Judge Creates Own Da Vinci Code 463
xmedar writes "The BBC is reporting that the judge who presided over the recent Da Vinci Code plagiarism case used steganography to embed his own code in the judgment using italic text in random places throughout the text. The full text of the code reads 'smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz' if you want to have a go at cracking it." From the article: "Although he would not be drawn on his code and its meaning, Mr Justice Smith said he would probably confirm it if someone cracked it, which was 'not a difficult thing to do'. In March, he presided over a High Court case brought by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who claimed Dan Brown plagiarized their own historical book for The Da Vinci Code."
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:3, Interesting)
FFS, Her Majesty's Courts Service is slashdotted!
[0@42 downloads]$ wget http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/images/judgmen
--14:30:51-- http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/images/judgmen
=> `baigent_v_rhg_0406.pdf'
Resolving www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk... failed: Temporary failure in name resolution.
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having said that, I read Angels and Demons (which I think is a marginally superior novel to DVC) but seeing the liberties that he took with physics I stayed well clear of Digital Fortress because I knew that my familiarity with the science invoved would have me spitting my own teeth out, so I do sympathize.
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:4, Interesting)
One Question (Score:5, Interesting)
Blah, subject, blah (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:2, Interesting)
A Codesmith Exists (Score:5, Interesting)
Reverse the first part to get 'codesmith' and take away the word 'a' & 'exists' from the next few letters
This leaves you with 'Jaeotpcgream' which you will use later.
Take letters on the keyboard next to 'qwfkadpmqz' to get 'asriseonas' which is then combined with 'Jaeotpcgream' to form 'jaeotpcgreamasriseonas'
You take out the words 'to raise a scam' then throw away the rest of the letters.
These words are then rearranged to form the sentence:
'A codesmith exists to raise a scam.'
Judges laugh too. Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen judges belittle all categories of person in the courtroom including; Witnesses, accused, spectators, Attorneys and bailiffs. Even Lower court Judges, Legislators and the law are fair game.
I know a Judge who wrote a book of courtroom humor. Justice Carl Harrison of the Jamaican Court of Appeal. If anyone can find a reference for this book, post a link.
Re:Smithy Code? (Score:5, Interesting)
Creative Decisions (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a few more:
And yeah, they're pretty bad.
Re:too much time on their hands? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, there are good arguments against levity in court proceedings, but I can say that these cases have made the lives of countless law students at least slightly more pleasant.
A particular favorite is the wrongful appropriation case of Zim v. Western Publishing Co., 573 F.2d 1318 (5th Cir. 1978), which begins -- for no particular reason that I can discern -- in a mock King James style:
My guess is some law clerk won fifty bucks for getting Irving Loeb Goldberg (a great judge and perhaps even a great jurist) to do this.Clue? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if this is useful or helpful, but I noticed that the character sequence past smith(y)code has the same number of characters from the phrase to abbreviate both books:
Jaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
HolyBloodHolyGrai lDaVinciCode
Re:Coolest Judge Ever? (Score:4, Interesting)
How about Alex Kozinski? Only judge I've seen who, just to make a point, wrote a dissenting opinion as a one-act play for the sole purpose of shaming the government into dropping their obviously stupid case. He succeeded. And, as a bonus, the play was hilarious.
Some thought (Score:2, Interesting)
The judge's hidden string and the titles of the books have the same length.
smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzvTheHolyBloodandtheHolyGrailTheDaVinciCode
Anybody here who can make something out of it?
My pet peve here is with your HS English Classes (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole argument over something like Ebonics occurs because we are not really honest with ourselves over what we are trying to teach-- this is not about learning prescriptive language rules in the same sense that you have them with, say, Perl, but rather a way of learning some accepted stylistics that are considered helpful in earning respect as a writer and speaker. We ought not to lose sight of the difference.
To someone in linguistics, areas like Ebonics are actually quite fascinating. For example "I be going to the store" in Black American English does *not* translate exactly into any phrase in Contemporary Standard American English. Indeed the tense is closer to the imperfect tense in Spanish than to any CSAE tense. But people have a problem teaching this sort of thing in high school because they confuse the issues of language study and communications style.
The rules of natural language are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. In essence, use defines language. Philologists, for example, can use their study of how language has changed to effectively date wording in documents (for example, we know that the Codex Regius is probably a transcription of poetry that was composed at least a few hundred years earlier).
But these areas of language study are extraordinarily technical. As someone who is not making my living in those fields, I can never be more than an informed consumer of these ideas.
For a good "introduction" to this field of philology and linguistics (and in particular the subfield of poetics), I would recommend "How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics" by Calvert Watkins (Oxford 1995). However, it is not exactly light reading.
BTW, the above book recommendation is more on-topic than the rest of this post. It is absolutely amazing to me how many codes were apparently presented in works of oral traditions, and how some coded poetic devices were transmitted verbatim across centuries even as languages diverged (we see complex poetic formulas with identical root/morphology structures in differnet branches of the IE poetic traditions, for example, and I would not be surprised if other oral culturo-linguistic groups had similar techniques).
"Never waste the time of the high court" (Score:2, Interesting)
"Never waste the time of the high court"
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archiv
---
"Never waste the time of the high court"
I cracked this with http://www.secretcodebreaker.com/scbsolvr.html [secretcodebreaker.com]
The italicised letters in the judgment are: Jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv
Entering this into the programme generates: kneverswastlandthenyofminglyouc
which is not a clean crack but enabled me to guess the code.
Dr Daren Kemp
www.Christaquarian.net
Co-Editor of the "Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies" www.asanas.org.uk
Author of "New Age: A Guide" (Edinburgh University Press 2004) and "The Christaquarians?" (Kempress 2003)
Posted by Christaquarian on April 27, 2006 05:16 PM.
Fact or Fiction? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, but Dan Brown prefaces it with a Fact page that calls the Priory of Sion a real organization founded in 1099. The truth of the matter is that the Prior of Sion was a Hoax, originally started in 1957. (See Priory of Sion [priory-of-sion.com] for the evidence of this.) He also makes this generic claim: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
The book goes on to make laughable errors -- Gospels in the Dead Sea Scrolls!? (There are no gospels or any Christian or New Testament material in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus had thousands of followers in his lifetime? Jesus was of no consequence at all in his lifetime -- an unknown rabbi in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. 5,000,000 witches burned!? No. More like 200,000 [kings.edu] and all after 1400, and mostly by local governments. Constantine made Christ A God?! -- Constantine was pro-Arian (the losing side) in that fight. All he cared about was the unity of the church for political purposes, not its doctrine. Mithras was called the "Son of God" and "Light of the World" and was raised after three days!? All wrong [wikipedia.org]. Sunday worship started by Constantine -- again wrong -- history shows it is predominant back int the 2nd century (Constantine is fourth century).
The book is schlock, both as literature, and in its research.