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Cryptic Code Stumps Experts
moonboy writes "From the CBSNews.com article: 'The experts who cracked Nazi Germany's secret codes are tackling a 10-letter enigma that has stumped fine minds for more than 250 years - D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. Former code-breakers from Britain's World War II intelligence center at Bletchley Park set out this week to decipher a cryptic inscription on an 18th-century monument at an English country estate. Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail. Some believe it is a private message to a deceased beloved. No one knows for sure."
Maybe it just means nothing?
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
How do they know it even is a message? For all anyone knows this could be ten pages of random text that some rich guy did and hyped up as some super secret code.
it's only 10 letters long. So really you could just list all valid 10 letter english phrases then see which follow the rules for an Enigma machine.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Holy Grail? Puh-lease.
It's probably just what it said in the article: a dedication. I find it hard to believe that they'll find the Holy Grail from a 10 letter code.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Seriously, how much information can be in 10 letters? not to mention this is only 250 years old and the grail went missing over 1000 years ago... sounds like they got punk'd
drunk chemists
LOL, WTF? IMO, IIRC, tho IANAL, this looks familiar!
Paren post is goatse cx.
Isn't that the code for infinite lives on Contra?
Another mind boggler...
U U D D L R L R B A S
I need more lower case letters so that this will actually post, hehe.
after reading the article, no one suggests that it could be complete jibberish. How do they know it's not completely random? There's people out there like myself who enough of a bastard to do exactly that to baffle people for as long as the memorial exists...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
If they really want to know where the Holy Grail is, they should just ask the old man in Scene 24.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
MEIN LEBEN
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M, eh? That's easy. It stands for "Does Our Universe Often Say Very Ambiguous Variegated...." oh. I give up. Don't listen to me, I'm a moron. I apologize. That could have been really funny in the hands of the right /.er. Me, I dropped the ball and said something amazingly stupid. I think I'm gonna go cry now.
"All Your Base Are Belong To Us"
I.S. O.V.R. T.H.E.R.E
Unfortunatly, the arrow that would accompany the message must have gotten rubbed off.
:)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Most old geezers sit around and do the cryptic crossword when they retire. I guess these guys need something a little more challenging. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
He must have died while carving it.
Fill in the blank.
Do Orcas Under Oceans Swim Very Acrobatically Via Virtuous Movement?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
clearly it was test run with enigma and says:
F.I.R.S.T._.P.O.S.T
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I can't see the D in the picture.
/. can solve this!
I'm sure
I've seen it. It's actually a three line inscription. The entire text reads as follows:
S T E A L U N D E R W E A R
D O U O S V A V V M
P R O F I T !
Focusing on the 10 letters alone is probably not enough. Perhaps one has to see it in a larger context, perhaps with the eight other monuments. Maybe you have to figure out why some of the letters are lower than the others, why the picture above is a mirror image of a famous painting, what the changes in the picture hinted at in the article means etc. Perhaps there's a whole lot more clues that nobody has even found yet. Perhaps you must be fluent in Persian or Egyptian to get the puzzle...
What we need is a real world Daniel Jackson.
QBHBFINIIZ. Nope. I give up.
DOUOS's? I don't think they exist.
Va-va-voom!
...given the location and time it was written it could only mean one thing!
Eat Spam!
It's an ancient Greek slogan, often used to commemorate the Greeks' victories over their opponents in war. Curiously, the slogan is not grammatically correct, even in the original Greek, but the fractured phrase, once established, was never corrected out of deference to tradition.
So in English, it roughly translates as:
All
Your
Base
Are
Belong
To
Us
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
...complete with interview.
Dianne's Only Uterus Outta Say Vigoursly And Violently Vomitt Meat
------- Assumption is the mother of all f$#@ ups.
The quickest way of working out what it means might be to ask Google if you can use their database to search for any contiguous series of words beginning with D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
If Google wouldn't do this, the first thing I'd do is try the same thing with a dictionary of quotations.
The best possible answer, barring actually finding the holy grail, is quoted in the article.
"Lord Lichfield's grandmother believed it stood for the opening letters of a line of verse: "Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity 'twixt deity and man." based on a poem by Anna Seward.
How would it be possible to come up with a better explanation? This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know. Think about it: what type of answer could satisfy such a short "code" better?
Its like reading Nostradamus: you will find patterns if you look hard enough.
Good old google shows a relatively interesting page with respect to this with more potential background:e nnes-sion.htm l
http://www.veling.nl/anne/templars/r
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's just an acronym!:
D.O.U.O.S.B.A.V.V.M:
"Deadly Odour: Underpants Or Socks Violently Aromatic - Very Very Manky."
google it?
_________ Help me get a PSP!
Dear Online Users Our Stories' Variety Are Very Very Mundane
The early English obviously had trouble with subject verb agreements.
Fodder for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. A plant / hoax? Perhaps. Maybe we'll find out someday.
The entropy of the English language is 1.5 bits per character (as an example; other languages have other entropy characteristics). When performing cryptanalysis on ciphertext derived from English plaintext, the cryptographer can determine whether or not he has achieved successful decryption by calculating this entropy on the result. The accuracy of the entropy derivation depends largely on the quantity of the data used to calculate the entropy.
It appears that the message D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. does not carry near enough information to derive any meaningful statistical information of the sort. This means pretty much that any potential decryption is as good as any other. In the worst case scenario, this message is the result of a one-time pad, in which case it is completely futile to attempt to decrypt it; even if P is proven to be equal to NP, one-time pads still maintain their security, since all possible decryptions are equally probable. Perhaps some information get be gleaned from the context of the message (the fact that it is either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening).
In any case, I get the feeling that this particular puzzle is going to be eternally unsolved. There will be plenty of equally feasible decipherments based on defendable premises, but we will never know for sure.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
All they have to do is look up George Lucas and ask him after all Indy found it Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
don't overanalyze unusual old scriptures,
verily always void of valuable meaning
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Seriously. Give it to Robert Langdon and Sophie, his cryptographer girlfriend. They'll make a bunch of bullshit guesses, and most of them will be accurate and lead them to the correct answer.
Of course, it won't point out the final resting place of the Grail. They already know where that is.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
before England gats a DMCA law.
What?
Looking at just the letters is misleading. The letters are on a monument with a mirror image of a known painting, and even within the letters, the D and M are positioned differently, and there are the words 'Et in arcadia ego' with the image.
Add to that that other aspects of the monument may be significant, or there may be significance in the context of other monuments in the garden and/or other entities.
Now as to whether it will be solved, can be solved without knowledge of an inside joke, or even contains interesting subject matter at all is one issue. If it does have meaning, I would give it better odds of being figured out than a plain 10-letter inscription.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And who was "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M."? And how did he manage to write his name in solid cement?
I know! Let's use technology to bring him back.
Wow! What's normal to him amazes us.
He is a lot smarter than his sister "M.V.V.A.V.S.O.U.O.D" of whom we no nothing.
He will be our new god.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Nicolas Poussin's rendition of the four Arcadian shepherds.
Perhaps the meaning of the cipher can be divined by running the Ecologues through a suitable perl script.
Come on... It's quite obvious that it's a cheat mode for a popular 18th century FPS. D O U O S V A V V M = Extra Ammo
Duh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!
Deranged otters usually operate slow vehicles and various valuable machines
Do not decrypt the above message! Contains early goatse!
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Distributed Object Unary Orthogonal System for VLIW Across Varied Virtual Machines
... we will find the answer in one of the future Neal Stephenson books? Out of context could look as extracted from one of the Cryptonomicon prequels.
Bletchley Park tries to crack a 250-year mystery: Do 10 letters at stately home lead to Holy Grail?
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
Do you think michael reads all the hate posts about him and crys himself to sleep every night?
"The first attempt at cracking the code will take place on Tuesday May 11th at 12pm at Shugborough Estate"
Its May 15th.... did someone find the grail but it just didnt make the news? Damn, must have been a car chase ont hat night, got pre-empted.
I love LA!
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Beware of white rabbit with big pointy teeth and a mean streak a mile long!
The MPAA recently commissioned Lawrence Livermore Laboratories to create a working time machine, in order to seek litigation against the first known cracker of CSS.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I'm still waiting for somebody to successfully crack a numbers station, despite the theoretical impossibiliy of doing so.
okno, okno, okno... 1 6 44 59 34 alpha kilo lima...Maybe it's a warning against browsing /. using IE.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
Come on people, it obviously says 42.
I had nothing cool to put as caption for my high school year book photo, so I filled it with random capitalized letters. Maybe this guy had the same problem.
Seeing how fast that went down, I'd have to say Yes; yes I imagine you DO read all the hate posts about yourself, Mr Sims.
Of course it's random numbers generated by the Arethusa algorithm seeded with the string "COMSTOCK".
Help! I'm being repressed!
The problem with such a small amount of "code" to go on, it is possible that many people will find different ways to explain it. For example the explanation in the article that it is an acronym for the words in a line of a poem. Another person may decide that it is a reference to Greek literature. However it is very possible that many little coincidences can be found to match and fit with the code, so we will probably never know the TRUE intention of the message.
According to my decryption device, it says:
b e s u r e t o d r i n k y o u r o v a l t i n e
Roughly translated, it mean It means "I have the worlds worst luck when it comes to scrabble. I have recorded my initial set of tiles here for posterity."
Gandalf, what's the Elvish word for friend?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
They probably died before they could buy a vowel.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
...the holy grail is the bloodline of Jesus Christ?
Didn't the writer of this article read the Da Vinci Code?!
Ignorance is everywhere!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought everyone knew that the Holy Grail is buried in the Apprentice Pillar at Rosslyn Chapel?
http://www.rosslynchapel.org.uk/
Those letters could be the makings for a magic word. During medival times it was believed that words and letters could be arranged in specific patterns to create magical affects. An example of this is the word Abacadabra, Which though funny sounding today was actually thought to posses magical powers. If you look at how it is spelled you can see a diffinite pattern A, B, A again, then C, Back to A, and so forth. I don't remember what it is supposed to do exactly. However, I do know that in order to make it work you had to write it and not say it.
Select Webpages From Google Where Upper(Words) like "D% O% U% O% S% V% A% V% V% M%"
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Latin had no letter "U"; the letter "V" was used to render both U and V, and even post-Roman inscriptions tend to follow this practice when quoting Latin. Greek has its own alphabet, so a Latin alphabet acronym for a Greek phrase doesn't make much sense.
Also, the article translates "Et in Arcadia Ego" as "And I was in Arcadia, too." This is incorrect. There is no verb in that phrase: it reads "And in Arcadia I". That's one reason why this painting is seen to be so enigmatic. This could be the first part of a sentence, though the pronoun "ego" would be superfluous in a complete sentence since the verb conjugation would identify the sentence as first-person singular. Or, it could mean "And in Arcadia, I" (i.e. the last part of a sentence such as "In Rome, there is Caesar, and in Arcadia, [there is] I.") Or the "I" could be a Roman numeral one. Any way you look at it, the article's translation is off.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Damnable Odorous Unscrupulous Open Source Vandals Always Vilify Valiant Microsoft
[Sits back and awaits the mods]
It must be an equivalent to TDNMATBICPLY :-D
http://www.google.ca/search?q=DO+UOS+VAV+VM&ie=UTF -8&hl=en&meta=
DO, UOS and VAV come up very close together in some hits yet are distinct... holy grail here I come!
If you rot-13 the letters, you get:
.H.A.N.D.
Y.H.B.T
cheers
l.o.l.a.f.a.i.c.s.t.i.j.a.t.l.a. ;)
(I can't caps. It's like YELLING.)
Privacy is terrorism.
That was until someone got in touch with a former vicar, who informed them the mysterious "HWP" was in fact...Hot Water Pipe.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Sorry, only the British /. readers will understand this.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
IDDQD
IDKFA
IDCLIP (or IDSPISPOPD)
Hmm... no.
DNKROZ
DNHYPER
DNITEMS
DNWEAPONS
neither.
/god
/give all
/noclip
bah. Beats me.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Maybe leave out the prepositions and it may have a shot. But then again I'm not into poetry or latin, only what I've read on the urinal walls. And I didn't see much latin there.
There was an old man from Nantuket...
Oh what the F...
Why don't they just google it.
i had an idea and tried something, if the painting is mirrored, could the text have been written using a mirrored alphabet?
.2$
./ password right now)
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -> zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba?
this would make DOUOSVAVVM into WFLFHEZEEN...
just my
-Naksu (who can't be arsed to remember his
...YHBT...?
It probably reads:
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
I was looking through all these posts to see if anyone had placed a link to a picture of the actual monument, and couldn't find one, so I poked around a bit, and found a photo of the monument here. Just click on the one on the right and you can see a bigger version.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
There are two problems with deciphering this:
1) No one knows if it is meant to be difficult to crack, or if it is just an abbreviated message to someone who would know instantly what it meant. This is an important distinction, because it determines if solving this thing is in the domain of linguists, or of cryptographers. Linguists decipher things which are not maliciously written to be obtuse (e.g., Champollion didn't have to crack any codes to figure out Egyptian Hieroglyphs, he solved it because he knew several languages and made some educated guesses based on his cultural knowledge). On the other hand, cryptographers decipher things which *are* meant to be obfuscated. This is done primarily through mathematical analyses, rather than historical and cultural knowledge. This is the reason that no cryptographer has been responsible for the decipherment of a language. This problem has been exploited in the past, such as the famous use of Navajo in World War II to confuse German code-breakers. Cryptographers can exploit the qualities of a language (such as examining letter frequency), but they aren't even sure what language this thing is in!
2) The sample set is staggeringly small. Whether you are deciphering a language or a code, it's extremely difficult (and generally close to impossible) to do so without several different, lengthy samples. Often, people make the claim that something is "gibberish" when there's only one or two samples (as someone does in this article). This is really a baseless claim, since there are probably *dozens* of valid decipherments of anything. This is the sole reason why so many undeciphered languages have not been deciphered (e.g., Etruscan and Linear A).
When I read the summary, the first thing I thought of was the Phaistos Disk. It was found on Crete in 1908 (at Phaistos). It is a disk-shaped tablet, with strange, oddly un-Minoan, characters on both sides, spiraling in towards the center. It is even stranger because the characters appear to be stamped or pressed into the clay. (This is the earliest known example of such stamped writing.) Because the disk is so strange, many have claimed it's an elaborate hoax, but the amount of work necessary to create such a stamped tablet (making all of the stamps with which to place the characters on the disk) would mean it is a *very* elaborate hoax. Most archaeologists think it's for real, but, despite people's best efforts, no progress has been made in its decipherment. Since the sample set is so damned small (1 tablet), and since no one knows what language it's in, *and* since it is clearly unrelated to Linear A or B, there's little hope in it ever being understood. Go on Google and type in "Phaistos Disk" and you're sure to find lots of sites claiming they know the solution.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript sets even more historical precedent for the difficulty of this task, and shows that cryptographers are not successful when it comes to solving an unencoded inscription. William F. Friedman (who broke the Japanese Purple Code and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII) and some guys from the NSA have tried to decipher it, and failed. He claims it's a fake language, composed of gibberish, but it follows Zipf's law, which means it appears, based on the ratios of sign frequencies, to be real...so if someone wrote a gibberish language, they knew what they were doing to make it look real...even though Zipf, who discovered this relationship, wasn't even alive when this thing was written.
Sorry I didn't make any links, but I'm lazy, and if you type any of this stuff into Google, you'll find lots of articles.
(Wow, looks like I learned something from my Lost Languages and Decipherment course, thank-you, Professor Zimansky.)
Waavasonod ? ... and backwards?
do no sav aaw
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
They obviously need Sherlock Holmes. Not only would he solve the riddle but he would also manage to save Britain in the pocess, bring a criminal to justice and protect an innocent man who somehow got mixed up with it all.
vampirical
I think you'd have better luck unfravelling it by talking to a historian than some 21st century code crackers.
What if it's just the initials of some phrase a weird uncle always said? Or a dirty joke Papa always told at family fatherings?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M
Down step
Over there
Under there
Over a bit more
South two steps
Very close now
Another step backwards
Very close
Very close now
Move another 4 steps
Bet this
FRIEND, MY NAME IS BEELZEBUB AND I NEED TO TRANSFER $27,000,000 (TWENTY SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS) OUT OF THE UNDERWORLD. (etc, etc)
There is an academic article discussing the purported relationship between the "D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M" code and the Holy Grail: The Mysteries of Rennes-le-Chateau and the Prieure du Sion. The article is by Dr. Steven Mizrach of Florida International University.
The book discussing the subject is: Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This is the book that inspired (or was ripped off) by The Da Vinci Code.
The Disinformation page on the subject is: here.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity twixt Deity and Man, thou Shepherdess the way the D is under the Sherherdess and the M is under the MEN thats why the picture above is also in reverse....
It's obviously a hash of the picture, when the old owner saw he had errors in downloading (Picture in reverse) he just left it in the download dir and forgot all about it.
As they, like in the image, seperated their words by periods which were vertically aligned in the middle like those in the image.
Down, Out, Up, Out, Side, Vertical, Astern, Vertical, Vertical, Middle.
Location of Holy Grail: 4th Floor Parking Lot, Pasadena Mall, Southern California, USA.
"They changed what one of the shepherds is pointing to," he said. "He's pointing to a completely different letter than in the painting. And they've added a second sarcophagus to the picture."
This reminds me of The Ninth Gate, where Lucifer himself modified images found in the book 'The Ninth Gate of the Kingdom of Shadows.' A man would be pointing at something other than the original image, a chessboard would be reversed, a key would be in the wrong hand, etc.
Just get Jon Johansen to do the damn job!
it's an early precursor to the game hangman?
-- "Someone's gotta go back for a shit-load of dimes."
Most likely it is a mnemonic device or shorthand for some larger phrase. Of course, the exact nature of the phrase and the intentions thereof could be wildly overblown.
It probably means something, but whether it means something of worth is another question.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The experts who cracked Nazi Germany's secret codes are tackling a 10-letter enigma...
I didn't know Alan Turing was brought back from the dead.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. Digital Obedient Unit Optimized for Scientific Violence and Assassination Vigilant Violence Machine CyborgName
The Latin version of "ALl Your Base Are Belong To Us"
This is like...nothing.
Understanding the V's for greek nu, the only place the sequence of letter turns up, ignoring spaces and everything, is verse 12 of Matthew's gospel-
*meta\ de\ th\n metoikesi/an *babulw=nos *)iexoni/as e)ge/nnhsen to\n *salaqih/l (greek beta code)
Not that this is interesting, or, chances are, at all related. But it's still neat, or something. =)
Actually, there's a place in the latin as well (understanding the V's as V's). Meh. But this is neat, even if it leads nowhere.
(Sorry, I don't remember what the deal was with the "A" in "AND".)> They are not trying to do a substitution cypher or anything. The idea is that the letters are a sequence of initials for words in some quotation or something.
FWIW, someone already solved an old puzzle in a British church, where a long cryptic string of consonants engraved above the ten commandments can be read by inserting a lot of E's -
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The original painting, and a bit of information on the phrase "et in arcadia ego" can be found here (bigger version of the painting here. Note that you can't really make out the letters in either)
I first heard the phrase while studying Tom Stoppard's Arcadia in school, and our interpretation was close to one of the two on wikipedia:
"I, Death, am also in Arcadia"
This is a memento mori, a reminder that death is certain even if life seems perfect at the moment.
The painting features 4 shepherds in "Arcadia" (a pastoral paradise), puzzling over those words engraved in a small monument.
The artist of the Shugborough version may very well have intended for us to puzzle over his version like the shepherds in the original... and if the act of us puzzling over the carving was the artist's goal, there may well be no solution like there would be in normal puzzles. (Or there might only an arbitrary solution that cannot be attained without further data.)
Perhaps some poets should look at it in addition to code breakers.
Legend says it reveals the location of the Holy Grail.
This is of course based on the assumption that The Holy Grail is an object. Most often it refers to the cup Jesus drank from at the last supper, or the cup used to catch his blood as he hung on the cross, or both.
This is most likely a mistake, or a misunderstanding due to faulty translation of the original text.
The original term used for the holy grail is "sangraal", and that's where the problem starts.
San Graal does in fact mean "Holy Grail".
Sang Raal however, means "Royal Blood".
Since there is ample evidence to suggest Jesus was in fact the descendant of Solomon and David, and therefore he was true Royalty, the rightful heir to the throne of Palestine, and a threat to the Roman Empire. Which is exactly why they killed him (jews did not), if he was even killed, which is not even certain and cannot be proven.
So if Royal Blood is indeed the proper translation of sangraal, and due to its inherent connection with Christianity then it most likely refers to Jesus' bloodline.
As is generally believed, Mary Magdalen moved to the South of France after the crucifixion carrying with her the Holy Grail, so it's not such a big leap of logic to assume the Holy Grail was in fact Jesus' son, being brought out of Palestine in order to save his life, and the Royal bloodline.
There is also ample suggestion in the gospels of Jesus being married, and that Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany were one and the same. Seeing how close Jesus was to this Mary of Bethany, and her brother Lazarus, it's also very likely Lazarus was in fact Jesus' brother-in-law, and that Mary Magdalen was in fact Mary of Bethany.
Also, Mary Magdalen was not a prostitute and Magdalen was not her last name. If you can point to the passage in the Bible that specifically says she was a prostitute, please make a note of it and inform the world, because not a single biblical or historical scholar has been able to do so to this day. It is in fact a lie concocted by religious leaders trying to obfuscate the fact Jesus was a married man with a family; being married and having children was practically required at that time and it's unfathomable that he didn't.
If you found any of what I said interesting or infuriating, please read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" available here.
Oh, and in case you were still wondering, I am an Atheist.
However, just to stay a little bit more on topic, here are a few suggestions as to what DOUOSVAVVM stands for:
Designed Overreacting Usage Of Some Very Agitated Violent Viagra Malfunction.
Do Only Uneducated Overly Simplistic Villains Accept Very Violent Methods?
Deaths Of Unbridled Overreaching Sacrifices Values And Virtue Very Much.
But of course, DOUOSVAVVM is NOT an english acronym...
-- This sig for rent.
When I die, i want to be burried in an elaborate toomb, with false dates, and lots of armor and shit, and an inscription in Latin and Greek that reads "Here lies the king of all that is and ever will be." Imagine when archaeologists dig me up in a few thousand years :-)
This, However, I suspect is an abreviation of Latin words.
Why use old people?
While the famous version of Les Bergers d'Arcadie shows a version that is reversed from this monument, other versions were created. One version came several years before the famous one. This page shows both.
But most interestingly (and cryptically) is this image. I don't know the origin of this engraving, but it is almost exactly the same as as the monument. Down to the swirling clouds, which actually aren't present in the famous version! The only obvious difference is the present of an additional urn on top of the sarcophagus in the monument. I have little doubt that either this engraving was created from the monument, or the monument was created from this engraving.
Can anyone offer anymore insight into this engraving?
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
This dredged up an old memory from Dicken's Pickwick Papes.
The section about half way down the page.
The Inscription
I hate to bring it up again, but maybe it says: "all your base are be are belong to us..."
maybe they can start on this one:
4638 ABK 24 ALGMOR3Y X24 89 RPSTOVAL
an is an anagram generator. Duh. I used tr to remove the spaces and single-quotes that an likes to stick in.
Looking through the list of combinations, I only came up with one semi-interesting result:
VVV? Very Vicious Vegetables? A warning about GMO foods? Quite the forward-thinkers these folks must have been.
I don't know why he cries himself to sleep, but he does, and he usually wets the bed, too.
I started reading fark.com recently. This same item was on fark at least a day, but more like 2 or 3, ago. This is probably the 3rd or 4th case of my noticing slashdot post something that was on fark a good time prior.
:(
That, combined with the fact that slashdot rarely has any 'cool' topic postings anymore (remember the matchbox server, anyone?), and is largely politically focused (from "real world" politics to "geek"/business - sco, ibm, novell, etc. - politics) kind of makes slashdot a fairly worthless place for entertainment.
And let's face it - slashdot is all about entertianment. if "keeping informed" were your goal, you'd read the newspaper's blurbs and be done with it. there's nothing "news" like about the one-sided political opnions on slashdot.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It's apparently an older form of "our", "you", or "your". Not sure which - or perhaps it's all 3 depending on context and the date of usage. Anyone? See here:
The erst and fyrmost stæp to eal gode Weorka is the dræd and feurt of the Lauord of Heofan and Eorth, while thurh the Heilig Gast onligtneth the blindnese of ure sinfull heorte to træd the wæg of wisdome, and thone læd ure fet into the Land of Blessung.
And here:
I may no lenger more endure
My wonted lyf to lede,
But I must lerne to put in ure
The change of Womanhede.
simple....just pass this to the underground cracking groups...and have it cracked within a week. they always seem to come through when it comes to cracking software protection algorithms :)
In the year 2021, experts have cracked the code. Anonymous spokesperson for Cryptographists International claims that the code is loosely translated from Latin to mean, "You have way too much time on your hands."
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
MOD PARENT WAY UP!!
Nice thought that the boffins at Bletchley were cracking this one. All but 3 are pushing up daisies now... so unless they have done something amazing and reincarnated the likes of Turing et al... I don't think so, I'm gonna end here.
Or perhaps its the actual question....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Peace
The correct 30 life Contra code is:
Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A Start
Now who remembers the code to fight Mike Tyson?
"Hello World" of course!
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Actually, one of the recruitment avenues that they took for Bletchley Park was weeding out the nation's best crossword solvers through a competition (http://www.historyarticles.com/bletchley_park.htm ).
In a not-so-surprising move, SCO has claimed *this* code, too.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
But you are being a bit blasphemous.
(And I'm being a bit anal...)
God's favorite mint:
Testamints.
Yes, they exist. And they actually taste great...
You irritate cops just because you can, and then you wonder why you get a ticket for going 47 in a 45, right?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
"The Extra Key Is Under The Rug", only in latin?
http://www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/zelazny/212/ grail_1.html
http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/templars/temp ic10.htm
http://www.worldofthestrange.com/nlv455.html
http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/metis.htm
The code is indeed directions to the holy grail (well, close enough), it breaks down like this
"Up Down Up Down Left Right Left Right A B A B Select Start"
Virtually All Voluminous Virginal Men
Slashdot, eh? Evidently a work of divination! There was also mention of the location of the Holy Grail - but I think they were probably mistaken.
Be careful! New moon tonight.
might steal it. Wouldn't you rather have a car that the police checks up on all the time without your knowing, that would be spotted after an hour, rather than a car they'd never notice?
somehow it really means,
"Meet me at the corner pub for a pint the next time you're in town, your turn to buy."
It's 5.
The sum of 2 and 3 or 3 and 2, blahblahblah and all that pseudo-superstitious crap.
I looked at this for a few minutes. The chances of decyphering the meaning is very very (VERY) slim, unless you find a good reference from the period about it.
The "D.M." aparently has to do with a funeral right, in Latin, of course. I'd have to assume the rest is in Latin too. The number of latin words that the phrase could match are huge. Even if you did find a match for the phrase, which shouldn't be all that hard, it may or may not be right, without some other reference.
Our
Utterance
Omits
Some
Valuable
Assertation
Validating
Vexation
Think of the phrase (and rather obnoxious to non-christians) WWJD.
Where Would Joseph Drive?
Why Would Josie Drink?
Would Willy Just Die?
White Water Jewish Dancing.
From what I hear, it doesn't really mean any of those. Ask a Christian for the right answer.
I considered finding a latin dictionary file, and having a program run through all the possible combinations, but since I don't read latin, it wouldn't make too much sense, now would it? If it is a reference to "the holy grail", that means some of those letters probably represent cities or countries somewhere in Europe or Asia, with their name from several centuries ago.
For all we know, it's a tribute to all of someone's illigitimate children.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
But the glyph V is also often used for the letters U or W (if doubled, VV), or for the digit 5 in (mostly Latin) inscriptions, so solving the puzzle it is best treated as a character class. It might be in Greek since Arcadia is mentioned, but the tombstone's ironic and ambiguous inscription (either "I, death, am in Arcadia, too" or "I, too used to dwell in Arcadia") suggests Latin.
So we may consider V = [VWU5] as a working assumption.
Since Arcadia is where the 'goddess' Artemis was said to live, we may assume the 'D' of D and M is a lady named Diana (the Latin name for Artemis), which supports further the hypothesis that it is all Latin.
If this is so, we may extend out working assumption to A = [D].
Now could anyone please post a complete family tree of Nicholas Poussin as well as the Anson family (and others who lived at Shugborough House around the time the stone was set up? Guests, staff, etc). We would need to find all possible candidates for D and M, then define some constraints to prune the search space (e.g. solution might be a couple, i.e. sex(D) != sex(M), female(D) => male(M) or a group of either 3 or five (again, 'V') friends).
Here's an interesting picture collection to support the cryptoanalytic hunt.
As for the 'holy grail', you can easily participate in the Sunday mass tomorrow (between breakfast and reading ./), sharing the Eucharist in rememberance of Jesus with much less hassle.
Which chapter, then?
Saying "Matthew, verse 12" is like saying "Umm... it's in the old testament... in the middle, somewhere".
Well, granted, there are few chapters in Matthew, but still. Chapter 25, verse 34 (I think) and out, pretty much sums up what one needs to do to get into heaven (AFAIR).
It's probably the Zip Code +4 for the Holy Grail's final resting place. The Romans, so I've been told, were fairly smart folks and I'd be surprised if the The Republic didn't have the idea of Zip Codes.
And with as fast as their Empire expanded they probably realized they needed four extra letters, what with the Goths moving in and all. (Not unlike the expansive nature of the American Empire under G.W. Bush, who may need to move towards "Zip + 5" after we add Afghanistan and Iraq to our growing list of suburbs).
Of course, they based their Zip Code on what was to become the U.S. system, so the letters "DOUOS" are the first five letters of the zip. The "V" is probably a weathered hypen, and the "AVVM" are the last four digits.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
The francmasons usually use *very long* abbreviations (just look at obituaries -- altough I don't think masons are *that* public in many countries). This happened in England, so I won't be suprised if it turns out that this monument has some significance for francmasonry, and that D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. is some kind of message for them.
1) Make up some random symbols.
2) Tell everyone it reveals a Holy Grail.
3) ?
4) Profit.
I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this monument is too narrow to contain.
Apologies to Fermat.
I'm inclined to agree... Obviously the 'U' existed since medieval times, but AFAIK it was quite uncommon for people to put it into inscriptions on coins, monuments, etc. Maybe it is used in this case because the word it represents is not Latin. (An English or French proper name?)
Though it's getting a bit offtopic, here's some trivia:
Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (tr. R. Graves)Just an example of Third Reich l33t speak really.
The message is to Von Munchhausen (VM) who has borrowed the senders video (alright then advanced Nazi prototype video from before our videos were invented) which he calls his AV. The sender, not remembering whether VM has the video or not is asking the the question..
"Do you owe us the AV VM?"
DO U O S V AV VM
if the reply is something like
NO I S CN PRON
then the hypothesis will be confirmed.
When will people stop claiming it was the British at Bletchley Park who cracked Enigma? It was a group of Poles working under Marion Rejewski at the Biuro Szyfrow who beat Enigma, but not until Hans Thilo Schmidt had betrayed the Germans by providing copies of the operational manuals to Enigma, which contained enough information to decipher the internal wiring. It was not until Poland was invaded that the bombes used to decipher Enigma encoded messages were moved to England. It is true, however, that it took the resources of Bletchley Park to build enough bombes to decipher messages after the number of wheels on the Enigma machine increased.
Besides anachronism, the problem with this interpritation is that one would also have to store the key somewhere, and it would have to be worth it to put this cipher text in this obvious location.
At least, it doesn't anymore in my opinion.
Let's look at this logically. Jesus and his disciples where basically living in poverty, relying on the kindness of others for food and shelter. It's likely that the Grail Jesus drank from didn't even belong to them. It's also likely that it was a simple wooden cup.
Now let's also look at what happened shortly after the Last Supper. Jesus was crucified and all of the disciples either fled, where captured or in one case, committed suicide.
At the time, they didn't know what the significance of the Last Supper was (they found out 3 days later of course). Do you honestly think in all the confusion that occured on the first Easter they took the time to save a cup?
The grail was either lost, or simply rotted long ago.
Below the image is a line of letters - O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V - and beneath that on either end, the letters D and M.
Ancient barcode? Probably bought by the Knights of Wal*Mart... The tomb was more than likely a seasonal item next to the housewares (mirrored image).
"Doek okewn uoenie oiile suienvg vaig asosovi veiinga vrine mnehigue", which is Cayepet for:
"In otin ihuan in tonaltin nican tzonquica", which is Nahuatl for:
"Aqui terminan los caminos y los dias", which is Spanish for:
Here end the roads and the days.
All they had to do was ask me. Experts my butt.
Homo sum. Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. [I am a man: nothing human is alien to me. -- Publius Terentius Afer (Terence)] (And don't call me a puto.)
007 373 5963
of course..
No, It is Canadian pr0n?? what the fuck would anyone be looking at canadian pornagraphy for in Nazi Germany?
Rocky II plus Rocky V equals Rocky VII, ADRIANS REVENGE!
http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/s ion.html
This offers a solution of sorts.
Slashdot is still butchering URL when used with plain text.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
... you create a DOUOSVAVVM username just so other slashdot addicts can throw the afore-mentioned act in your face
wonder what will happen in a hundred years or so when people look back on chat logs and are like
"what the dilly fuck does wtf mean?"
these guys should take a look at some of the code that I have been left with after a former colleague left my company.... forget engima, DES, or blowfish--- now this is crytpic...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M Darl McBride: Does Our Unix Operatong Systen validate All Very Valuable moneyes
"More prosaic solutions have surfaced over the years, including the conclusion that the first and last letters ('D' and 'M'), which sit slightly beneath the other letters, are initials for the Latin Diis manibus -- which was etched on Roman tombs to dedicate departing souls." (http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?s tory=520409&host=3&dir=65)
i mages/20040512/wcode20512/_done_0513shug.jpg
1 ,1214603,00.html)
The guy who commissioned the sculpture was in the Navy, and fan of sea codes, and the family has had long interest in the Knights Templar.
AP photo of the couple leading this, in front of the engraving: http://images.theglobeandmail.com/archives/RTGAM/
Google gives me only one reference to the line "out of your own sweet vale" that points to where it comes from: "The current Lord Lichfield's great-grandmother believed the letters represented the lines of a poem from Roman mythology about a shepherdess: 'Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity twixt Deity and man, thou shepherdess the way.' " (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,1171
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
is clearly nonsense, since "ego" isn't written "I" in Latin.
d'oh!
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
BEDEVERE: Do you think he meant the Camargue?
GALAHAD: Where's that?
BEDEVERE: France, I think.
LAUNCELOT: Isn't there a St. Aaarrrgghh's in Cornwall?
ARTHUR: No, that's Saint Ives.
( A muffled roar is heard. )
BEDEVERE: Oooooooooh!
LAUNCELOT: No "Aaarrrgghh
BEDEVERE: No! "Oooooooooh!" in surprise and alarm.
I've seen a number of people here already saying that the code is too small to be any form of encryption.
...or maybe I'm just babbling now.
What if the two outer letters indicated a mixing of sorts?
Instead of D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M
The D and M could possibly expand the letters to two-letter combos...
DO DU DO DS DV DA DV DV
MO MU MO MS MV MA MV MV
Now, you have 16 possible letter combinations instead of eight... potentially more ways to integrate them into a new cypher of some kind.
Another possibility is that the OUOSVAVV isn't the message... it could be the key, and maybe D and M could be a second part of the key.
Perhaps the sculptor used those letters in conjunction with the other inscription ("Et in arcadia ego") in some odd fashion to produce a workable plaintext. Just because the inscription is in plaintext, doesn't mean it isn't an encrypted form of OTHER plaintext... it's just much more improbable.
The Penguin Producer
IOU One Holy Grail
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The best alternate I've heard:
Who Wants Jack Daniels?
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
Ps 14:1
How would it be possible to come up with a better explanation? This woman was of the family and is in the best possition to know.
I wouldn't be so sure about that...
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Musgrave RitualLikely it's Latin. Inscriptions of note, since the history of the Latin language, have been in Latin.
Furthermore, the Vs are probably Us.
-JemIf you look up "Anna Seward" 1747-1809, the poet who wrote the prose "of ure own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity 'twixt deity and man", you'll find her father was a canon at Lichfield Cathedral in 1757, and she was dubbed the "Swan of Lichfield".
Now go back and read the article. I don't think there's any enigma here.
The monument is the right age, the text fits, the descendants have the right story.
I'm waiting for it to become an acceptable term for something totally unsolvable. I'd make a killing on a triple word score in Scrabble.
"Even in Arcadia, there am I." Perhaps they should look in Arcadia...
(The thing that is perfectly obvious is that it is a joke to make you all mad, of course)
If you enter the code quickly and get tired of waiting for the title screen to show up you can display it by pressing Start.
- Se lect-Start for two players.
e rm=Kon ami+Code
Thus, I remember the buttons as such:
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-Start Start for one player and
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-Start
Of course the actual code ends with B-A. The Start's and select's are just for player selection.
Also, this sequence (called the Konami code) was in fact used in several games. Check this out:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?t
I would've said "Cryptic Code Confuses Crypotologists"
[o]_O
Modern cryptologist stumble at the meaning of an inscription in a tshirt, found in a time capsule. The insciption reads: AYBABTU
here's my theory...
2 222222
if it's a location of the holy grail (assuming it's the holy grail) then there has to be numbers, most likley a lagitude and latitude values
so here's the deal...
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
0000000001111111111
12345678901234567890123456
so by getting the numbers of each letter we get the following values
4 15 21 15 19 22 1 22 22 13
so now we will join each latitude/longitude value as in (latitude/longitude)
4/15 connects to 21/15 which connects to 19/22 which connects to 1/22 which connects to 22/13
after connecting these we have a sort of triangule in around central africa, and to add more interest it surrounds the country of CHAD (Map [gesource.ac.uk] and Info [gesource.ac.uk]) which has been in the news a few years ago about a discovery of the oldest skull found that might related to the human being (news [csmonitor.com].
quoting from that news:
What's more, it was found along the shores of a dry lake in the country of Chad, 1,500 miles west of the east African rift valleys often called "the cradle of humankind."
For years, lead researcher Michel Brunet has tilted mostly unsuccessfully against the long-held theory that hominids emerged from the Great Rift Valley around Kenya then spread westward across Africa and into the broader world. Now, in the hominid he has named Toumai, or "hope of life" in the local language, he has proof that the earliest prehumans covered a larger area.
interesting eh?
clepto9@excite.com
You're right about the "U" not being part of the Roman alphabet, but the article's translation is fine. Vergil tended to make use of understood subjects such as death, and he tended to not put in some verbs that were unimportant such as "am" and "said." What's interesting is that it looks like the quote is in dactyllic hexameter with the thesis of the first foot removed. Vergil wrote quite a bit in dactyllic hexameter, but I don't recall a time when he bit off part of a foot.
More bothersome are fools who speak not in themselves, but out their mouths, and not from their hearts or minds, but from their fear.
The two letters that are seperated from the rest: Married couple's first initials.
The rest of the letters: Their children.
Interesting, and slightly related: http://www.snopes.com/photos/grave.asp
It's obvious where the grail is...
Down. Over. Up. Over. South. V... Vest. Ah, fuck it.
Perhaps it's AYBABTU in latin?
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
"Venture To The Land Of The Freeze Dried Godzilla Farts"
orsomethingtothateffect.
Keine eier
Then they'd just kick you in the balls instead.
Maybe it's got something to do with the Toynbee Tiles! In case you're not "in the know", the Toynbee Tiles are a top-secret Masonic project in which the bodies of famous great thinkers are literally "seeded" at famous intersections througout North America, and their graves are marked with a puzzling message about Kubrick. JUST KIDDING! I actually have no clue who's behind the tiles, just as I have no clue what we're talking about? What code? Can I find it on a streetcorner? If so, I have to wait until daytime because there's a lot of prostitutes in my neighbourhood.
Well, since I'm gonna get bad karma anyway for this inappropriate comment, I might as well take this opportunity to plug the things I love: STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and HOMESTAR RUNNER and BANANA CHAN and SEGA DREAMCAST. There. May the Karma gods spit on me.
"I am a fictional character."
There's a story like that in Stanislaw Lem's "Cyberiad". Might be the one you're thinking of. Basically, one character sends messages to another one; the messages are intentionally trite, with no hidden meaning whatsoever, but everyone thinks that it's a fiendishly complicated cypher. In the end, it turns out that the only purpose of the messages was to discredit the recipient in the eyes of his paranoid master, who, unable to discern the "secret", simply assumes the worst.
I could never understand how they settled on "at noon" from "a midi". Midi is also a name for the southern part of France. I tried once (and failed) to find out how long that name has been used. Does anyone know? The codes were found in the late 19th century, but Dagobert II was alive ~650 AD.
Of course, the 'pommes bleu' bit is still pretty strange.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Maybe the engraver's daughter is named DOUOSVAVVM
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
The article has a quote in the side bar "The inscription is obviously a classical reference. It's either Latin or Greek and based on some historical happening".
Does it bother anyone else that anyone would seriously state something is "obvious" when they have nearly no information about the meaning, context, author or anything else?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
From an article in The Guardian
"The picture shows a female figure watching as three shepherds gather around a tomb and point at letters within an inscription carved upon it, which read: Et in Arcadia Ego! (And I am in Arcadia too.) Beneath it the letters O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V. are carved, and underneath them a D and an M.
The current Lord Lichfield's great-grandmother believed the letters represented the lines of a poem from Roman mythology about a shepherdess: "Out of your own sweet vale Alicia vanish vanity twixt Deity and man, thou shepherdess the way.""
Job done, move along.
Decoding the letters is a red herring. After all it could be a one time pad.
The painting shows someone touching the stone - trace your hand or finger over the stone in the pattern of the spelled letters to open a secret hideaway.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
It seems abbreviated phrased on tombstones was a common practice, ie. (from wikiquote)
* Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo.
o Translation: "I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care." (found on tombstones abbreviated NFFNSNC)
D M is a common inscription on Roman gravestones (can't quite remember what it stood for, something to do with the gods of death), which are also usually full of cryptic abbreviations, in order to save space... "Gaius" becoming "C.", that sort of thing.
Frankly, I don't see what's so interesting.
"Forty Two", including the space
The answer is simple
Rknpgyl!
V jvfu crbcyr jbhyq fgbc ernqvat zrnavat vagb rirelguvat, vg'f whfg fghcvq. Vg'f whfg yvxr gubfr crbcyr jub frr zrnavat ba Fynfuqbg cbfgf... cher vqvbpl.
Bu, naq V qrpbqrq gur Q.B.H.B.F.I.N.I.I.Z. guvatvr znwvatvr, vg ernqf LINA RUG AVBW!!!!
(V yvxr gbegvyynf, ol gur jnl)
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
...in this case I fear it's necessary. Parent is referring to Stoppard's play Arcadia.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. (V+V=W)
Dont Ordinate Users Of Swaziland Another Windows Machine.
It actually reads "DOUOS SUAVUM" or "two cool people" (douo=two suave=cool, talking about people from the endings). That's all.
Yup.
Wasn't something like this in Gabriel Knight II: Blood of the sacred, blood of the damned?
-- Cheers!
I can only imagine cryptologists of the 24th century trying to go through old internet logs as they attempt to decipher "AYBABTU"
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Im more than certain that this is a publicity stunt. A very good one apparently that it should appear on CBS. "As it happens!" I was at Shugborough Hall on this very same day. I was doing a bit-part in a documentary called "All The Queens Cooks". There were a number of people milling around doing press-shoots etc. But to me it seemed like a stunt, to get people to visit the Hall, I think it also some sort of anniversary of the Enigma or Alan Turing round about now too.
...
They had got the Enigma all layed out on display on a table with red velvet, (ie for show). In reality if the real purpose of this excersize was to crack those codes dont you think they would have used a laptop with an enigma simulator/code cracking program? So while they may be attempting to crack that code I think there were also some alterior motives on their mind, like getting a bit of publicity for the tourist trade!
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
but this textarea is too small to contain it.
The quite superb Atari ST game Dungeon Master (mid 1980's by FTL) contained the following text in a scroll you could pick up. Now there are a lot of Dungeon Master fans, and a lot of Dungeon Master fan-sites but the decyphering of this still remains illusive. Anyone any ideas?
"Grynix jernum quey ki skebow rednim u os dey wefna enocarn aquantana"
I think they will find out that it's simply a recipe for Potato Pancakes.
Maybe someone carved a bunch of random letters just so that they could look down from heaven at all us idiots trying to figure it out?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
There is no "Holy Grail" in the object sense.
The mythical Grail refers to the bloodline of Jesus. The existence of the bloodline proves that Jesus is human. That's bad PR.
The "Quests" were a layer of mythology laid over massive, armed trips to the Middle-East where caches of archaelogical evidence existed to support the above concept. Review the Google results of a search on "nights templar grail middle east jesus crusade". Investigate gnostic christianity. It held that its leader, Jesus, was only human in much the same manner as Bhuddism.
Support the truth by thinking and learning for yourself.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
I didn't want to think about this but when I woke up in the morning, I had a possible answer. What if it should have been written sideways?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. would be
D.
O.
U.
O.
S.
V.
A.
V.
V.
M.
You'd expect to see names on a tomb wouldn't you? What if the Holy Grail was actually a bloodline instead of a chalice (san graal vs sang raal ?). Maybe the originator identified a subset of the progeny of Jesus? I'm guessing 4-5 generations span a 100 years and we are looking at 2000 years so somewhere between 80-100 people (assumption: everyone has a child at age 20).
If this were all true, then someone has to trace back their ancestry to 10 forefathers with those initials.
Then again, everyone says I'm full of crazy talk.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Dude, that's fuckin' brilliant. Nicely put.
While it -might- not work, it would be interesting to plug this into Google with a regex like:
:) had matches
(D|d)[^ ]*\ (O|o)[^ ]*\ to see if any web site (besides this thread
Altavista used to have something almost like Regex (they allowed grouping and some operators but not all). Honestly, this could probably have been done with Altavista's old version of "Advanced Search".
I understand it had some intense computing behind such a search, and I wouldn't expect immediate results, so to offset the impact allow people to submit regex to a queue and email them when finished.
And yeah, I've submitted this as a request a couple of times and been ignored. I'll try again, maybe post-IPO they'll have the resources to work a bugger like this.
Anyone know of a search service or search meta-service that accepts regex?
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Maybe the reason no-one's cracked it for 250 years is because *THERE IS NO CODE*. Maybe it's just a big prank, them fucking with people's minds.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
on their homepage (http://www.testamints.com), I see no indication of who has or has not endorsed their products (apart from God almighty, of course)
I don't see why the one person is so convinced it's a classical Latin or Greek reference.
Does fear bother you?
Or is it the fact that some people respect that they themselves did not create the universe or run it, or have any authority in it aside that which is given to them.
What is the problem? You want to take issue with God Almighty? That's playing the fool.
I do not respect men. I fear God, and discern that which is good from that which is evil by the spirit of truth, which in the end will be the judge of all. I do not invent the truth, I seek it, respect it, and value it.
Seek and ye shall find... It's easy, you just can't claim to be a know-it-all - that's the first speed bump.
You confuse Christianity with a small sample of people from that religion.
;) Your ad hominine fallacies reveal much about your character. Your fallacies show flaws in your logic. Therefore your logic is flawed.
While I am a follower of Loki, I am amused by your deceit and trickery.
Christianity is based on truths, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, love your enemies, etc. Like Islam, and many other religions, those truths have been distorted or forgotten or ignored by the followers. This is where we have a breakdown. Thus you base the actions of a few to the entire population, which is called prejudging. This prejudging is what bigots do. Thus, it is logical to conclude that you are indeed a bigot. Thus you are also a hypocite. Should I be the same as you, I would brand all members of your religion as bigots or hyporcites, but I will not. Doing so is a fallacy, which I will not commit.
Christianity has contributed much to society, many Christian run homeless shelters do a lot of good work. Feeding, clothing, and taking care of the poor. Many Christian organizations also take care of the poor in other countries. More so than any other religion. This philisophy came from Jesus hiself, to take care of the least of your brothers. He said "What so ever you do to the least of your brothers, you do unto me." Doing so taught a philisophy of taking care of the poor. This in itself is a philisophical truth. You apparently are too blind to see this. Many books are written on Christian ideas, like servent leadership, which contributed much to literature. In fact one of the greatest stories ever told was inspired by Christianity, the story of "King Arthur". Many good litature books, which of course you are also too blind to see. Hatred has blinded you, apparently. Let go of that hate.
I recall a Roman Emperor Constantine I, who said that if God helped him win the next battle, which the odds were against him, that he would change the offical religion of the empire. God was on his side and he won. That in itself is evidence of God doing something. There are other examples but your hatred has blinded you to them.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Just Google it!
W E L C O
M E T O T
H E N E X
TL E V EL
(hmm yeah, sorry you had to read this lower-case filler text)
but the lameness filter is too constraining to allow it.
That's right. All your base.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
IIRC, my HS yearbook was full of BFF, TTFN, LOL, STFU, BBQ, DOHC, etc.
The whole point was that they were messages that only the right person would understand. Secret data? hardly! Just a note to say "hi".