Dear friends,
I think I can name you this way. This year has been hard but we learnt a lot. I learnt from you some ingenuity , to look at the world with new eyes; you gave affection which is energy, warm and illusion. I am very proud of you. You overtaken your complexes, your lazy attitude, your fears. Remember, you are special. Love to yourselves.
Never surrender.
I will miss you. Kisses for ever
Mónica
nick monpinillos
Good afternoon, my dear friends.
If you want to solve this kind of matters you must think different. Holmes found this solution:
Holmes and his Lordship’s staff placed two large blocks of ice on the pedestal. The statue was set down on the blocks and the slings were removed. When the ice melted, the statue sat squarely on the pedestal.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you
Doctor Watson
My dear Eli
Your solution is possible nowadays but in Holmes’s time the Fenway wasn’t invented. Anyway, I didn’t say anything about that point so well done!!!
Now, think of other solution appropiate for the XIX century
It’s a peasure for me having such intelligent pupils
I am looking forward to hearing from you
Doctor Watson
You are just about to finish your course. Summer is around the corner, Why don’t you read something?
My suggestion is “A Scandal in Bohemia”, which illustrates perfectly how a detective’s story can be exciting and amazing without any violence.
“A Scandal in Bohemia”was the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories to be published in The Strand Magazine and the first Sherlock Holmes story illustrated by Sidney Paget. This short story cycle was preceded by two of novels— A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four —. Conan Doyle wrote four novels in total and several cycles of short stories.
The great detective has been accused of being misogynistic. In this story we can observe Holmes’s admiration by intelligent women. Conan Doyle shows his character defeated by a woman’s wit, but he wasn’t in love, of course!
Here it is the beginning of the story:
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer–excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory”
Holmes is visited by a masked gentleman introducing himself as Count Von Kramm, an agent for a wealthy client, but Holmes quickly deduces that he is in fact Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, the hereditary King of Bohemia. The King admits this, tearing off his mask. (Actually, the Habsburg Emperors were also Kings of Bohemia and there was no separate dynasty; Doyle chose to place an imaginary king at an existing country, rather than create a whole imaginary country).
The King is engaged to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, a young Scandinavian princess, but the King thinks she would have a very low opinion of him if any evidence of his former liaison with an opera singer named Irene Adler, originally from New Jersey, were ever revealed to them. Unfortunately, that is what the lady herself is threatening to do, apparently not, though, for monetary gain, for the King’s agents have already tried to buy the evidence. They have also broken into Miss Adler’s house to find it. The evidence of King’s affair is a photograph described to Holmes as a “cabinet”, and therefore too bulky for a lady to carry upon her person, showing both the King, then the Crown Prince, and Irene Adler. The King wants Holmes to recover the photograph for him. He gives Holmes £1,000 to cover any expenses. Holmes asks Dr. Watson to join him at 221B Baker Street at 3 o’clock the following afternoon. And …..
You can find the complete story if you click http://en.wikisource.org and write ” A Scandal in Bohemia”.
Hello my dear candidates to Holmes’s assistant.
One of the skills you need is wit. Sometimes the solution to a problem needs an original point of view. This is an example.
Lord Fanshaw was having a statue of himself erected outside his country mansion, but a problem arose regarding the mounting of the statue on a pedestal, so His Lodship sent for Sherlock Holmes.
“You see, Holmes,” said Lord Fanshaw when the great detective arrived, “the statue weights five tons, and the only way it can be lifted is by a crane and two slings under the base. The problem is, how de we set the statue down on the pedestal and get the slings out?”
Holmes gave the matter some thought and came up with a solution in four minutes.
Can you find one?
I’m looking forward to hearing from you
Doctor Watson
I’m sure you didn’t read carefully my article. Study it!. Some of you are a little bit confused.
Here it is the solution. The two letters left are: B A
Why? The answer is simple. Holmes and Professor Moriarty are enemies. B and A are the letters that complete “Baker Street”. As you know Holmes lives at 221b Baker Street. Probably, Moriarty was planning something against Holmes!
I’m looking forward to hearing for you
Doctor Watson
Good afternoon dear Yenni.
I am sure you can be a good assistant. You have an essential virtue persistence. Don’t give up!
Here it is your clue. The two letters left complete a name related to Holmes.
I look forward to hearing from you
Doctor Watson
Did you read my article on cryptography? Holmes is an skilled cryptanalyst. You can demonstrate you deserve being his assistant. Solve this little whodunit.
“Ah, Watson!” exclaimed Holmes, as his colleague entered the study of 221b. “Now that you’re back, perhaps you can give me the last two letters in this sequence, which appeared on a scrap of paper that had been found in Professor Moriarty’s rooms.”
T E E R T S R E K
Watson didn’t have a clue, do you?
I look forward to hearing from you
Doctor Watson
One of the Holmes’s skills is cryptography. Cryptography is the science that studies how to decipher encoded messages as well as how to codify them. This is an activity as old as intelligence services. Most of the ciphers are build by mathematicians or people very skilled at mathematics.
Holmes is also a competent cryptanalyst. He relates to Watson, “I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writing, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyse one hundred and sixty separate ciphers” One such scheme is solved using frequency analysis in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” which uses a series of stick figures, for example:
In cryptography, a substitution cipheris a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are substituted with ciphertext according to a regular system; the “units” may be single letters (the most common), pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth. The receiver deciphers the text by performing an inverse substitution.
There are a number of different types of substitution cipher. If the cipher operates on single letters, it is termed a simple substitution cipher; a cipher that operates on larger groups of letters is termed polygraphic. A monoalphabetic cipher uses fixed substitution over the entire message, whereas a polyalphabetic cipher uses a number of substitutions at different times in the message—such as with homophones, where a unit from the plaintext is mapped to one of several possibilities in the ciphertext.
In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as a Caesar’s cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar’s code or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques.It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. This is a simple substitution. For example, with a shift of 3, A would be replaced by D, B would become E, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it to communicate with his generals.
The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As with all single alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in practice offers essentially no communication security.
ROT13 is a Caesar cipher a type of substitution cipher. In ROT13, the alphabet is rotated 13 steps.
In cryptanalysis, frequency analysisis the study of the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a ciphertext. The method is used as an aid to breaking classical ciphers, as the one deciphered in “The Dancing Men” by Holmes.
Frequency analysis is based on the fact that, in any given stretch of written language, certain letters and combinations of letters occur with varying frequencies. Moreover, there is a characteristic distribution of letters that is roughly the same for almost all samples of that language. For instance, given a section of English language, E tends to be very common, while X is very rare. Likewise, ST, NG, TH, and QU are common pairs of letters (termed bigrams or digraphs), while NZ and QJare rare. The phrase “ETAOIN SHRDLU” encodes the 12 most frequent letters in typical English language text.
The histogram above is a typical distribution of letters in English language text. Weak ciphers do not sufficiently mask the distribution, and this might be exploited by a cryptanalyst to read the message.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
The story began when Hilton Cubitt asks for Holmes’s help. His wife, Elsie, who is American, received a letter from the United States, which evidently disturbed her, and she threw the letter on the fire. Then the dancing men appeared scrawled in chalk on a windowsill of and afterwards on a piece of paper left on the sundial overnight. Each time, their appearance has an obvious, terrifying effect on Elsie, but she will not tell her husband what is going on.
Holmes tells Cubitt that he wants to see every occurrence of the dancing men. They are to be copied down and brought or sent to him at 221B Baker Street. Cubitt does this, and it provides Holmes with the most important clue in the mystery.
Holmes quickly realizes that it is a substitution cipher. Through much brainwork, he cracks the code by frequency analysis.The last of the messages conveyed by the dancing men is a particularly chilling one, and Holmes …. I won’t say anything more.
Read this thrilling history!!
I forgot it. He explains how he deciphers the message !!!
Good morning again my dear pupils.
It is incredible!. You took too much time in giving me the right answer. Probably it is due to the terrible Maths teacher you have. It is a question of logic, concentration and a pinch of sense of humour. Definitively ask for another teacher. The meaning of the word to deserve is “merecer”, TRM.
You gave me the solution, she preferred golfing because Amelia’s preferences always began and ended with the same letter.
Sherlock Holmes
Holmes's puzzles 
