Wednesday, September 28, 2016

FCBR1DG: Animal Idioms ANSWER

Did this week's Mystery Monday puzzle send you screaming into the night? Let's break down the answer!


The puzzle this week hinged on two hints from the description. The first being the title: Animal Idioms, and the second being the large number of bats in the image.

The description gave a few idioms, some of which connected to animals in the image, some of which didn't. Hopefully the solver would look at the image, recognize that there were more bats than any other animal in the image, and recognize that the bats were important. The most common idiom about bats is "blind as a bat." Once you recognize that this phrase is the key to the puzzle the question is how to apply it.

Most often when a puzzle references "blind," it is going to be a reference to Braille. Braille is a 2 by 6 grid of dots. The image cane be broken into 16 squares that follow the 2x6 grid system. If you only pay attention to the bats, and ignore the other animals you would see what looked like a Braille arrangement. Here is an edited version of the image that makes that more clear:


In a non-puzzle world Braille numbers would be kicked off by a symbol to let you know that the following was numbers rather than letters. Many puzzle COs skip that step however so I have skipped it as well.


reading the bat "dots" as numbers you should get N3015547W9744783 or N 30° 15.547, W 97° 44.783. And what do you find there?


A gigantic bat sculpture! Dale Whistler’s Night Wings is an 18 ft tall and 20 ft wide sculpture made of purplish aluminum, that slowly spins on the concrete base to which it is mounted, allowing viewers to take in the entire view no matter where they are standing. Austin is home to the largest urban bat colony in North America, with over 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats calling Austin home for part of their yearly migration cycle. The bat symbolized in the sculpture was the mascot for Austin’s ice hockey team before it moved, and Austin is home to Bat Conservation International, a non-profit group whose mission is “to conserve the world’s bats and their ecosystems.” 

So how did you do with the puzzle? 



1 comment:

  1. Hello Cully,
    I just loved to read this post about animal idioms. After reading this stuff, I realized that idioms are everywhere. It's really interesting puzzle, keep it up.
    Thank you,
    Lilly

    ReplyDelete

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