Mysterious 250 year old “Copiale Cipher” cracked

Scientists in California and Sweden said they have used computer translation techniques to solve a 250-year-old mystery by deciphering a coded manuscript written for a secret society.

The University of Southern California announced Tuesday that researchers had broken the Copiale Cipher, a 105-page, 18th century document from Germany.

The handwritten, beautifully bound book didn’t contain any sort of Da Vinci Code but rather a snapshot of the arcane rituals practiced by one of the many secret societies that flourished in the 1700s.

via Dawn.com

The “Copiale Cipher” is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. Apart from what is obviously an owner’s mark (“Philipp 1866”) and a note in the end of the last page (“Copiales 3”), the manuscript is completely encoded. The cipher employed consists of 90 different characters, comprising all from Roman and Greek letters, to diacritics and abstract symbols. Catchwords (preview fragments) of one to three or four characters are written at the bottom of left–hand pages.

Transcription, transliteration and decipherment brought to light a German text obviously related to an 18th century secret society, namely the “oculist order”. A parallel manuscript is located at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel.

For information about the method of decipherment, see the paper “The Copiale Cipher” by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer (2011), presented as part of invited talk at ACL Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC).

via Copiale.

English translation of this secret document here.  Example of secret handshake and password:

"The grasp resembles the apprentice one, except the fact that the big joint of the 
second or the middle finger gets squeezed. The word is boas ..."

 

October 24, 2011 Arkansas Aurora!

This from storm chaser Brian Emfinger (BrianDjin2):

What an incredible display last night! I just happended to check out spaceweather.com around 8pm and saw that aurora were being seen in Ohio so I thought I would throw my camera outside and see if it picked up anything. The first image had some very light auroras which put me into a immediate panic as to where I should go. I decided to just run out into the field and within just about 10-20 minutes the auroras went crazy. … Here is a time lapse of the aurora explosion… and again… this is from ARKANSAS!

via RealClearWx.com – October 24, 2011 Aurora!.

The shooting stars are great too.

6 newly discovered sketches Tolkien himself did for The Hobbit

In 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and even created the artwork for its original Unwin & Allen publication, and the upcoming book The Art of The Hobbit will celebrate the author’s artistry. Better yet, it’s going to contain an important surprise: two dozen never-before-seen sketches and paintings created by Tolkien.

And when we say “never before seen,” what we mean is that this artwork had been sitting for a number of years in a library, completely unknown to the public.

According to The Guardian:

“When HarperCollins began preparing for the book’s 75th anniversary next year, the publisher discovered Tolkien had actually created more than 100 illustrations, which lay buried in his archive at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and were only recently digitised.

How could the works of such an eminent author go unknown for so many years? We don’t know. Although Oxford’s Bodleian Library has 11 million volumes spread across multiple buildings, the artwork was found in Tolkien’s own archive.

But the late Oxford professor’s archive contained more than a few sheets of paper; in 2003, researchers found 2000 pages of a translation and commentary of Beowulf.

According to publisher David Brawn, The Art of The Hobbit (to be released on Oct. 27) includes Tolkien’s “conceptual sketches for the cover design, a couple of early versions of the maps and pages where he’s experimenting with the runic forms.” It sounds like a must-have for fans of the father of high fantasy. …

via 6 newly discovered sketches Tolkien himself did for The Hobbit | Blastr.

The publisher hopes to bring attention back to The Hobbit in advance of the much-anticipated release of Peter Jackson’s film next year.

“People have celebrated Tolkien as a writer for years – you haven’t been able to get away from him since all the books of the century polls,” said Brawn. “But The Lord of the Rings has always been the focus since it was published in 1954 – it’s a much more grown-up, significant book. It has overshadowed The Hobbit as a more old-fashioned, children’s book, which has become known in the context of The Lord of the Rings. The anniversary allows us to move the spotlight back on to the book which started it all.”

via Guardian

The Hobbit movie is in the making…

Bizarre Giant Sea Serpent Fish Filmed 1500 ft below sea level

A huge oarfish was caught on camera in the Gulf of Mexico …  giving scientists a rare glimpse of the bizarre fish in its native deep sea habitat. Researcher Mark Benfield describes the fish, a likely inspiration for the sea serpent myth.

via Earth: Bizarre Giant Fish Filmed : Video : Discovery News.

Wake before the quake?

I woke up unexplainably about 3 minutes before this quake. I’m never up at 5:33am and I was wondering why I woke up when a few minutes later I got a text that said “earthquake”. Anyone else?