Note to Emily — if you’re reading this early, we’ll be calling you tomorrow to wrapup — so avoid the spoilers

So Monday was my 23rd birthday and today was the celebration.

Something was clearly up with Mari and Patrick — I was to keep this afternoon free to do… something…, and after Lindy on Sproul, they hand me a CD case, the cover being a lot of blank spaces and a USB drive and say “here it is!”

Unbeknownst to me, in the past 3-5 days, Mari, Patrick, Bryan, Chantae and Emily put together a full mini-hunt for my birthday party, complete with antepuzzles, a proper round of 5 puzzles, and a meta.

Sadly, I couldn’t scare up much solving help at Lindy on Sproul.

At the end of it all, it was a lot of fun! And I have awesome, smart friends! The party itself was only so-so, but the solving was worth it.

Spoilers and the full hunting story after the jump

Spoilers begin here.

So the USB key contained a mixtape audio file — listening to it provided songs and band names which fit nicely into the blank lines on the CD case, providing in the one specified vertically aligned row “TAIFXUL” (had a little trouble getting the X) but as I pointed out halfway through “well, with nothing else to go on, I betcha it’s a Twitter feed”

(It was clear that this was designed for me, so a lot of little stories or preferences of ours showed up from time to time. Such as using Twitter)

The Twitter feed required campus knowledge I didn’t have; but looking around Flickr found the answer: Taif Xul — which is Fiat Lux reversed (the UC Berkeley motto) — appears under the awning of the Campanile.

So Mari (who’s been following me) and I go there, meet Patrick, who hands me two sheets of paper (Paper Puzzles, or PP as I refer to them later) and that three other puzzles will appear in the Twitter feed (Twitter Puzzles, TP).

And so I begin to hunt. Mostly alone.

I get pretty far on my own, with the authors around me bouncing and trying not to spoil anything. Bryan has the great idea that I should be momentarily uncertain of the answers, and to call them in via Twitter (which seemed fitting)

The Paper Puzzles

PP1 (designed by Emily) was Shakespeare (and one Alexander Pope) identification, which was pretty straightforward. They were all “interesting” names in that they were fairies or other ethereal creatures. As it works out, they are also the moons of Uranus (a great twist moment!) and the one “major figure” missing from the “literary firmament” is the one missing major moon… OBERON

PP2 (designed by Chantae) was “Poetry in the Information Age” — quickly I identified the text as Jabberwocky — with errors. So I start to look at the errors. One word doesn’t match in length, and that’s clearly the “magic” word, with errors. All the errors provide a nice set of letters… which happen to be associated with letters on a phone (eg, only A, B, and C will be switched with each other). This provided a great moment when I made the connection (by drawing lines between the sets) and yelled out “PHOOONES!” (prompting rounds of “KHAAAN!” and “STELLAAAAA!”)… a quick regex search for 6 letter words with these replacements through /usr/share/dict/words yielded WELKIN

Twitter Puzzles

TP1 (designed by Bryan) was the Freebase puzzle. Seen in the Twitter feed, it was a check written out with conspicuous replacements — a lot of the numbers were in hex, prepended with 0s and the owner of the check was “RDF” — These are clearly Freebase GUIDs. Looking them up gave you a set of things that referred to weird sayings (to wit, an odd Earl aka “Bell the Cat”, a song called “Don’t Cry Wolf”, a particular kind of “sour grape”) — this was, also the best funny/punny/groaner puzzle they came up with, in particular, a reference to the stock ticker LION (“lion’s share!”). And just to make me pull out the MQL, the date on the check is a full timestamp, of the creation of a link from “Injury” to “Insult”. All of these are sayings that come from fables, in particular, AESOP.

TP3 (designed by Patrick and implemented by Mari) was the most MIT-hunt like puzzle. It was letter substitution (letters to numbers) into dates/numbers of webcomics I read, and associated pictures from those comics with the text blacked out and one word underlined. The underlined word fits with the greek letters that follow. Following the flavortext, (a reference to the Bob Dylan song “Desolation Row”), where the other thing Einstein does is “recite the alphabet” — you recite the GREEK alphabet, this spells something in the mapping. Doing the same for the letter substitution earlier gives you a Questionable Content comic, the title of which (combined with the phrase in the greek) refers to Frances FARMER

… and it was here that people were arriving for my party. So we party for a bit, but invariably people start to ask about what’s been going on so far in this mini hunt. Now I have help!

Finale

All that remains is TP2 and the overall meta.

so TP2 (designed by Emily), which I looked at only briefly, seemed to be, at first, merely Lorem Ipsum text repeated. But there seemed to be extra things added, particularly a stray C. So, finding a “canonical” Lorem Ipsum on Wikipedia, Roger (now I have help) insisted that I diff the puzzle text agains the canonical text. There are purely Latin insertions in the text, which indicates the right track. Each set of insertions, looking up the definitions online, clue what seem to be illness symptoms. When we get to the very last one (A butterfly rash) Laura calls out “OH! That’s a symptom of Lupus!” We all look at her funny for a second and she explains she recently has been reading a story where someone exhibited this symptom. So we look up the symptoms of Lupus and sure enough these are the symptoms. So I tweet in LUPUS, but the proper response (other than the latin clue) should have been “It’s never Lupus!” — Chris turns around and says “Oh, so in English, that’d be WOLF”

So now we have OBERON, WELKIN and AESOP, WOLF and FARMER. Everyone is crowded into my office by this point. This only took 10 minutes with people, most of it just me at the conn. Googling “aesop wolf farmer” (Twitter puzzles) eventually gets to an Aesop fable: “The Wolf, the Farmer and the Plow”… so “Plow” is a good working term. As for the Paper Puzzles, Oberon and Welkin, well, Google clues Shakespeare again, so I grep for it in my digital Shakespeare, and Oberon says “welkin” once… “The starry welkin cover thou anon”. Plow. OH. There’s the local Berkeley bar, “The STARRY PLOUGH”.

The plan initially was to be done by 7:30 — assuming I had help — and to have a drink there before the party. (1) They underestimated their writing talent! It was genuinely hard! and (2) I had no helpers for most of it. They’ll still buy me a drink there soon.

I woke up this morning, early, for the first time in a week, to get in early, to skip lunch, to leave early, to buy Obama/Biden buttons from the SF street vendor outside the BART, to vote, to get food and to go to Katie’s election night gathering.

And you have to understand something when it comes to hanging out with Katie and Erin — they are a witty, fast, talkative pair. To be certain, their friends (many of whom I met for the first time) are likewise fun girls.

I played bartender, pizza was ordered, and a good, loud time was being had by all, until the polls closed in California

And MSNBC called the election for Obama.

I hope never to forget it. We looked at the screen like, “what?” — we didn’t know what to think. We checked Fox News, figuring that if they agreed, it had to be true.

It was.

The room was dead silent.

And we waited. A few snarky comments here and there, as McCain conceded, and waited. We were shocked; we couldn’t quite believe it. And as Obama gave his victory speech, becoming President-Elect, we collectively teared up.

No, that’s not a point of shame, it’s a point of pride.

For every election since I’ve considered myself politically aware, I have not known what it feels like to believe in my country. Every time, I get hopeful. Every time, my hopes are dashed. Prop 22, a precursor to tonight’s Prop 8, I think, was that first election; when I believed in something and felt it was wrong.

An interesting fact about me: I have never once said the Pledge of Allegiance under the Bush administration. Nor have I saluted the flag during the national anthem; I stand in respect for the latter but refuse to recite or salute. For 8 years, for a large portion of my life, ever since I was 14, I have held the firm belief that my government did not represent me. When I marched for peace on February 15, 2003, my government called me a ‘focus group’, and went to war anyway. When I voted for Kerry in 2004, my country, to my chagrin, decided on four more years of corruption and lies. I have felt my civil liberties corroded. I cried in frustration the first time I had to deal with airport security after 9/11; that my bags could be searched without warrant or cause, that I had no right to protest; it seemed that every last right I had as an American citizen was hampered, taken away, or simply ignored.

Except the right to vote.

(And let it be known that’s no cakewalk either — officially, today, I voted provisionally because my polling place moved)

And as I sat there, watching Obama give his victory speech, the tears I felt were hopeful. Which is a weird feeling to those who have never felt it. No, things aren’t perfect. No, I don’t expect Obama to fix everything with some wave of a magic wand. But I feel, for the first time, his first hundred days are going to be my hundred days. That government that I have chosen is coming to be.

That is empowerment. That is why Obama carried young voters in a landslide.

And after the tears, cheers and disbelief was over; after the cheap champagne had been poured and the party began anew, for tonight, our government worked.

As I drove home, both Telegraph and Shattuck were filled with people celebrating. I hear the City is even more crazy — Twitter tells me of spontaneous celebration filling the streets. Scott Beale (@laughingsquid) summarizes it best: “San Francisco is erupting with spontaneous patriotism”

San Francisco and the Bay Area has always been patriotic. We’re crazy, but contrary to the Bush administration, we’re not terrorists. Or communists. Or godless atheists. Or hippies. Or homosexuals. Or Asians. We are all and none of these. We are Americans.

After Obama is sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, I will again say the Pledge of Allegiance. I will again salute the flag.

My country, tis of thee.

Right here

Meanwhile, I have a new place to live (pretty sure) in North Berkeley! I am building a server so as to retire my current one and reduce the number of boxes I have… and life continues.

Also — Wordpress 2.5 == w00t.

And PicLens is AMAZING if you want to view photos.

The Daily Cal’s version of the Open Letter that Prompted My Response

IMO, the whole thing is kind of an emotionally-charged psycho negotiation. But at heart, it’s a negotiation.

As pointed out, this is a demand letter disguised as a letter for dialog. While I do support bringing influential parties from both sides to the negotiation table, what’s screwy about this letter is that, in fact, the last thing the tree-sitters want (given their demands) is an honest negotiation.

The first rule of negotiation is knowing what you really want; and this is where the tree-sitters are blinded by rhetoric. That money-quote chasingred described (equating trees and humans or whatnot) is merely a result of that; I doubt they actually believe that human life is equal to a tree (or hope they don’t?). Mainly, in their minds, they have painted anything less than full capitulation by the University as failure. The real money-quote of the letter is, as pointed out, “help save the oaks and build the new training facility in an alternate location” — this is their sole victory condition.

On the University’s side, they would very much like to build the facility in that location. They have money for it (private, whatever — that’s a whole other kettle of fish) and it is, in fact, their land. It was their land when they planted the trees in the first place.

IMO, the legal high ground is entirely on the side of the University. Even free speech has it’s limits; I’m not up on my constitutional law, but an argument could certainly be made for the tree-sitters posing a clear and present danger or even imminent lawless action, especially now that the courts have gotten involved and ruled that the tree sitters should leave. IMO, they by all means have the right to stomp around campus, distribute flyers, write open letters like this one, etc… content should be free, they should push the limits of where and how they distribute it — and they did! (kudos from a free-speech perspective) — but they’ve clearly crossed the boundary here.

So really, the negotiation comes down to a moral argument instead of a legal one. Again, I’d say the tree-sitters are blinded into a false dichotomy. What they don’t realize is that they could “win” the moral argument without keeping the trees. And this is where the negotiation could take place — hammering out some environmentalist agreement, limited mainly by their imaginations and staying within reason. Revitalize the Eucalyptus Grove (and make it safe — hell, with all the UCPD watching the tree sitters….). Negotiate a UCB effort to study some environmental problem. Get some money thrown toward rainforests (as someone suggested). Hell, transplant a few of these so-called old-growth trees to somewhere else on campus. Any number of possibilities.

And I betcha the University would come to the table on that one, because let’s consider the weapons for each side:

Right now, the tree-sitters have:

• Endurance
• A higher “moral” starting ground from the public opinion
• Scare tactics, threats
• Liability/Danger Threats
• Position (they’re called tree-sitters for a reason)

The University has, in broad terms:

• Money (ours, some of it)
• Influence
• UCPD
• A growing public opinion
• Time

What I’m suggesting is that the tree-siters give up their threats and position for money and influence. Everybody wins, noone gets hurt, the building goes up in a legal way, and the tree sitters win a moral victory.

As suggested, the tree-sitters will lose in the long run if they maintain their current strategy. The UCPD will attrition them out of the trees (ancient art of siege) and the people will shun them, and favor the resolution of the conflict in favor of the university and the public interest.

When they sat in the trees for a month, they had a much higher public opinion than they do now, after being in the trees a year. That would have made their bargaining position better, had they gone for the moral victory as soon as the legal one was even tipping to the side of the University. Now, the more scary they become, the more blind rhetoric they spew, the more trouble they cause, the more the public will come to distrust them. It’ll seem as though the tree-sitters are against progress, their moral argument shattered.

They should negotiate while the negotiation is good, because it’ll be a smaller and smaller victory as time goes on.

(Disclaimer: Personally, I started pretty neutral; I don’t like the idea of so much emphasis being put on throwing a ball around, but then again, it doesn’t affect me too much. The trees are nice, sure, but the rhetoric around them is kinda nuts. I was okay with a protest and tree-sitting until it became a problem (a line crossed a long time ago))