Vagueness and the Aftermath - A sporadic diary

[RED-DOG]

Poppy enjoys a paddle and I look at the plants.

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[RED-DOG]

Did you spot the fly in pic 5?

[Karabiner]

Did you spot the fly in pic 5?

Only when I had another look after you mentioned it.

Some lovely pics there Tom - but where's Kizzy and how is the old girl doing?

[RED-DOG]

Did you spot the fly in pic 5?

Only when I had another look after you mentioned it.

Some lovely pics there Tom - but where's Kizzy and how is the old girl doing?

Kizzy is doing great Ralph, considering the fact that she's 14 next birthday, that's 98 in dog's years.

She doesn't see or hear as well as she used to and she spends most of her days lounging in a comfy spot, but she's always enthusiastic about our morning walk and bounds around like a puppy.

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[RED-DOG]

Where do those 14 years go?

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[Karabiner]

Where do those 14 years go?

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Unbelievable Jeff.

[nirvana]

'ere, how come I couldn't see these pics earlier but now I can

[RED-DOG]

'ere, how come I couldn't see these pics earlier but now I can

Have you sobered up?

[nirvana]

'ere, how come I couldn't see these pics earlier but now I can

Have you sobered up?

Normally I just see a 'click here to see full image' or something like that, and click the link and nothing. Then it's all there after Ralph posted. Must be magic from Ralph

[RED-DOG]

This is the same waterfall at different shutter speeds.

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[RED-DOG]

I've been reading about Bletchley Park, you know where they did the code-breaking during the war.

I didn't know this but hundreds of people worked there, mostly recruited through puzzles in te daily papers. Those that sent in the correct answers were offered a job.

Of course everyone there was sworn to absolute secrecy, and when declassification came 50 years later there were several instances of husbands saying to wives, "I have something to tell you, I used to work at Bletchley Park during the war, to which came the reply, "Did you?, so did I".

[RED-DOG]

They eventually cracked the famous Enigma code because an Enigma machine was captured from a German sub before it could be thrown overboard, although capturing it was only part of the battle.

The code breakers found a qwerty type keyboard with 26 settings for each letter, meaning that when you pressed say, a W, it would come out as an R etc.

Once they knew how it worked they could begin a process of working backwards to find the message.

As a starting point they would assume the most common letter in any message was an E, then they would make a similar assumption that the next most common letter was an S and so on.

Of course they needed more info than that so they would try to work on messages from locations that were liable to repeat certain words, like for instance a weather station with words like wind, rain and storm.

A huge breakthrough came when they intercepted a regular message from a quiet dessert outpost. Once every 24 hours he would send, "Nothing to report today".

[RED-DOG]

At the end of the war we captured hundreds of Enigma machines, so we showed the governments of lots of other countries how well they worked and gave them all some.

Lots of them used them for years while we gleefully listened in.

[Rod Paradise]

Simon Singh's book 'The Code Book' is brilliant for taking you through the creating and breaking of codes. His lecture on probability that Tank and I went to years back was fascinating as well.

[Jon MW]

...

A huge breakthrough came when they intercepted a regular message from a quiet dessert outpost. Once every 24 hours he would send, "Nothing to report today".

I meant to reply to this before but forgot until Rod's post bumped you back to the unread posts board.

Time was always key to cracking the codes, as in if it takes too long to crack it's no longer useful.

It wasn't the most decisive realisation but one of the early boosts to cracking German codes was they realised that so many of the German messages ended with the phrase 'Heil Hitler', a pretty big leak for the Nazi's not to have thought about themselves