Last night, I was watching an episode of the BBC TV series "Sherlock." In the episode, Sherlock Holmes is trying to determine the meaning of certain messages written with a cypher. At one point, he makes a comment about needing to creatively approach the code since modern technologies won't be able to break down the ancient cypher. Today's longread proves Holmes wrong -- modern code-breaking tools can in fact be extremely useful in decoding ancient cyphers. This story from Wired is interesting in analyzing both the process of breaking the code and what the code revealed.
"They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside" by Noah Shachtman
Published in Wired, November 16, 2012
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/all/
Eric
really entertaining article but what does the code really reveal? it seems like it learning about an old group for the sake of it?
ReplyDeleteYou know, I think you are right. I had a similar immediate reaction to this article -- that the process for the code-breaking was really cool, but that the finding itself was kind of uninspiring.
ReplyDeleteBut when I thought about it some more, I think that might be placing an unreasonable standard on this. Think of all the things they could have found that would have been historically boring. Instead, the got information about a mostly-unknown fringe group that was engaging in some pretty trick politics in their time. It's not life-changing or anything, but it's pretty cool.
Eric
It's really cool, it just seems like a lot of time and resources to basically hear about a secret sect that may or may not have done something. I think we're in agreement here
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