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2011-10-14 19:29:10 (8609 views) On September 22nd, we posted a difficult 4th clue about our upcoming new male management product. The clue is in the form of a string quartet with one violin, 2 violas and one cello. The post specifically stated that this time the clue would be very revealing but also well concealed.
On October 15th, Fog08642 became the first to crack the code.
While we were battling with motor coils, suppliers, pantone colors, texturing mistakes and re-dos, coding, filming, stress-testing and so forth, we hope you have enjoyed this brief (?) excursion into literature, biology and code cracking and found it refreshing.
This blog is about to return to our main mission - male management automation and streamlining for the modern couple. But first, a complete walk-through of ...
THE HINTS
The clue would have been much simpler had it not been for the 3 voices (1 violin, 2 violas) that have nothing to do with the code. The presence of these unrelated lines required one to realize that the bottom line was just too amusical - a random rhythm, only 3 notes, A, C and G and an abnormal number of rests.
As this wouldn't be immediately obvious to non-musicians, on the 28th we decided to give a hint. The Dante fever caught on at DreamLover Labs.
"Color che ragionando andaro al fondo" (those who, reasoning, went to the bottom) is a subtle reference to the bottom of the score, i.e. the cello line.
Hint 2 on 9/30 was a response to the proliferation of simplistic explanations which sought to explain the clue without seeing the code within the music. We wanted to put people on the right track by suggesting them to focus on the notes ("Note dolci" = sweet notes).
Still no one was trying to translate the musical score into letter notes yet, so we decided to post a new hint (#3) on October 1st. This time we found within the Divine Comedy a reference to Boethius, said to be the first to use letter notation to write music (so that this is now called the Boethian notation). This Dante's verse was a bit subtle because it did not directly reference the Roman senator, consul and philosopher. Instead, it referenced the place in Pavia where he is buried. However by just googling the Italian version one would have found the English transation and notes explaining the reference. Boethius is buried in Pavia's "Cielo d'oro" church, hence the ticket.
Hint 3 was correctly decoded by McSlavey, however there still was some confusion as to what Boethius meant, so hint 4 (10/3) was posted openly talking about notation and the musical treatise in which the first example of Boethian notation appeared.
CB351 soon nailed on 10/4 the reference to letter notation, a connection we highlighted in hint 5. At this point it should have been clear that the notes had to be translated into letters.
Writing down letters next to each note on the musical score would have led to the realization that the bottom line was a bit different as mentioned in the beginning. Together with hint 1, this would have allowed one to focus mainly on the bottom line. The fact that these notes were A, C, and G would have immediately stood out to a biologist, but for the rest, in hint 6 (10/6) we gave the first hint at the conversion that had to be carried out.
In hint 6 we really gave it away, talking about regularities (using only 3 notes), a new domain with life as a code (DNA), rest/silence (musical rests on the bottom line), bases (nucleobases in this case), and again, getting to the bottom. But to make the hint even clearer, we have a gel electrophoresis photograph with a rest embedded into it, a clear indication that pauses matter and that they may even correspond to one of the nucleobases.
A bit confused that people still hadn't cracked this we just went on giving further hints about the correspondence between letters and bases. Hint 7 shows Cytidine near a cello playing the C string. Hint 8 shows the tuning of a cello. Hint 9 highlights the fact that the C string is being played. And finally, hint 10 shows a G note next to a Guanosine molecule.
THE SOLUTION
The solution is to write the letter corresponding to each note on the bottom line of the score, substituting a T (or U) for the rests. The sequence yields
GAT GAA GCT TGT TGT CTT ATT ATG GCT ACT GAA
In the cell, each of these codons (the 3/4 signature on the score was no accident) translates into an aminoacid by a process called translation (this is how proteins are synthesized). Each aminoacid also happens to have a letter associated to it (Leucine = L = CTT, for instance). So the 4-letter string above can be translated into another string of characters with an expanded alphabet, and the resulting aminoacid sequence spells out the decrypted word in plain English:
DEACCLIMATE
The deacclimating DreamLover product will be fully announced shortly, right above this post.
Now if someone can decrypt Henry's corporate card number... we'd like to charge him for those 120 DreamLover 2000 units he ordered :)
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Deacclimation is a more rarely used word (hence Google's automatic redirect) but it does exist. It is the opposite of acclimate, and it refers to the inverse process, i.e. that of restoring normal metabolism after the organism has adjusted to some environmental parameters.
In this case we refer to the male's physiology (and psychology) readjusting after a life-long period of excessive ejaculatory and orgasm seeking behavior, and breaking the addiction.
To find references, just tell Google to "search for deacclimate instead" (or use Google Books).