Fact and Fiction

Thoughts about a funny old world, and what is real, and what is not. Comments are welcome, but please keep them on topic.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Pi (update)

I wrote a blog posting a few weeks ago about the song π (Greek letter p) on the new album Aerial by Kate Bush, where I said the following:

She recites π to a large number of decimal places. Actually, she doesn't recite the precise digits of π, and even omits a large block of digits, as has been noticed by many people. Now I don't believe for a minute that KB would make careless mistakes, because she has the reputation for being a bit of a perfectionist. That means that the "mistakes" in the digits are deliberate. How intriguing! This has just got to be a number puzzle that KB has set us to solve.

I have now had a close look at this song, and my impression that it contains a number puzzle has been strongly reinforced by what I have now found in the song. I am not going to tell you what I have found, but I will stake a claim on having found it first (eat your heart out GCHQ!) by quoting the anagram

"Heavy-hearted, contrary warmth"

(comma and hyphen are unimportant)

which is designed to be checkable by whoever created the puzzle in the first place (i.e. Kate Bush) or by anyone who solves the puzzle, but will confound everyone else unless I decide to explain exactly how it was generated. I may or may not decide to explain the anagram, depending on what other details I can decode from the song. However, I will say that the anagram is derived by a logical chain of reasoning, starting from information that is encoded in the song, and also including information that is referenced by the song, to generate 3-ish words that were then mangled into the above anagram.

Conveniently, there are several "parity checks" that my decoding of the song is correct, otherwise I wouldn't bother you with this anagram. I should add that I have not used any special knowledge to obtain this decoding, and I assume that there is lots more in the song that I have yet to decode.

If you think that you can unmangle the anagram, then I suggest that it would be quicker to attempt to decode the song itself, because solving the anagram is more difficult than deducing the code that is used in the song.

2 Comments:

At 12 December 2005 at 00:42, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Picture today was obviously taken at altitude above 200ft - otherwise would have been misty

 
At 12 December 2005 at 08:06, Blogger Stephen Luttrell said...

I assume you are referring to the photo I included here. I didn't realise that so much could be deduced from the photo!

 

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