I do cryptograms at www.cryptograms.org. One that stumped me badly for a long time:
FQUTZ HGBEH KTMU NWEEH; CUUVEU GDUH KTMU GDEJ NWHKUH.
I ended up pulling a dictionary text file and created a searchable dictionary of word patterns. Not the fastest way to figure it out, but hopefully applicable to future ones. Eventually I'd love to write a program that can solve simple substitution ciphers based on the English language (and in the future plug in other language dictionaries, but step by step).
In the meantime, I keep my 100% completion rate on the month, even though it is at the cost of my solving time.
spoiler:
Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Contact - Carl Sagan (part 2)
Laughing at the idea of a presidential sneeze possibly causing nuclear war. A little scared because its probably an accurate depiction of the power the president holds.
"As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
Odds and ends: I enjoyed the fact that the president in the book is a female. Not quite reality in this day and age, but we are opening up to the idea. In other news, The National Enquirer was as notorious for flagrantly wrong but sensational headlines even in 1985. At least in some ways, the world never changes. On a more sci-fi note: One of the ideas Sagan posits about an earth defense against extraterrestrial threats: '...outposts on pluto....'. No. Outposts on pluto wouldn't be very effective at all, unless the attack happened to coincide with the random point in time where pluto was anywhere near the vicinity of their incoming trajectory. Even though we think about the orbits of the planets as circles, in this case we need to remember that the position of a planet at any given time is a point on that orbit. For a planet with such a long orbit as pluto, defensively it would probably be useless to establish a base there. It might be different if there was a planet that was always on the same side of the sun as us, but there isn't. In addition, I'm still talking about this from a 2-D perspective. The possibility of an ET coming in from some direction not on our orbital plane can't be ignored. Given all of the possibilities, it would be far better to establish defenses directly around the earth, or, given the possibility of future technology, at a few points distant enough from the solar system that we could monitor incoming threats from multiple directions and focus our resources there. Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons we could establish a base on pluto, but defense shouldn't be one of them.
If only - Sagan discusses briefly the effect s of Trofim Lysenko's influence on Soviet molecular biology, citing it as one of the causes of the soviet's difficulties in developing the organic components of the Machine. He goes on to say that the Americans suffered a similar but more abortive attempt to stifle evolution."Fortunately for American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were never as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union." If you look strictly at the issue of evolution and molecular biology, that may be true. At the same time, because it was never as widespread, it also never suffered the complete defeat that Lysenkoism suffered once it was discredited, and probably will not until the end of the era of religion. Which will be never.
The Watchmen story uses the same way of uniting the world and moving toward world peace as Contact does. We will coalesce around an external threat, drop our differences, and work together. There'll be some squabbling over who does what, but its fundamentally a united effort. We're lacking that external threat in the United States right now to unite us, so we're falling apart politically as the sides get more and more stridently opposed. For some reason a manufactured crisis can't get us moving in the right direction. Does congress have the power to bind its future self? Can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?
A question I'd like to reserve for later so I can think about it - "What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?"
"As der Heer was shutting the door and entering the adjacent sitting room, there was an explosive presidential sneeze. The Warrant Officer of the Day, sitting stiffly on a couch, was visibly startled. The briefcase at his feet was crammed with authorization codes for nuclear war. Der Heer calmed him with a repetitive gesture of his hand, fingers spread, palm down. The officer gave an apologetic smile.
Odds and ends: I enjoyed the fact that the president in the book is a female. Not quite reality in this day and age, but we are opening up to the idea. In other news, The National Enquirer was as notorious for flagrantly wrong but sensational headlines even in 1985. At least in some ways, the world never changes. On a more sci-fi note: One of the ideas Sagan posits about an earth defense against extraterrestrial threats: '...outposts on pluto....'. No. Outposts on pluto wouldn't be very effective at all, unless the attack happened to coincide with the random point in time where pluto was anywhere near the vicinity of their incoming trajectory. Even though we think about the orbits of the planets as circles, in this case we need to remember that the position of a planet at any given time is a point on that orbit. For a planet with such a long orbit as pluto, defensively it would probably be useless to establish a base there. It might be different if there was a planet that was always on the same side of the sun as us, but there isn't. In addition, I'm still talking about this from a 2-D perspective. The possibility of an ET coming in from some direction not on our orbital plane can't be ignored. Given all of the possibilities, it would be far better to establish defenses directly around the earth, or, given the possibility of future technology, at a few points distant enough from the solar system that we could monitor incoming threats from multiple directions and focus our resources there. Don't get me wrong, there are many other reasons we could establish a base on pluto, but defense shouldn't be one of them.
If only - Sagan discusses briefly the effect s of Trofim Lysenko's influence on Soviet molecular biology, citing it as one of the causes of the soviet's difficulties in developing the organic components of the Machine. He goes on to say that the Americans suffered a similar but more abortive attempt to stifle evolution."Fortunately for American molecular biology, the fundamentalists were never as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union." If you look strictly at the issue of evolution and molecular biology, that may be true. At the same time, because it was never as widespread, it also never suffered the complete defeat that Lysenkoism suffered once it was discredited, and probably will not until the end of the era of religion. Which will be never.
The Watchmen story uses the same way of uniting the world and moving toward world peace as Contact does. We will coalesce around an external threat, drop our differences, and work together. There'll be some squabbling over who does what, but its fundamentally a united effort. We're lacking that external threat in the United States right now to unite us, so we're falling apart politically as the sides get more and more stridently opposed. For some reason a manufactured crisis can't get us moving in the right direction. Does congress have the power to bind its future self? Can God create a rock so heavy that God can't lift it?
A question I'd like to reserve for later so I can think about it - "What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil?"
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