When I travel by airplane, I prefer to start my trip on foot, rather than car. There's an air of wonder about traveling when you step from your front porch, belongings in hand, headed for a destination thousands of miles away. When you do it by car, invariably encountering traffic, the whole affair feels like an inefficient commute. My trips usually involve walking just over a mile to the light-rail, taking the light rail about 10 miles to the airport, then getting on the plane. As I was sitting on the train today, it occurred to me that the first leg of my trip is at a velocity of about 3 miles per hour (if I'm taking it leisurely). Then, on the train, it's about 40 miles per hour, and finally, on the airplane, it's over 600 miles per hour. If I took a whole trip to the Coast on foot (as Louis and Clarke did), it would take months. Who needs jetpacks?
Speaking of crypto treasure-hunts and math circles...I just found these educational materials from the NSA. There are dozens of lesson plans for topics ranging from probability to geometry. They're very complete, including clear instructions for the teacher (or parent, or math circle leader for that matter), and nice activities to print out for the students.
Picking up on a previous post with this one. PYSOPT relationships, if you can call them a relationship, are odd. I spend about an hour each way on the train, going right to the end of the line. So lots of faces start to be familiar and a few are on a smiling basis. I'm not a chatter, especially by the end of the day, so the familiarity doesn't progress.
Does it for anyone else? Or are we all now preoccupied with technology and brain dead from work by the end of the day? There are some groups i have noticed - maybe i should find out if they are train only friends or if it extends past or pre the travel. Let's see if i can give you an answer on this...
I was surprised to hear Audra wanted "codebreaking" to be the theme of her party this year. Maybe she missed math circle, or maybe there's cryptography in the air, maybe she knew it would bring Dad even more into the party preparation than normal (last year's Pirate Party was also
- We put out puzzles and thinking-activities from our "games and puzzles drawer out for people to play with as the party gathered. We also left out a set of the "code books".
- When everyone assembled, we said "instead of a cake, all we have here is this empty-feeling box". Inside the box were two ribbons with letters on them. The kids figured out that dowels would be needed, and thought of wrapping the ribbons around chair legs or other cylinders around the house...not noticing the pile of 10 dowels against a wall. Eventually, the dowels were discovered, and one ribbon got decoded on the first try -- what are the odds? It took a lot more work to decode the second ribbon. Between the two ribbons, the message was "I have hidden your stuff in a secret location. You will find help where les oeufs are produced." The two French dictionaries were sitting next to where the empty box started ended up helping out. "The Chicken coop!" and they were off.
- Inside the coop was a plastic egg with two smaller eggs nested. In that was a tiny USB thumb drive. I created a bunch of directories (A-Z) and a "readme.txt". The file said "Look in directory "D" for the next clue". Inside directory D were another set of directories A-Z, and a readme.txt that said "What "are" you looking for". Inside directory "R" was another readme.txt: "what are "you" looking for, again?". Inside directory "U" were more directories, and a readme.txt: "mmmmmmmmmmm...I love cake." Finally, inside directory "M" was a file that said "you've found the right place."
- The innermost directory (note the path was "D/R/U/M") had a text file with morse code spelling out "The next clue is hidden inside an instrument you hit with your hands." as well as an .mp3 file with morse code spelling out "DRUM". I used this web site to generate the two files. The cryptographers broke into two groups, one group tried to decode the audio, the other asked me to print out the morse code for them to decode. Even though I slowed the morse code audio way down, that team finally switched to decoding the text as well. Nobody noticed the path spelled out DRUM. Interesting!
- Inside the drum was an envelope with a bunch of slips of paper in the original transposition code (I wrote a python program to generate this... see the bottom of this post). I wanted to allow this task to be parallelized, so I wanted to chop up the message into bits, and then added numbers so they'd know which order they went in. The slips decoded to the text "ONE LOOK", "TWO UNDER", "THREE THE THING", "FOUR THAT HANGS", "FIVE ON ROPE", "SIX FROM A", "SEVEN TREE AND", "EIGHT CHILDREN", "NINE PLAY ON", "TEN FOR FUN". They quite quickly decoded the individual strips, but had a dickens of a time figuring out the ordering of the slips. They were thinking the numbers were another level of code, or were part of the message, or formed a more complex pattern (like 2 4 6 8 ...). Finally, they got them all on the floor at once, and with a little Socratic questioning help, they figured it out. "The Swing!"
- Under the swing was an envelope with what caused the funniest moment of the party (for me, anyway). I wrote "Hermione shows up with fancy hair and a dress." With no time at all, the rushed into the house, grabbed the single volume (book four) of the Harry Potter series, and took about 30 seconds to find the right chapter. On that page was another slip of paper, this time with another book title, and a math problem (110 * 3 - 10). And so on for eight books. The last slip of paper was in an art book, on the page about Miro. They discarded the book before noticing the slip of paper said "look behind a painting that looks like this one." They dug it back out, found the page, and behind the painting was another envelope, holding a paper saying "four legs eats here".
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"Cat bowl!" Under the cat bowl were two more scytale ribbons "Oh, no, not more?!?!". They were getting hungry for cake. The scytale ribbons had a little-bit-too obscure clue (I think I was getting tired at this point in the puzzle-making process): Ribbon one: "Your next clue is hidden inside a musical instrument on the West wall of the house" and "If you go to Hawaii you will hear my strings". It took way too long to find the Ukelele on the West wall of the house. I was busy upstairs laminating the ID cards, but heard the excitement of finding a slip of paper with the URL http://www.mecodegoodsomeday.com/secretCode. Heidi says she had to help them with the typing - theirs was too error-prone to get it right.
- They recognized bits of the car, and my car-key's bike-chain keyring. They finally found the cake in the trunk...but no goodie bags! Fortunately, the icing had morse code ("Not again!") that said "look under the bed" which is where they found their goodie bags.
time is really flying by. as suggested by the title, it has been a few days over two months since the fires. Things are good overall, but moving so slowly.
The debris is yet to be cleared. I got a call from the company contracted by the government to do the clean up about four weeks ago to say we will hear from them in a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks ago I did hear from, and was told I would hear from them in a couple of weeks. So that is yet to happen. It is what was expected and we knew it would be ages before things are cleaned up, but we are finding it difficult to imagine "what next" without a blank canvas to work from. However, we are starting to fantasize (is that spelt correctly?) about what to build - hopefully will capture the expanded views we now have.
We are still living with Pete and Wendy. We have a caravan that we move in and out of depending on who else is staying here (the beds inside are more comfy). Joe is working on the bathroom out the back for increased space for us all. We decided not to go ahead with the offered rental in Kinglake - given I am off the mountain nearly 12 hours a day due to work, we realised it would be very easy (especially for me) to fall into the trap of work, dinner, sleep and lose the support of being around others.
Having said that, we are house-sitting for some other friends for a week while they are away. This will give us all a break, especially P&W, who have had only the sunday after the fire to themselves in the past 2 months.
Further inviestigation revealed that Brodie's cuts and scratches were most likely the result of tangling with a possum. The neighbour told us he found a deceased possum at his place, and figure this was the outcome after giving Brodie a good whipping. The black and white wonder has always been intriuged (okay, obsessed) with possums (remember Fenton St davemonkey?) and I would say he managed to catch one when it was in a weakened state. Luckily for Brodie we didn't catch him mid-fight...but I would say he will leave them alone in the future.
Joe is still delighted to be driving around in the Troopie, and work is good for me (still waiting on whether I got the permenant position).
I am starting to get a few personal notes out to people - this is taking me longer than I would like, but will get there eventually. Your thoughts really do mean so much to us.
Happy Easter/Chocolate-fest everyone. x
I'm feeling pretty spoilt today. Yay!
Thank you cindy and kathryn. Already better than the original. I am a very lucky person.
There is a lady i would often see on my train to or from work. I realised she lived up the road from me one day when i drove past her walking the dogs one saturday morning en route to st andrews markets. I haven't seen her since the fires. I hope she is okay.
How long do you think until i'm bored with this toy?
