To be Frank (except I'm not), @humn, you appear to be in a strange place. Are you alright? You seem as if perhaps something happened in real life that perhaps wasn't so great. Is everything okay?
@TheGreatEscaper it's possible.
I'll see the email in a couple days, unfortunately, as I only access it from my computer and that's not available for a little while.
@humn not your thing? Aw. Give it another shot at some point if you're ever willing. It'll take a bit of effort to get into but it's honestly the only piece of entertainment I've ever experienced that I would call 'transcendental'
Given a multiset (a set with repeated elements allowed) of positive integers, its P-graph is the loopless graph whose vertex set consists of those integers, any two of which are joined by an edge if they have a common divisor greater than 1, that is, they are not relatively prime.
The P-graph of...
> I’ll build you a better man of firmer flesh and all complete, from hairy head to metatarsal feet, using A’s and I’s and U’s and E’s with muscular arms and flexible knees; eyes and ears and lids and lips, neck and chest and breast and hips; …
@humn If you mean that you still need a hint for what I was on about: Black and Littlejack are the villains of The Wonderful O, who seek to remove the O's from all wrds.
In The Phantom Tollbooth, basically every name has a significance/pun. For example, Dr. Dischord - his name is 'Discord' with 'chord' - implying bad sounds. Or the DYNNE, or 'din'. And Chroma, with his colors. I even managed to figure out something for King Azaz (the wordy king) - it's from A to...
In The Phantom Tollbooth, basically every name has a significance/pun. For example, Dr. Dischord - his name is 'Discord' with 'chord' - implying bad sounds. Or the DYNNE, or 'din'. And Chroma, with his colors. I even managed to figure out something for King Azaz (the wordy king) - it's from A to...
LEARN+LINEAR+LOGIC=PROLOG
To find the values of individual characters for the above alphametic puzzle where each of the alphabets in the below represents a unique digit in base 10 and leading characters are non zero digit.
@humn "Are any characters in The Phantom Tollbooth based on real-life figures" would probably make a good Lit.SE question. Want to sign up and post it? :-)
@humn I'm not sure how to make a very broad Q like that about literature as a whole (would probably be closed as too broad), but a Q like that about a particular book would be great.
It is a commonly known fact that Lewis Carroll based Alice in his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass on Alice Liddell, after she asked him to tell him a story.
But were any other characters, for instance the Mad Hatter, inspired by real life people, and what evidence ...
Disclaimer: no offence intended to Americans, Australians, or any other group! It's all part of the puzzle.
What am I talking about in the following riddle?
There are many different types of men;
They often come in groups of two or three.
Each group has a matching group of women,
But they shoul...
I woke up this morning to find Easter eggs hidden around the house. Instead of being filled with chocolate, each one had a slip of paper inside. Apparently the Easter Bunny left a puzzle to solve. What does it all mean? (Each line represents one clue inside an egg. They are listed in the ord...
@Gareth Could the CCCC answer be ENDURE? "Accept" as def, the letter before "posting" is E, somehow "state of" = UNDER (not sure about this bit), and then "perhaps" indicates anagramming UNDER+E.
(I'm not very confident about this, but experience has shown that not mentioning halfway hunches often ends badly, and I don't lose anything by making a wrong guess.)
@GarethMcCaughan Fair enough! (And sorry about that.)
@Randal'Thor For the easter puzzle, sort by the numbers (after your rot-n-ing) and read off the firsts, then the seconds, then the third, and you get WHAT IS MY FAVORITE CANDY
Easter is a Christian holiday celebrating Jesus' resurrection. The most common practice in the US is an "Easter egg hunt", where little plastic eggs with candy are hidden throughout the house / yard / whatever by the older family members (posing as the "Easter Bunny"), and the kids of the family try to find the eggs.
In pagan tradition, it was a celebration of Spring. In Judaism it's called Passover and celebrates the Angel of Death "passing over" Jews' houses and only murdering non-Jewish children. In Christianity, as Deusovi said, it celebrates the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion on Good Friday. I'm not really sure where chocolate eggs enter into any of this.
@Sid Well, in countries where Christianity has a stronger presence, it is basically a religious festival: people go to church and stuff rather than just sitting around eating chocolate.
I think both Christianity and Judaism have a tradition of fasting linked to Easter/Passover, but I may be getting mixed up with some other period in the year.
I grew up going to church for Easter.. People who are 'christian' but don't really go to church frequently tend to go on two holidays, Christmas and Easter
Now it tends to be more like, give up something for lent (it's supposed to be your time, and such) but nowadays it's more like I won't eat chocolate for the 40 days
@Deusovi Give up something, like fasting? Or like a New Year's resolution? Or like sacrificing to the gods? (I'm probably getting mixed up with the ancient Greeks for that last one ... :-P )
For the avoidance of doubt: the answer to my clue is not ENDURE, though I have to confess there is something very slightly dodgy about the clue and if it weren't for the fact that changing it would leak information I'd make a minor alteration to it. And no, I don't do indirect anagrams.
I don't think most Christians consider that they have to give something up for Lent either. Various specific Christian groups have had specific requirements, which have also tended to change over time. I would agree that it's got diluted, but I'd say it's over a longer period than just the 21st century. Gradually since maybe the mid-19th or thereabouts, and faster since the mid-20th.
I think there were eggs (as a symbol of new life, which works whether you're celebrating the coming of spring, the Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt, or the Resurrection) long before there were chocolate eggs.