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05/08/00
clue=``totaliter aliter'' means something like ``completely different''
name=v. a.

06/21/00
clue=the meaning of 'octave' in the quote is the musical one. that's the interval between two 
consecutive notes of the same name as do3-do4, ri5-ri6, and so on. scientificaly speaking, 
the octave is defined by the multiplication by two of the frequence of a note.
name=Abel

10/19/00
clue=May be completely meaningless, but you never know:

There is an old story, associated with Thomas Aquinas and re-told by Karl Barth, about two
medieval monks who spent many hours discussing the nature of the future life. Would heaven be, they wondered, very
much like what they deduced from the Scriptures and their own experience, or would it be quite different? They
made a pact that whichever of them passed over the great beyond first would try to send back a message, affirming
or denying what they had long discussed. They had already agreed that the future would be "aliter," otherwise
than what can be known or imagined, but in what way? Eventually a signal came through to the survivor which he
deciphered as "Totaliter aliter", Totally otherwise. 
name=Jessica

12/07/00
email=dmandel
clue=Just a general note about leitmotivs - There are many connotations this can be used in - but one of them is in 
reference to Wagnerian operas.  It would be foolish to ignore the musical connection when it is such a recurring
theme... "an associated melodic phrase or figure that accompanies the
reappearance of an idea, person, or situation especially in a Wagnerian music drama"

clue:  Since I can't do much in math it seemed like a plan to just look at the verbal part of what seems like a very
complex piece of work.  Like most of what I send in this isn't very deep but it might be a key or at least a key of 
sorts.  Look at the last two quotes.  The one about "cosmology" deals with patience.  The last one which is Reprise 
deals with how old Moses and Aaron were when things got rolling for them.  Those two do fit together.  Now look at the 
very first quote which talks about star-something.  Right above that are throwing stars.

The way they go at this could be exactly what a couple of your other contributors have said: up-front and obvious.  
That wouldn't eliminate all the complexity and it wouldn't have to be filler, I just mean that combining the very 
obvious with the very complex is mind-boggling for almost anybody who isn't inside whatever this is.  If someone had 
the time to go through each of the illustrations you have posted my sense is that something very obvious is connected 
to something equally obvious in the _same_ piece everytime.  From that point they could add in the complex parts and 
you end up with a completely public message that looks insane and yet conveys a great deal of meaning.  (I just read 
through the firstn part of this and it continues to make sense, so here is a little more to illustrate what almost has 
to be part of what they are doing.) 

The complexity is openly connected with the ads or announcements that are 
contained in this newspaper.  The  words give you what they might call level 1 and that gives you references to a list 
they hand out at their meetings.  Only the insiders would have the list and might be so short that it could be 
committed to memory, like Mayday 87 and 91.  Those contain tons of text and the complexity comes in as to how to 
extract what they need from those texts.  We are now at the limit of my computer knowledge but consider this: all the 
ads contain self-checking devices which could be used to generate the same message another way but you have to be at 
the meeting to get the current list of newspaper articles or ads to run through the process.  The danger would be one 
of them getting caught but the next meeting could generate and I guess always generates a new list.  One of them 
getting caught would slow this down but it wouldn't end it because newspapers are kept
in archives in hundreds of places.  

Somebody else can give you some historical examples but the one I know is that the
French Resistance used something like this in this in the Paris organization.  You only knew the one above and below 
you.  Many were caught and tortured, some talked but the organization survived.  Sorry this is so long but for me it 
is starting to make sense.

clue:  It occurs to me that not just Revelations but Revelations 21 (the "New Jerusalem") comes up repeatedly. For anyone 
who's curious, you can find the chapter here:

http://www.awitness.org/biblehtm/re/re21.htm

clue:  You may be right but there is one argument for it and that is the fact that the paper these appear in is almost 
certainly sent to dozens of university libraries.  Some of them undoubtedly get archived and even if they don't the 
participants could check the new issues as they come in.  I never saw a library that didn't stack the old periodicals in 
chronological order, newest on top. That would give a stretch of time before the old ones were discarded. 


near a terminal: 01.28.02

clue:  I still think these are at least partially connected with being deposited in university libraries.  For one thing, it 
would take university level brains to be tied into something like this.


JB318: 05.07.02

clue:  Once I was on an electronic service similar to CompuServ back in the day.  We used to get strange postings in
our teenage forum from a guy that seemed to be having a one-sided conversation with nobody else in particular.

We wondered out loud what was going on.  It was a high enough traffic forum that somebody would notice, but low enough
traffic that there weren't calls to the sysops to get the poster canned.  We made a few attempts to get to know him
(her?), and he responded a very little bit to us asking "Who are you?" but in the end it all remained a mystery.  The
story ended unremarkably, since I don't remember what happened.  Either he stopped showing up (most likely) or I got
bored with that forum and spent my time elsewhere.

I speculated at the time that it was a spy for a secret agency sending messages on to  somebody else.  (It was all
written in such a way that it looked like such an obfuscated message, though if it was it wasn't steganographic--you
could *tell* that it was a message to *somebody*.)  Rather than sending it in an E-mail, where the staff could dig it
out of the mailbox and see who read it, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of legitimate readers of that public
forum who would have read the strange posts.  Any one of them could be the intended recipient, and there'd be no
reasonable way to figure out who the real recipient was.  That way, not only did the recipient not have to risk being
given away by virtue of having received such a message, but indeed even the sender didn't need to know who the
recipient(s?) are/were!  That beats out one-time pads and such if you have to conceal the identity of the recipient.




HC: 06.24.2004
In the star on the right side of the page with the Chinese characters and Hebrew letters, I noticed something odd about one
of the Hebrew letters.  In clockwise order starting with the letter just to the right of the top spike, the letters are ayin
(silent), mem (m), yod (y), gimmel (g, more on this later), tsadik (ts), bet (b), daledh (d), and vahv (v).  The letter in the
center is a chet (ch as in "Bach").  The English spellings of the letter names is not standardized and may appear different
elsewhere.  Anyway, most of this you could probably have looked up easily yourself, but I noticed one odd thing about the gimmel at
the bottom right.  First of all, the tail on the gimmel is only sort of half-formed, making it sort of look like a nun (n).  The
other odd thing is the dot in the center.  Dots of that sort appear frequently in Hebrew as a sort of helper punctuation (they
aren't necessary, but they appear in children's books and in books for foreigners like me).  For example, the dot in the bet on the
right of the screen has a dot to indicate that it is pronounced as a "b" and not as a "v".  But I've never seen a dot in a gimmel
(or a nun) before.  I have no idea if that's significant, but it struck me as odd.



Anon : 06.30.2004

The Thomas Harris Connection: I believe that the first "Hannibal Lecter" novel was published in 1981. It and The Silence
of the Lambs both involve the use of codes keyed to books, as I recall. The latter also uses a pun on a chemical formula.
Furthermore, the final book has the Lecter character reflecting often on the nature and irreversibility of time. Thomas Harris is
fairly reclusive from what I understand. Maybe he's a member. Maybe he knows of this and is a fan. Maybe the creator(s) of the ads
are fans (the most likely).



Marcel B 09.05.2005

The arrangement of Hebrew letters looks like a Kabbalistic device, however it could be a simple anagram or 'start reading
here...' I'll look into it further.
Don't worry about the dot ("dagesh") in the gimmel. Many hebrew letters attract a dagesh when the rules of classical hebrew are
properly applied - particularly the letters of "begged kefet", i.e. the letters (bet, gimmel, daled, kaf, pey and taf) that make up
that mnemonic.
	


D. Thomasson 04.15.2006


Please see my solution to the "Octave" logic problem in this announcement:
http://www.borderschess.org/Octaves.htm






Preterite Pete 01/23/2007


	NAT seemed fairly confident about the ADW being held by "dozens" of libraries. Fortunately, this is easy to check. It's held
by the following:

U of Arizona

Arizona State

Washington State*

U of Hong Kong*

U of Texas, Brownsville**

Amherst College

U of Michigan**


*Don't get excited; this is Lexis-Nexis access and does not contain ads.

**Don't get excited either; this is just the web site access.


So, Amherst would be the only unusual one, but they subscribe to several non-Amherst student papers.



Preterite Pete 01.23.2007

Has anyone in Tucson ever tried this? The day one of these comes out, you go to the library and look up the references.
Maybe someone has simply inserted a page with further (clearer) directions in them?





Punnet 11/30/17

No one mentioned this, but the picture to the left is 12 variations on shuriken, or throwing knives.
Most seem to be similar to the stars and asterisks common throughout the ads, but I'm not sure what 
significance they have to the overall theme.