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Yesterday, the Internet Solved a 20-year-old Mystery
- aw3c2 13y agoActual link is http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramblings http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramb...
- mcguire 13y agoFrom the second compilation, by gingerest: "{OR Please see that we all have blood pressure in the normal range & see that none of the rest of us have to take blood pressure medication}" Now, there's a prayer. (The alternative was: "Please see that we all have bodily perfection in the next realm, see that none of the rest of us have to bear painful memories." Which is more likely, I suspect.)
- JTon 13y agoI love when an online community comes together and solves puzzles like this. /r/Whatisthis turns up some gems here and there. An another note, I'm disappointed this particular puzzle turned out to be prayers... boring
- cobrausn 13y agoOld woman dying of cancer didn't have the common courtesy to at least scribble down something more interesting for you to browse for 5 minutes on the internet later. What a shame.
- Luc 13y agoWhat the hell. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to remark on. It was presented as a conundrum, and it turns out it's something disappointing to the grandparent. You're the one dramatising things.
- cobrausn 13y agoThe 'boring' remark is the only thing that set me off. The post without that would seem reasonable - as it stands though, it looks like someone complaining about not having something more interesting to read about, not someone expressing disappointment there wasn't something more meaningful to her heirs.
- Luc 13y agoSeems reasonable to express disappointment at the decoded message. I'm not sure why you're trying to be the white knight in this.
- samstave 13y ago"Drink more ovaltine"
- deaconblues 13y agoSon of a bitch!
- sliverstorm 13y agoAgreed, boring is definitely a value judgement and as such kind of inappropriate.
- eplanit 13y agoIt's not so much about dramatizing, he's simply a dick.
- cobrausn 13y agoFinally, someone who understands me. Although this is the first time I've been called both a dick and a white knight in the same thread. I'll chalk that up as a win.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoIn HN we reserve consideration and respect for people who can't afford the rent in San Francisco. An old woman dying of cancer deserves none. She was probably a homophobe too!
- Shivetya 13y agoGo read the original story, there is a link above. Someone even went as far to parse out one version of the Bible to determine if the first letter combinations matched. Even know what the basic thread of her thoughts, its the discovery and how to further that discovery that is the fascination. That is was prayers actually made it easier and leads to other methods to work it out.
- interstitial 13y agoSo do you think God lets you pray in index form? I mean, if he's the grand super dude, can't we just recite the index?
- zaphar 13y agoI don't usually discuss matters of faith in this forum since it's pretty far off topic. However since you asked. Most christian faiths would say yes. The form is less important than the intended meaning for a prayer. And God would be perfectly capable of understanding the index form since He is considered to be Omniscient. QED: index form is perfectly fine. Other religions may differ as to whether the form is less or more important than the intended content so I can't say whether principle transfers or not.
- notahacker 13y agoI like the Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheels for transmitting the perceived substance of a religious text with an almost industrial efficiency.
- bjelkeman-again 13y agoWith modern computers we should be able to recite religious texts fast and efficiently. Even a Raspberry PI with a solar panel could probably get up to some decent speed compared to a prayer wheel. Not sure it helps you reach nirvana though. :)
- 13y ago
- jccalhoun 13y agoBe sure to drink your Ovaltine.
- protomyth 13y agoIf it was one of my relatives, it would have been that or some geo coordinates to an almost impossible to get to place resulting in nothing (or a sign that said "gotcha").
- anigbrowl 13y agoAsk Metafilter is a very very good place to get random questions answered - a smart and very diverse userbase, along with some sensible rules on how to ask a question, which gives it an edge over Quora for my tastes.
- jlgaddis 13y agoPlus you don't have to create an account.
- teraflop 13y agoSorry, but that's wrong. Here are the rules for how to sign up: http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi
- work_account_1 13y agoI believe he meant that you don't have to create an account just to view the answers.
- teraflop 13y agoWhoops, in retrospect that should have been obvious.
- tbirdz 13y agoOn Quora you have to sign up just to view the answers, although I believe there is some kind of hack to get around it with a cookie or something.
- rpedela 13y agoAdd "?share=1" to the end of the URL.
- joeframbach 13y ago
- IvyMike 13y agoI thought this was going to be about the redditor who uncovered Tommy Wiseau's country of birth, but that's just a 10-year-old mystery. http://www.reddit.com/r/theroom/comments/1vklp3/i_think_i_have_found_tommys_nationality_new/ http://www.reddit.com/r/theroom/comments/1vklp3/i_think_i_ha...
- richardlblair 13y agoI love the interweb.
- snorkel 13y agoI like the post but I don't care for the click baity headline. Please add a few more words to headline when posting to HN.
- netcraft 13y agoHN policy is to always have the title the same as the source, for better or sometimes worse. There are many cases of them changing a link title even if the provided one was much more descriptive. Edit: relevant discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
- aw3c2 13y agoActually it is not. And I wish mods were not so overzealous. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > (...) please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
- netcraft 13y agoRelevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
- simias 13y agoIn this case the problem is that it's blogspam, a direct link to the metafilter thread would have been sufficient, it gives all the context we need.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 13y agoSuch kind of "lossy compression" was used sometimes to transfer secret messages. It's impossible to fully decipher it without knowing the text, but it serves as a reminder for those who know it, so they can reconstruct it in full form if needed. This way the information could be kept in oral form for a long time (even for generations), while being preserved in written form only in such way that strangers couldn't decipher it in full. But since common patterns can be discerned (if you at least know the subject approximately), one can reconstruct some parts of it with pretty good accuracy.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoA sort of index.
- chimeracoder 13y ago> Such kind of "lossy compression" was used sometimes to transfer secret messages. It's impossible to fully decipher it without knowing the text, but it serves as a reminder for those who know it, so they can reconstruct it in full form if needed. This was the way that the Qur'an was originally passed down. Originally, the Qur'an was meant to be a recited work. Furthermore, at the time, Arabic writing wasn't so much a complete orthographic system as much as a reminder of the roots of words[0] This works well in Semitic languages, in which the consonants denote the general meaning of the word, and the vowels change the specifics. For example, one might write "SLM", which can be expanded to any of the following (capitalization for emphasis) 1) iSLaM = "submission" (literally) 2) moSLeM = "one who has submitted" 3) SaLaaM = a greeting, similar to "peace" (etc.) The writing is not enough to reconstruct the entire text, but it's good enough for someone whose job it is to recite the work, and simply needs a little reminder. [0] In fact, not only did traditional written Arabic lack vowels (much like Hebrew), but I am told that even consonants were difficult to distinguish from each other.
- shmerl 13y agoSimilar idea (using just the initial letters of words) was used in various Hebrew works. Such kind of text was usually called megilas sesorim (i.e. a "scroll of secrets").
- ithinkso 13y agoIf mystery was not known then no one could say it was 20-year-old mystery. Media headlines.
- interstitial 13y agoTrue, but viral it up: Minutes old mystery solved instantly, but what happened next made me fall off my chair.
- jlgaddis 13y ago> You'll never believe what happened next!
- deaconblues 13y agoCode crackers hate her!
- jtheory 13y ago72-year-old grandmother passes a message from beyond the grave with this one weird trick
- Jabbles 13y agoHow hard did the family actually try to solve this mystery though? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTN https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTN
- gry 13y agoTo be fair, this wasn't searchable in 1996. :) They rediscovered the card a couple days ago and the string of characters only results in the content itself. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFUTDODBAFUOT https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFU... The solution was someone recognizing the pattern, not arbitrary Googling, which I find far more interesting.
- smackfu 13y agoActually, arbitrary Googling works pretty well. Just start chopping letters of the end, and you get a hit on "OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIH" from 2007.
- iM8t 13y agoIt's incredible what people can do just because of curiosity. I mean - there's no practical gain from helping another person decipher a code other than just out of curiosity. I'm fascinated by the message and the relentlessness of the person who kept the code and tried to crack it for 20yrs. This is just so cool!
- sebnukem2 13y agospoiler: prayers.
- thehme 13y agoThe title of this article does not reflect what the article is actually talking about. Also, while a nice gesture of the family member to write, as I read the article I was building up excitement and really wanted to know if she had written some interesting/secret information for the kids, but then found she was just praying. Nothing wrong or against that, just that my curiosity was sparked but ultimately my interest went unfulfilled.
- judk 13y agoWelcome to magazine journalism.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI wonder if n-grams could solve this automatically? If we consider the actual words to be a latent variable, then we can use an n-gram model to compute the maximum likelihood estimate (sorry Bayesians) using dynamic programming. There is also the Bayesian approach where you treat it as a Bayesian network and use belief propagation to compute the marginal posteriors over each letter. EDIT: took a while to figure out the ML approach.
- jjwiseman 13y agoYes, that's what I did: https://github.com/wiseman/finalletters https://github.com/wiseman/finalletters It uses a bigram model and Viterbi decoding. With the right corpora (the repo includes the King James Bible and some Lutheran hymnals, as the woman was reportedly Lutheran) it's easy to decode "OFWAIHHBTN" into "our father who are in heaven hallowed be thy name".