
Until then it has been a decade
But we never truly did fade
One of us is the key
One of us flies the wind
One of us controls sound
Together we...
Just so I am clear, what's the site's official stance of reusing different themes of puzzles(like NATO Phonetic alphabet)? Is that considered to be a duplicate of the original?
I'd even say that some puzzles wouldn't be solvable if the phonetic alphabet (or element symbols or ISO country codes or A1Z26 or Morse code) weren't such a staple. So a simple code involving the phonetic alphabet may not be a duplicate, but it usually isn't an interesting puzzle.
@MOehm I've never seen that term before -- A1Z26 -- though obviously I know what it is from context. I like it. (Not sure what I would've called it, but definitely something much more long-winded.) Is it standard nomenclature?
While we're kind-of on the topic, gematriya (should be Googlable) is an old and standard way of assigning values to letters in Hebrew, also used in Hebrew puzzles. It works by assigning the 1-9 to the first 9 letters, 10-90 for the next 9, etc. Is the corresponding thing used in puzzles in English? Z would be 800, for example.
I guess it is so you can get 666 and 888 with short expressions. Those numbers have a meaning in Christian numerology. See here for a puzzle involving Gematria. The accepted answer has a useful link. The Hebrew Gematria seems be more akin to the Greek number system.
My friend, who works in a Library, has recently learned about Puzzles, in general, and Puzzling Stack Exchange, in particular. He was excited and has sent me this puzzle to "test" the users of PSE. Can you rise to the occasion and explain what happens on Day 6 and where it happens?
Day 1: Cop...
I've tried several approaches, none of them really successful. Given that there was a bout of "marshall" clues recently, I'll state the obvious and say that a marshall can be a kind of American policeman. But I don't see how the wordplay could work.
not sure what the answer would be if American is the definition, though. I couldn't find any synonyms of American so went to names of Indian tribes (Cherokee) and state demonyms (Georgian), both of which are weak
I can give a hint for the C4 if it's wanted (maybe a letter?). A couple of constructions have been mentioned with comments like "I don't think Gareth would do that"; I am making no comment on whether either is used in this clue but I don't find either of them very objectionable and as a general remark you shouldn't rule either of them out if solving one of my clues.
Actually, to be a little clearer about one of them (with, again, no comment at all on whether it's got anything to do with this clue), I wouldn't use "in the Middle East" as a def for, say, ISRAEL, but I might use it for ISRAELI or for "inserted into ISRAEL".
"Cop" is definitely American but everyone in the UK knows it.
"Feds" is pretty well known over here too but of course no one would use it to refer to the UK police. There are some UK-specific police forces that don't have direct equivalents in the US, of course.
(As usual none of the above should be taken to indicate anything about my clue.)
I will say -- again, with no comment on the particular clue -- that I would have no hesitation in using "feds" or "Met" or "Yard" or other very well known local police forces in a crossword clue, if it seemed appropriate.
Yes, UK policemen are officers. (I am not 100% sure that every policeman is an officer, but for sure many of them are and I don't think it would be very unusual for someone being accosted by the police to address one of them as "officer".)
Ah, thanks. To me, officer always has a certain military ring to it. From detective stories I know that in the US, there are police captains and detective lieutenants. (But there are police sergeants and constables in the UK, too, so there are also similarities to the military.)
@Adam I think of "polis" as distinctly Irish, but that may be because the people I've heard that term from happen to have been Irish. ... I looked it up, and OED says Scottish, Irish and NE English.
"Bobbies" to me sounds deliberately old-fashioned. I suspect the typical usage is tabloid newspapers deliberately evoking nostalgia in order to get their readers angry about something that's changed over the last 50 years.
I asked Google, and the first two things it found that weren't (1) other meanings or (2) works of reference were: a "practical service which aims to bring peace of mind to the vulnerable and elderly" organized by one local police force and an article in a right-wing UK tabloid paper talking about how a right-wing UK politician is proposing to "put an extra 20,000 bobbies on the beat". I think I pretty much nailed it.
(I mean, neither example is actually a tabloid trying to make people angry, but both are deliberate evocations of nostalgia probably aimed at older readers, and one of them is actually from a tabloid.)
Yea the usage of "Bobbies" is really weird. Never heard of it outside stereotyping. I thought it might be common English slang but I guess I must be wrong
I will state something obvious that there's no clear clue for the location other than the few other locations you have. The "Where" is not connected at all, to the "what"
Well done. I should have tried to look at the series of countries in isolation. I tried to fit a number to each country and the +45 calling code for Denmark looked good.
Ok :) See Gareth, I told you the populace loves Moderators who Rule With An Iron Fist. I say we step it up a notch now, instead of August like we planned.
I found this online riddle at m4tr1x.ws, but now I am stuck. It seems you need to gain deeper and deeper access to this virtual Matrix-style computer system. First you need to create an account via the register command. That is easy, after confirming via email you can login to the system.
Afterw...
1. We generally require puzzles to be self-contained. In this case it's reasonably self-contained even though it references something elsewhere: the poster is saying "I found this puzzle in that place; any ideas on how to solve it?".
2. We generally don't allow puzzles that are part of an ongoing competition. I don't know whether the thing he's doing is an ongoing competition in the relevant sense; it may be worth trying to find out.
3. We discourage "puzzles" that are really being posted only in order to drive traffic to other sites. This smells a little like one of those, but only a little.
4. I don't think we care whether OP got to the puzzle by sacrificing their first-born child in a satanic ritual, following a trail of child pornography, hanging out with terrorists, etc. -- though, see #3, if their posting seems designed to encourage others to do such things then it might be a different matter.
The main thing making me suspect #3 a little is that the user seems keen to detail the steps they took in order to get to where they are. But that also seems like potentially useful information for figuring out what they need to do next.
I may be giving the post too much credit for #1, though: it's not clear that it's a puzzle the rest of us can usefully solve unless we do the same thing as the OP did (which I for one am absolutely not touching with a bargepole).
(If we take it that the puzzle really is to find something that SHA224's to the thing given, then I guess it's something the rest of us could try to solve, e.g. by feeding the whole of a wordlist into SHA224 and seeing what happens.)
(tho there are 2 versions of posting them one by one: either all at the same time as omega_krypton recently did, or one a day as jafe did with his geography)
@GarethMcCaughan oh good point
right, i'm leaning to post them one by one, at a pace of a day or so then. thanks btw!
Each of the puzzles below gives a two-word answer. Solve the puzzles and arrange the resulting 16 words into four groups of four, each with a common theme. The resulting group names form a clue for the final answer.
Written every which way
A manager's dilemma
Keeping you safe
Coordin...
In my job as a poet for a national newspaper I am rarely faced with ethical decisions. However, today was quite a challenge…
The editor came to me this morning and said, “Hey, I’ve heard about this website – they call it the Puzzling Stock Exchange or something…”
“Stack Exchange,” I corrected ...
An eight-letter synonym for America is Columbia. But (a) that's America, not American, and I can't seem to find a related word that's eight letters long and means American, and (b) I don't see how it'd be 'policeman stationed in the Middle East'.
The Binomial Elks Club
For many months, Bill Gates had heard whispers of an exclusive club for the super rich, but when pressed, no one would provide any details. The secrecy surrounding the club piqued his curiosity, so he hired a team of private investigators to find out everything they could...
In the spirit of the classic river-crossing puzzles:
Problem:
The word PLANS is on the west shore of a river, while the word PAINTER is on the east shore.
The farmer needs to take his word PLANS from the west side to the east side.
However, he can only cross the river with one "chunk" at a time...
Take a normal 3x3 rubiks cube (the Classic unmodded cube).
I know the WCA method for scrambling is to pick a random (valid) cube state and calculate a sequence of moves to go from solved to that state, for the convenience of the competition scramblers.
AFAIK, this is a very hard thing to impleme...
I'm from Italy, yet I speak English
On top of that, my name is French
I hail back from the late nineties galore
Last in 2016 did I release lore
Until then it has been a decade
But we never truly did fade
One of us is the key
One of us flies the wind
One of us controls sound
Together we...
My friend, who works in a Library, has recently learned about Puzzles, in general, and Puzzling Stack Exchange, in particular. He was excited and has sent me this puzzle to "test" the users of PSE. Can you rise to the occasion and explain what happens on Day 6 and where it happens?
Day 1: Cop...
Hello everybody,
Has anyone ever seen something like this? I don’t even know what I should do with the puzzle...
Any suggestion or help is welcome!
Each of the puzzles below gives a two-word answer. Solve the puzzles and arrange the resulting 16 words into four groups of four, each with a common theme. The resulting group names form a clue for the final answer.
Written every which way
A manager's dilemma
Keeping you safe
Coordin...
In my job as a poet for a national newspaper I am rarely faced with ethical decisions. However, today was quite a challenge…
The editor came to me this morning and said, “Hey, I’ve heard about this website – they call it the Puzzling Stock Exchange or something…”
“Stack Exchange,” I corrected ...
The Binomial Elks Club
For many months, Bill Gates had heard whispers of an exclusive club for the super rich, but when pressed, no one would provide any details. The secrecy surrounding the club piqued his curiosity, so he hired a team of private investigators to find out everything they could...
In the spirit of the classic river-crossing puzzles:
Problem:
The word PLANS is on the west shore of a river, while the word PAINTER is on the east shore.
The farmer needs to take his word PLANS from the west side to the east side.
However, he can only cross the river with one "chunk" at a time...
