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Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers

Posted by kdawson on from the finding-patterns-where-none-may-exist dept.

atrocious cowpat passes along a call for help from symmetry magazine, the joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, noting: "Could be just plain gibberish, it could be something like those wonderfully weird letters to the Mount Wilson observatory, or it could be a message from aliens who just happened to have gotten their hands (tentacles/exoskeleton) on a fax machine." "A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (4.4-MB image here). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!"

1 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Last stanza:
    consider the || separators between trinary digits |, | |, | | |; decode as for first stanza, gives:
    tadcfmtt blaztr zyppt pioqttb ->
    "employee number basse sixteen"

    thus, the central numbers are probably the employee # of the prank letter writer. Someone at Fermilab could probably check this (maybe Frank Shoemaker?)

    I think we've solved it!