The Semaphore and the Crying Of Lot 49
As we have for the last several days been looking ever deeper into a book that we picked up in a local store, re-published in 1974 by the Gale Research Company, Codes and Ciphers by Agapeyeff was published in the dark days prior to World War II and probably was snapped up by many government officials around the world, because of the many little tidbits of knowledge about encoding messages through the ages, and specific information about a topic that, certainly in the 1930s was probably fairly difficult to come by outside of a small circle of closely guarded specialists.
We mentioned the Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon which we sold a year back, because it also has a detailed recapitulation of communications in Europe, as part of an ongoing clandestine conflict between two shadowy organizations who somehow got involved in everything from music to mail. We can't remember all the plot complexities, except to compare it to the many convoluted stories that are quite similar to what inhabit the Internet now as a kind of back-yard paranoia grown large. Or perhaps comparatively speaking, a fictional precursor to Dan Brown's dark plots about real-world organizations with contrived motivations. When we say fictional, the elaborate sub-plots and references in Pynchon's work are sometimes difficult to ferret out, since he uses real life concepts, and simply elaborates a little to create sometimes hilarious, if somewhat nefarious plots, while Brown presents some of his work as a sober truth, though we cannot say from personal experience if there is any humor involved in Brown's works. All we now is that people told us breathlessly told us about hidden plots and dark history, which we had to explain slowly and methodically were based on legends and myths, not on any solid evidence.
When we did some more research for yesterday's article on semaphores, we discovered a tantalizing new fact about semaphores. A big company in San Jose commissioned an artist to create a set of four huge illuminated circular disks on the side of a building, which encoded a message which was presented to the world at the time as a puzzle. We went to visit the website and were astounded at the complexity and inventiveness of the artist, Ben Rubin who created the disks and the markings to transmit a coded message, with a public challenge to decode the message which was delivered by these rotating, disks, which were referred to as semaphore. The idea was that the public was to observe the motions of these disks and then try to decode the message. Using elaborations of the Vigenère cipher, which we will need to read more about, since the table is listed in the Codes And Ciphers book along with an explanation of how the table is used to translate plain text into a coded message. The artist obviously spent time and energy trying to construct a new system of encoding, with the idea of not making it too easy for just anyone to figure out and not making it uncrackable. He created a matrix of 256 characters, based on ASCII computer character sets, which is what you are reading here and then placed it in a keyed modulo output, which is a little beyond our understanding at this point. It is really just modulo math, or more accurately arithmetic where the numbers are divided and added in a simple pattern or algorithm.
But the whole point of the project was to transmit the text of Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 in encoded semaphore text. We wish we had our copy now, but we have consigned it to a customer months ago. But the semi-Psychedelic cover lives on in our memories.
And several observers noted the irony of using the text, since it involves Pynchon's view of California as a kind of last frontier, where corporate entities have taken over and diminished the role of individuals, who historically helped to bring technology forward through ideas and inspiration. We did not live in California in the 60s, but it must have been a vibrant time, and Pynchon's novel captures some of the strangeness that still inspires us today as we look back on the explosion of culture and the wholesale shifting of frames of references that took place in a short period of time.
And here is a hint about how the novel was coded using a table of values, which we will explain at greater length later.
We mentioned the Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon which we sold a year back, because it also has a detailed recapitulation of communications in Europe, as part of an ongoing clandestine conflict between two shadowy organizations who somehow got involved in everything from music to mail. We can't remember all the plot complexities, except to compare it to the many convoluted stories that are quite similar to what inhabit the Internet now as a kind of back-yard paranoia grown large. Or perhaps comparatively speaking, a fictional precursor to Dan Brown's dark plots about real-world organizations with contrived motivations. When we say fictional, the elaborate sub-plots and references in Pynchon's work are sometimes difficult to ferret out, since he uses real life concepts, and simply elaborates a little to create sometimes hilarious, if somewhat nefarious plots, while Brown presents some of his work as a sober truth, though we cannot say from personal experience if there is any humor involved in Brown's works. All we now is that people told us breathlessly told us about hidden plots and dark history, which we had to explain slowly and methodically were based on legends and myths, not on any solid evidence.
When we did some more research for yesterday's article on semaphores, we discovered a tantalizing new fact about semaphores. A big company in San Jose commissioned an artist to create a set of four huge illuminated circular disks on the side of a building, which encoded a message which was presented to the world at the time as a puzzle. We went to visit the website and were astounded at the complexity and inventiveness of the artist, Ben Rubin who created the disks and the markings to transmit a coded message, with a public challenge to decode the message which was delivered by these rotating, disks, which were referred to as semaphore. The idea was that the public was to observe the motions of these disks and then try to decode the message. Using elaborations of the Vigenère cipher, which we will need to read more about, since the table is listed in the Codes And Ciphers book along with an explanation of how the table is used to translate plain text into a coded message. The artist obviously spent time and energy trying to construct a new system of encoding, with the idea of not making it too easy for just anyone to figure out and not making it uncrackable. He created a matrix of 256 characters, based on ASCII computer character sets, which is what you are reading here and then placed it in a keyed modulo output, which is a little beyond our understanding at this point. It is really just modulo math, or more accurately arithmetic where the numbers are divided and added in a simple pattern or algorithm.
But the whole point of the project was to transmit the text of Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 in encoded semaphore text. We wish we had our copy now, but we have consigned it to a customer months ago. But the semi-Psychedelic cover lives on in our memories.
And several observers noted the irony of using the text, since it involves Pynchon's view of California as a kind of last frontier, where corporate entities have taken over and diminished the role of individuals, who historically helped to bring technology forward through ideas and inspiration. We did not live in California in the 60s, but it must have been a vibrant time, and Pynchon's novel captures some of the strangeness that still inspires us today as we look back on the explosion of culture and the wholesale shifting of frames of references that took place in a short period of time.
And here is a hint about how the novel was coded using a table of values, which we will explain at greater length later.
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