First edition (1678) of "The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan, after the Bible itself, probably the most widely read book in English. In England and colonial North America, if a household owned only one book, it was the Bible, but if a household owned a second, it was "The Pilgrim's Progress." Nearly illiterate and indifferent to spiritual things until he married a woman who owned two religious tracts, Bunyan wrote most of "The Pilgrim's Progress" while in prison, for non-conformist Protestant preaching without the approval of the Church of England. When the authorities locked him in the stocks on the town common, his neighbors fed him and brought him drink.
In style and literary power, "The Pilgrim's Progress" is a high mark of the English language, the equal of Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible.
O my dear wife, said he, and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered. At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing towards night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed. But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears.
John Bunyan, "The Pilgrim's Progress"
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Wow again! Mike cracked the Intercept from Planet Mollyringwald!
Uhhh Mike ... you know, you have an authentic flair for cryptography. Granted these are "simple substitution codes," Vleeptron notes for the second time that you're the only human being on the Internet who took a successful whack at decoding these.
I promise not to steal any more days of your life with any more of these for a while.
The Wilder piece was 20th century English prose, and this was 17th century English prose. Did "Pilgrim's Progress" obey the ETAOINSHRDLU frequency about the same as "Bridge of San Luis Rey"?
Were there unique problems or wrinkles in decoding this one? Easier? Harder?
Tell us a little more about using Excel for these codes.
Oh ... Scott Kohlhaas's comment. I did a little surfing. Scott K. is a Libertarian who once ran for the US Senate in Alaska.
In my blather about the Intercept from Planet Mollyringwald, I wrote
***
Why are the Musicians and Fabric Artists ducking this like the neocons in the Bush administration dodged military conscription?
***
Well, it has dawned on me that Scott K.'s organization against the draft uses a Robot, the Robot hunts for any blog text like "military conscription," and spams its message. So I was essentially replying to a Robot.
(Do Vleeptron comments still require you to re-type squiggly letters -- a CAPTCHA ["Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"] to keep Robot spam out of the comments?)
Whether the Sixties are really back is an entirely different question. Marine General Peter Pace will be the shortest-serving Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since Army General Maxwell Tayor (1962-1964) during the Vietnam War.
"It's deja vu all over again!" -- Yogi Berra
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Scott Kohlhaas said...
Hello.
Would you be willing to spread the word about www.draftresistance.org? It's a site dedicated to shattering the myths surrounding the selective slavery system and building mass civil disobedience to stop the draft before it starts.
Our banner on a website, printing and posting the anti-draft flyer or just telling friends would help.
Thanks!
Scott Kohlhaas
PS. When it comes to conscription, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!
Monday, 04 June, 2007
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Vleeptron Dude said...
GOOD GRIEF!!!!!!!! IT'S TRUE!!!!! THE FUCKING SIXTIES ***REALLY*** ARE BACK!!!!!!
So like Scott, when are the radical priests and nuns gonna throw human blood on the Selective Service files?
Thank God I still have my embroidered bellbottoms!!!
Everybody's always saying bad stuff about Bush, but anybody who can bring the Sixties back -- I mean, this is Some Whomp-Ass Achievement!
uhhh Scott but could you please do something about the sucky whiney music? I won't take away your iPod if you'll do something to make the music ROCK again!
Welcome to Vleeptron, home of one of America's Last Draftees!!!! Apres moi -- le All-Volunteer Armee!!!
volunteers hahahaha volunteers hahahaha
anyway Scott, don't forget to decrypt the coded message at the bottom of this post. You can do it. You're smart.
I'll check out www.draftresistance.org
Thanks!
Monday, 04 June, 2007
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Mike said...
Not so sure about the 60s. But I'm pretty sure about this:
“O, my dear wife,” said he, “and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am certainly informed that this our city will be burnt with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered.” At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing towards night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed. But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears.
-- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress
Friday, 08 June, 2007
4 comments:
Easier or harder is kind of hard to define. I'd say that this one was harder than the last one, but it took significantly less time. I'd say I spent about an hour on this cypher. Maybe an hour and half. There were things about this cypher that were definitely harder than the first. There were more letters used in this one than the last. Only 2 letters were unused in this one, and it was longer. Another thing that struck me about this one. I'll show you the results:
a -> h
b -> t
c -> c
d -> f
e -> g
f -> x
g -> w
h -> r
i -> s
j -> d
k ->
l -> p
m -> o
n -> n
o -> k
p -> l
q ->
r -> u
s -> m
t -> b
u -> e
v -> q
w -> i
x -> a
y -> v
z -> z
As you can see from the Bolding, there were actually 3 letters that matched straight across. The frequency in this one matched ETAOINSHRDLU fairly well. Better I'd say than the first cypher. This one was etainohrdql. Also, this one was harder because of some of the older language. I don't know how many times I skipped over the word "lieth" before figuring out the cypher. In fact, seeing "tliet hh" in the text almost made me start over thinking there was an error in my solution.
All in all, this one solved itself much faster than the first one, but seemed much harder to me. One thing about it though, it's definitely fun to do.
The substitution table was selected automatically and randomly, so inevitably a couple of letters will be the same in plaintext and cyphertext. I would have had to manually force all letters to be different if I'd wanted to -- but forcing every letter to be different ... well, it just ain't natural.
I figured MORE letters -- a longer passage -- makes the job easier rather than harder, but I just chose it because I like the way it reads. I used to have "The Pilgrim's Progress" on an audio tape, I think John Gielgud narrated it, and on long highway trips it sounded as if the Voice of God was reading to me.
Vleeptron will lay off the codes for a while to give you a break. But next time ... well ... uhhh ... who knows, maybe the Aliens will be using another cypher system.
More letters used makes it harder, longer makes it easier. The longer the text, the more it's going to conform to statistical rules of letter usage, but if you have a cypher of 100 letters, and only 15 of the letters of the alphabet are used, that one is going to be easier to figure out than a 100 letter long cypher that uses all 26 letters. That's all depending on the text of course.
I'd be interested in another cypher system. It's been fun so far. :)
Oh, incidentally, Vleeptronz comments do still require you to re-type squiggly letters. I'd say that about half the time, I need multiple tries too.
Thanks! The new version of blogger doesn't make ME type squiggly letters, but I wasn't sure about other Commenters.
I had a post about CAPTCHA
http://vleeptronz.blogspot.com/2007/01/reveal-thy-true-nature-sir-or-madame.html
and here's the really strange Antidote to CAPTCHA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
... complete with the rise of computer sweatshops.
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