{"id":1228,"date":"2008-05-15T21:43:30","date_gmt":"2008-05-16T01:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2008-05-15T21:50:52","modified_gmt":"2008-05-16T01:50:52","slug":"explanation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/15\/explanation\/","title":{"rendered":"Explanation"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent some time last week at a professional conference. For the most part it was a relatively valuable use of my time, but there were significant portions of time where I was stuck sitting in a room with lots of people while a particularly boring speaker was presenting. I was without a computer–the conference expressly frowned on bringing one into the hall–so all I had to amuse myself was the notebook the conference had provided, and a pad of paper that the hall had provided.<\/p>\n

Since I had recently been reading about the Oak Island thing<\/a>, the notion of simple substitution ciphers using graphics–and how simple they are to decode for anyone with any small interest–was in my head.<\/p>\n

So, I thought it would be funny to whip up my own simple graphic substitution cipher, and leave encoded notes behind whenever I changed seats between sessions. Since the audience was entirely composed of highly technical people with solid analytical skills, it seemed likely that anyone sitting down would recognize that there was a coded message, and would be able to decrypt the code with a little effort. So, part message in a bottle, part altruism–giving the other attendees something to distract them for a few minutes during boring sessions.<\/p>\n

When I got back I dropped into FontStruct<\/a> and whipped up a font mapping the symbols from my cipher, so that I could easily generate messages. (Boy, I love that FontStruct<\/a>.) I’m tempted to print out a couple of pages of coded messages–maybe Zen koans–and leave them around the city in an act of benevolent surrealism (like the physics warnings<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Hence the last message<\/a>–it was slightly more tricky than most substitutions because it was a small sample of ciphertext and not in English, but on the other hand the punctuation was a pretty broad clue to that.<\/p>\n

After the jump, a bigger sample–four parts of one document (in English), which should make it possible for anyone with a bit of nerd puzzle fascination to figure it out.<\/p>\n

\"Part<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Part<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Part<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Part<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent some time last week at a professional conference. For the most part it was a relatively valuable use of my time, but there were significant portions of time where I was stuck sitting in a room with lots of people while a particularly boring speaker was presenting. I was without a computer–the conference expressly frowned on bringing one… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[83,281,129],"class_list":["post-1228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytime","tag-benevolent-surrealism","tag-cryptography","tag-geeks","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-jO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}