Walking, a lottery, failure, frenzy, the number 97… this study has all of those, and perhaps other things as well: “Failure is Also an Option,” Antoine Amarilli, Marc Beunardeau, and Rémi Géraud, and David Naccache, in The New Codebreakers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 161-165. The authors report: “The Nijmeegse Vierdaagse is the world’s most […]
As those keen on encryption and decryption will know, there are quite a few documented methods by which ‘secret’ messages can be concealed within apparently straightforward-looking chunks of text. Indeed, the original meaning of the word ‘Steganography‘ is simply ‘concealed writing’. For example, two blocks of text which at first glance appear alike can have […]
The Tower Project Blog explores, a bit, a love-ly code: This pamphlet Cupid’s code for the transmission of secret messages by means of the language of postage stamps by Bury George: The code uses the position and orientation of the stamp – with eight positions and eight orientations there are 64 basic messages – or 128 if […]
Many strands of thought weave together in this study: “The ‘Wow! signal’ of the terrestrial genetic code,” Vladimir I. shCherbak, Maxim A. Makukov, arXiv:1303.6739v1, March 27, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Kazakh National University and the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, both in Almaty, Republic of Kazakhstan, […]
This month’s Cryptography Challenge is to: (1) analyze this short video, which presents a song ostensibly about “Boris Yeltsin”, the words to which consist entirely of repetitions of the words “Boris Yeltsin”; then (2) answer this question: Is there a coded message? BONUS: If there is a coded message, decode it. If there’s not, don’t. […]
Terry Jones (the programmer Terry Jones, not the Python Terry Jones), compiled a “Women’s guide to HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances“. The list may be useful for other purposes, too. Here’s the beginning: Here’s a women’s guide to the most useful HTTP status codes for dealing with unwanted geek advances. Someone […]