Grids and Templates

We are waiting for inspiration here, so bear with me. The past few months have been a welcome change - I had not exactly figured out the clues that pointed from the Smithsonian building to the National Cathedral. I have owed the game some work - just like when Congress gambled Smithson's legacy on railroad bonds, which promptly went bankrupt! So Congress had to replace the money later.

But pictures of some parts of the National Cathedral are hard to come by, especially in the memorial bays. I was wondering how devout Charles Warren had to be, to get interred in the National Cathedral, but I found a docent's remarks that cleared that up: "If you have a million dollars, a place will be found in the Cathedral for you!" What a refreshingly direct and goal driven attitude.

While we wait, we can review some clues that were presented a while back. The Jukebox button array has been summarized by this figure, where the yellow entries are blank:

I have been reviewing this figure for some little while, and I keep getting caught on the asymmetric patterns that show up under letters H and I - all the other letter figures have a nice, precise left/right symmetry. I may have found a clue by decomposing the geometric series row, by gridding the I Ching assigned numbers against their order in the letter figures:

Roger shows his organization and attraction to symmetry here. And we can see that extra information could be encoded in his distribution of entries 51 through 64. The asymmetry that especially sticks out for us is entries 63 and 64. But why the difference in spacing between the pairs of entries?

The way to solve this puzzle will be to break it up into smaller puzzles, just like with the cosmic void scroll. Although we are still stuck on the last part of that task. Maybe next time ...

"From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, 'Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.' He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well - something in math - but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle."

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress