4 ms·

There's another article about it here: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/silk-dress-cryptogram-canadian-researcher-cracks-135-yea

There's another article about it here: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-science/silk-dress-cryptogram-canadian-researcher-cracks-135-year-old-unsolvable-code https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/science/earth-scie... An academic paper with the solution here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2223562 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2023.2... The initial blog post about the piece of paper in the dress: https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-bronze-bustle.html https://commitmentocostumes.blogspot.com/2014/02/bennetts-br... For me this raises as many questions as it answers in some ways. I have no idea why it would be hidden away like that.

fsckboy 3y ago
dry run of some standard operating procedure for delivering messages, practice for wartime. or she was a spy/compromised and stealing secrets from her employer that she was as clueless about as any casual observers today; she did this on the daily but she died or got arrested this particular day. maybe her husband wanted the weather for his horsetrack gambling ring or something. for every actual important encrypted message, there are a ton of similar messages and message transports of lesser importance. (i'm assuming it's not the case that this is the plausible deniability part of some sort of steganography scheme)
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
thaumasiotes 3y ago
> The pure depth of this code system is utterly fascinating. Each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning, so a seasoned veteran could tell the weather just by mentally breaking down each word of the telegram. (from the first link) This claim doesn't make sense. If the words of the telegram encoding for weather information are compositional rather than lexical, most of them shouldn't exist in English. How does it happen that all of them are extant English words? What happens if my observation of the dew point temperature needs to be encoded "luft" instead of "left"?
- nneonneo 3y ago
  For pressure + temperature, the measurements were encoded in the first two consonant-vowel pairs. So, for example, in the word "diamond", the two measurements were "di" (= .26 inHg) and "mo" (= 58°). There are 50 possible pressure readings and 50 possible temperature readings, for a total of 2500 words; of these, a small fraction are encoded as "arbitrary" words when no English word could be found that matched the desired pattern. You can see a full list of all the words here: https://books.google.ca/books?id=i7YazQEACAAJ&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=i7YazQEACAAJ&pg=PA31#v=onep... Keep in mind: the encoding process was meant to be more expensive to encode than to decode - each weather station only had to send out (encode) a few reports per day, but the receivers had to process (decode) hundreds. I suspect the use of words, as opposed to just sequences of letters or numbers, was to improve robustness: it would be easier for operators to transmit recognizable words correctly (and error-correct them if need be) than if they were transmitting strings of random letters.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > I suspect the use of words, as opposed to just sequences of letters or numbers, was to improve robustness I thought one of the articles related it to telegram pricing, which was per-word.
- couchand 3y ago
  That's covered on page 8 of the field manual [0]. Most of the words are real, some are not, and those are called out specially. Also, there are rules for ignoring letters. Generally, the journalism glosses over much of the detail. https://books.google.com/books?id=vICPCHgtPtkC&newbks=0&pg=PA8 https://books.google.com/books?id=vICPCHgtPtkC&newbks=0&pg=P...
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Also, there are rules for ignoring letters. This is a pretty far cry from "each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning". Going by the handbook, the example word of diction is 57% meaningful symbols and 43% meaningless ones. The word called for by the encoding system, diti, is in fact nonexistent, but you're free to supply whatever other letters you feel like until you've formed an English word. The example I asked about, the dew-point indicator left, is much worse, with -- as far as I can tell -- 25% letters with independent meaning and 75% letters without a meaning of their own. The handbook notes that dew-point indicators are not part of the system, and instead a lookup table is supplied which must be memorized. The linked document does not appear to include that table, though, so it's hard to characterize the dew-point indicators. I did appreciate the note that temperatures are to be reported modulo 100 degrees, but "the intelligence of the translators will prevent any error arising".

fsckboy 3y ago

dry run of some standard operating procedure for delivering messages, practice for wartime. or she was a spy/compromised and stealing secrets from her employer that she was as clueless about as any casual observers today; she did this on the daily but she died or got arrested this particular day. maybe her husband wanted the weather for his horsetrack gambling ring or something. for every actual important encrypted message, there are a ton of similar messages and message transports of lesser importance. (i'm assuming it's not the case that this is the plausible deniability part of some sort of steganography scheme)

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> The pure depth of this code system is utterly fascinating. Each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning, so a seasoned veteran could tell the weather just by mentally breaking down each word of the telegram. (from the first link) This claim doesn't make sense. If the words of the telegram encoding for weather information are compositional rather than lexical, most of them shouldn't exist in English. How does it happen that all of them are extant English words? What happens if my observation of the dew point temperature needs to be encoded "luft" instead of "left"?

nneonneo 3y ago
For pressure + temperature, the measurements were encoded in the first two consonant-vowel pairs. So, for example, in the word "diamond", the two measurements were "di" (= .26 inHg) and "mo" (= 58°). There are 50 possible pressure readings and 50 possible temperature readings, for a total of 2500 words; of these, a small fraction are encoded as "arbitrary" words when no English word could be found that matched the desired pattern. You can see a full list of all the words here: https://books.google.ca/books?id=i7YazQEACAAJ&pg=PA31#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?id=i7YazQEACAAJ&pg=PA31#v=onep... Keep in mind: the encoding process was meant to be more expensive to encode than to decode - each weather station only had to send out (encode) a few reports per day, but the receivers had to process (decode) hundreds. I suspect the use of words, as opposed to just sequences of letters or numbers, was to improve robustness: it would be easier for operators to transmit recognizable words correctly (and error-correct them if need be) than if they were transmitting strings of random letters.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > I suspect the use of words, as opposed to just sequences of letters or numbers, was to improve robustness I thought one of the articles related it to telegram pricing, which was per-word.
couchand 3y ago
That's covered on page 8 of the field manual [0]. Most of the words are real, some are not, and those are called out specially. Also, there are rules for ignoring letters. Generally, the journalism glosses over much of the detail. https://books.google.com/books?id=vICPCHgtPtkC&newbks=0&pg=PA8 https://books.google.com/books?id=vICPCHgtPtkC&newbks=0&pg=P...
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Also, there are rules for ignoring letters. This is a pretty far cry from "each consonant and vowel in each word has its own meaning". Going by the handbook, the example word of diction is 57% meaningful symbols and 43% meaningless ones. The word called for by the encoding system, diti, is in fact nonexistent, but you're free to supply whatever other letters you feel like until you've formed an English word. The example I asked about, the dew-point indicator left, is much worse, with -- as far as I can tell -- 25% letters with independent meaning and 75% letters without a meaning of their own. The handbook notes that dew-point indicators are not part of the system, and instead a lookup table is supplied which must be memorized. The linked document does not appear to include that table, though, so it's hard to characterize the dew-point indicators. I did appreciate the note that temperatures are to be reported modulo 100 degrees, but "the intelligence of the translators will prevent any error arising".