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Smithy Code
The Smithy code is a series of letters embedded, as a private amusement, within the April 2006 approved judgement of Mr Justice Peter Smith on ''The Da Vinci Code'' copyright case. The judge publicly admitted that "I can't discuss the judgement, but I don't see why a judgement should not be a matter of fun." It was first broken, in the same month, by Dan Tench, a lawyer who writes on media issues for ''The Guardian'', after he received a series of email clues about it from Justice Smith. How the code works The letters in question are part of the actual text of the judgement, but italicised in contrast to the rest of the text. The following sequence of unusually emphasised letters can be extracted from the judgement document: The italicised letters only occur up to paragraph 43 (which is page 13 of a 71-page document). Meanwhile, paragraph 52 concludes with this sentence: "The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC." (These abbreviation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadcast news organisation and generates about 120 hours of radio and television output each day, as well as online news coverage. The service has over 5,500 journalists working across its output including in 50 foreign news bureaus where more than 250 foreign correspondents are stationed. Deborah Turness has been the CEO of news and current affairs since September 2022. In 2019, it was reported in an Ofcom report that the BBC spent £136m on news during the period April 2018 to March 2019. BBC News' domestic, global and online news divisions are housed within the largest live newsroom in Europe, in Broadcasting House in central London. Parliamentary coverage is produced and broadcast from studios in London. Through BBC English Regions, th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Admiral John Fisher
Admiral is one of the highest ranks in many navies. In the Commonwealth nations and the United States, a "full" admiral is equivalent to a "full" general in the army or the air force. Admiral is ranked above vice admiral and below admiral of the fleet, or fleet admiral. Etymology The word in Middle English comes from Anglo-French , "commander", from Medieval Latin , . These evolved from the Arabic () – () (), "king, prince, chief, leader, nobleman, lord, a governor, commander, or person who rules over a number of people" and (), the Arabic definite article meaning "the." In Arabic, admiral is also represented as (), where al-Baḥr (البحر) means the sea. The 1818 edition of Samuel Johnson's ''A Dictionary of the English Language'', edited and revised by the Rev. Henry John Todd, states that the term "has been traced to the Arab. emir or amir, lord or commander, and the Gr. , the sea, q. d. ''prince of the sea''. The word is written both with and without the d, in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Puzzles
A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together ( or take them apart) in a logical way, in order to find the solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology. Puzzles are often created to be a form of entertainment but they can also arise from serious mathematical or logical problems. In such cases, their solution may be a significant contribution to mathematical research. Etymology The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' dates the word ''puzzle'' (as a verb) to the 16th century. Its earliest use documented in the ''OED'' was in a book titled ''The Voyage of Robert Dudley...to the West Indies, 1594–95, narrated by Capt. Wyatt, by himself, and by Abram Kendall, master'' (published circa 1595). The word later came to be us ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Cryptography
Cryptography, the use of codes and ciphers, began thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classical cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids. In the early 20th century, the invention of complex mechanical and electromechanical machines, such as the Enigma rotor machine, provided more sophisticated and efficient means of encryption; and the subsequent introduction of electronics and computing has allowed elaborate schemes of still greater complexity, most of which are entirely unsuited to pen and paper. The development of cryptography has been paralleled by the development of cryptanalysis — the "breaking" of codes and ciphers. The discovery and application, early on, of frequency analysis to the reading of encrypted communications has, on occasion, altered the course of history. Thus the Zimmermann Telegram triggered the United States' entry into World War ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Times
''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (founded in 1821), are published by Times Media, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. ''The Times'' and ''The Sunday Times'' were founded independently and have had common ownership only since 1966. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. ''The Times'' was the first newspaper to bear that name, inspiring numerous other papers around the world. In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as or , although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution. ''The Times'' had an average daily circulation of 365,880 in March 2020; in the same period, ''The Sunday Times'' had an average weekly circulation of 647,622. The two ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HMS Dreadnought (1906)
HMS ''Dreadnought'' was a Royal Navy battleship, the design of which revolutionised naval power. The ship's entry into service in 1906 represented such an advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, the dreadnoughts, as well as the class of ships named after her. Likewise, the generation of ships she made obsolete became known as Pre-dreadnought battleship, pre-dreadnoughts. Admiral John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, Sir John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, Board of Admiralty, is credited as the father of ''Dreadnought''. Shortly after he assumed office in 1904, he ordered design studies for a battleship armed solely with guns and a speed of . He convened a Committee on Designs to evaluate the alternative designs and to assist in the detailed design work. ''Dreadnought'' was the first battleship of her era to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a few large guns complemented by a hea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher
Admiral of the Fleet (Royal Navy), Admiral of the Fleet John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, (25 January 1841 – 10 July 1920), commonly known as Jacky or Jackie Fisher, was a British Admiral of the Fleet. His efforts to reform the Royal Navy helped to usher in an era of modernisation which saw the supersession of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzleloader, muzzle-loading cannon by steel-hulled battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. Fisher has a reputation as an innovator, strategist and developer of the navy rather than as a seagoing admiral involved in major battles, although in his career he experienced all these things. When appointed First Sea Lord in 1904 he removed from active service 150 ships which were no longer useful and set about constructing modern replacements, developing a modern fleet prepared to meet German Empire, Germany during the First World War. Fisher saw the need to improve the range, accuracy and rate-of-fire of naval gunne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kasiski Examination
In cryptanalysis, Kasiski examination (also known as Kasiski's test or Kasiski's method) is a method of attacking polyalphabetic substitution ciphers, such as the Vigenère cipher. It was first published by Friedrich Kasiski in 1863, but seems to have been independently discovered by Charles Babbage as early as 1846. How it works In polyalphabetic substitution ciphers where the substitution alphabets are chosen by the use of a keyword, the Kasiski examination allows a cryptanalyst to deduce the length of the keyword. Once the length of the keyword is discovered, the cryptanalyst lines up the ciphertext in ''n'' columns, where ''n'' is the length of the keyword. Then each column can be treated as the ciphertext of a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. As such, each column can be attacked with frequency analysis. Similarly, where a rotor stream cipher machine has been used, this method may allow the deduction of the length of individual rotors. The Kasiski examination involves ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vigenère Cipher
The Vigenère cipher () is a method of encryption, encrypting alphabetic text where each letter of the plaintext is encoded with a different Caesar cipher, whose increment is determined by the corresponding letter of another text, the key (cryptography), key. For example, if the plaintext is attacking tonight and the key is oculorhinolaryngology, then *the first letter of the plaintext, a, is shifted by 14 positions in the alphabet (because the first letter of the key, o, is the 14th letter of the alphabet, counting from zero), yielding o; *the second letter, t, is shifted by 2 (because the second letter of the key, c, is the 2nd letter of the alphabet, counting from zero) yielding v; *the third letter, t, is shifted by 20 (u), yielding n, with wrap-around; and so on. It is important to note that traditionally spaces and punctuation are removed prior to encryption and reintroduced afterwards. * In this example the tenth letter of the plaintext t is shifted by 14 position ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Smith (judge)
Sir Peter Winston Smith (born 1 May 1952), abbreviated to ''Peter Smith J'' in judgements, is a former High Court judge (England and Wales), High Court judge who sat in the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice in England and Wales from 5 April 2002 to 27 October 2017. He was the subject of comment and investigation in relation to his judicial behaviour in various circumstances. He retired on 28 October 2017. Name and abbreviation Smith's name is correctly Judicial titles in England and Wales, abbreviated in English legal writing as "Peter Smith J," and not as "Smith J", as is the norm for High Court judges. This is because there were other senior judges also named Smith. Biography Smith was born in Taiping, Perak, Taiping, Federation of Malaya, Malaya to George Arthur Smith and Iris Muriel Smith, while his father was posted abroad. He grew up with five siblings in Hornsea, East Riding of Yorkshire, East Yorkshire, and attended grammar school in nearby Bridlingto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fibonacci Number
In mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence is a Integer sequence, sequence in which each element is the sum of the two elements that precede it. Numbers that are part of the Fibonacci sequence are known as Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted . Many writers begin the sequence with 0 and 1, although some authors start it from 1 and 1 and some (as did Fibonacci) from 1 and 2. Starting from 0 and 1, the sequence begins : 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, ... The Fibonacci numbers were first described in Indian mathematics as early as 200 BC in work by Pingala on enumerating possible patterns of Sanskrit poetry formed from syllables of two lengths. They are named after the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, who introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics in his 1202 book . Fibonacci numbers appear unexpectedly often in mathematics, so much so that there is an entire journal dedicated to their study, the ''Fibonacci Quarterly''. Appli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variant Beaufort
The Beaufort cipher, created by Sir Francis Beaufort, is a substitution cipher similar to the Vigenère cipher, with a slightly modified enciphering mechanism and tableau. Its most famous application was in a rotor-based cipher machine, the Hagelin M-209. The Beaufort cipher is based on the Beaufort square which is essentially the same as a Vigenère square but in reverse order starting with the letter "Z" in the first row, where the first row and the last column serve the same purpose. Using the cipher To encrypt, first choose the plaintext character from the top row of the tableau; call this column P. Secondly, travel down column P to the corresponding key letter K. Finally, move directly left from the key letter to the left edge of the tableau, the ciphertext encryption of plaintext P with key K will be there. For example if encrypting plain text character "d" with key "m" the steps would be: # find the column with "d" on the top, # travel down that column to find key "m", ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
