The Royal Society say there going to have the Video-on-demand of Pillinger's talk available 'soon' (the links worth a visit
as it has some interesting previous lecture's)
Interesting. A good point, as there is a point in book where Gandalf does somewhat suspect Bilbo and the ring. Regardless, other than some omnious music, the Ring should not play that much of a role in The Hobbit other than Bilbo using it.
One snag is the portrayal of the ring world in the films as a shifting harrowing place
which is generally not nice to be in. I can't see Bilbo enganging in riddling talk with Smaug
if everyting around him is shifting and swirling.... I suppose the way out would be not
to show the Ring world, just shots of Bilbo not being there.
In the first edition, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the outcome of the riddle game. Tolkien later revised this passage to reflect the concept of the One Ring and its powerful hold on Gollum, developed while writing The Lord of the Rings.
maybe now you can emulate a replica of the Colossus, the computer used to
decipher the Enigma
Colossus was not used to crack Enigma it was built to crack the Lorenz machine (a high security teleprinter cipher). One of the interesting things was Bletchley Park was able to build
a Lorenz machine without ever seeing a real one!
The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using
Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South
Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from
inside the UK.
Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park,
took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages.
They were given the code name Fish. The messages which (as was later
found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as
Tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these
messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.
Because the Vernam
system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators
made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two
messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character
by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would
then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the
addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two
completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct
characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived
but not complete messages.
The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased
a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and
known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much
headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made
one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator
had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of
the German Army High command to another probably Athens to Vienna. He
correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator,
using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator
then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to
start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in
at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by
radio the equivalent, in German, of didn't get that send it again.
They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position.
Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then
began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton
and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the
interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the
cipher text. Input the same machines generating the same obscuring
characters same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly
disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make
differences in the second message compared to the first.
The message began with that well known German phrase
SPRUCHNUMMER message number in English. The first time the
operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in
S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the
same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following
the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same
obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point
on.
The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two
I've heard that story before. It surprises me. While an enigma will generate convincing random letters, and it makes sense to use one for that, it's surprising that he bothered setting up his machine to use the day's settings.
The problem with Enigma was that Enigma was unbreakable and if its unbreakable
you don't have to bother with all this singals discipline. Some operators were allowed to
select their own 'random' message keys (thus the code breakers became experts on German swearwords!)
I'd guess machine was probably already set up and the other end was having problems
decrypting
Enigma was an interesting development in cryptography because the rotating wheels caused the crypto output to be evenly distributed accross the alphabet. Therefore, it couldn't be solved by the typical letter replacement cypher techniques of assuming the most used letter in the code stands for "E" until proven otherwise, and working from there.
One of the interesting weaknesses of the Enigma cypher was no letter could be
encoded as itself. One part of the cracking process was to look for messages that had a
known content (weather reports were a favorate, the Germans were very keen on standard formats
in their reports) This could be used to narrow down the number of possible keys
Source
A tired German operator has been told to send out dummy messages and he typed only the last letter of the keyboard : ``L''. The British code breaking expert immediately recognized the missing ``L'' in the enciphered message and they got a very big crib.
What does "smeg" mean?
It's a word made up by Grant Naylor for the characters to use as an
all-purpose profanity. Some fans have theorised that it was derived from
"smegma" (a particularly unpleasant bodily secretion), but Rob and Doug
deny this. In the interview on the CD included with the Six of the Best box
set, they state that "we wanted to invent a futuristic curse word which had
the right sort of consonant and vowel arrangement to make it sound like a
genuine . . . curse word." In an online chat session, Doug Naylor said "I
think it's Latin for clean, also there's an Italian washing machine company
called Smeg. Also each of the letters S-M-E-G stand for smelting metal and
something to do with the washing machine process." A detailed list of
"smeg" references in the show is available at
http://www.bristol.u-net.com/smegweb/docs/smeglist.html
For pitys sake does anyone take 'user reviews' seriously??? Even if there not
written by interested partys, the chances of them being written by someone
clueful are scant and its more trouble than its worth to establish any
track record for a given reviewer.
A system of meta moderation would add credibility to the system, if someone
buys a product get them to evaluate a few reviews (if encouragement is needed
pay them in 'loyalty points')
New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson have been very upfront about their release plans for the Lord of the Rings movies. Saying they are doing the same thing as Lucas is inaccurate... at least so far. Plenty of people thinking they will put out some form of mega-collector's set after the final (extended) movie comes out. But, up to now, they have been very fan-friendly in terms of their openness regarding the release plan.
In one of the commentarys he did muse about fixing Gollum appearance in Fellowship of the Ring
to match The Two Towers. Possibly a minor tweek to the mega-collector's set
This user agreement may be a joke, but its also a legaly binding joke. Anyone
who knows about it is going to be much less inclined to use the site (I am!), which is counter
productive to the aims of a museam.
In the case of glass, there are plenty of architectural ways in which we can have brightly lit dwellings with gorgeous views without creating traps for birds.
>>Pepsi campus? As opposed to a Coke campus?
>You Americans are truly weird.
Brits are weird too.... or more to the point Pepsi vs Coke is annoying.
The pop pushers will offer 'good deals' to universitys etc only if they
don't sell the opposition's products. Pepsi vs Coke war is a fight to the death
>>Then we realised that Darth Bane (the guy who started system) had probably patented the Sith
>Wouldn't that have run out after 20 years? Or had the Galactic Republic had one too many Cher Acts?
Your Quite Right... I suppose tradmarking Sith could pass muster
Well guess I better not tell anyone I own an Acura, it will dilute their trademark after all. I can't tell you what kind of PC I own either, Dell will sue me for mentioning it. Seriously, they are fucking Legos. Get over it.
Do you own a hoover? Who made it? Was it the Hoover company? Did you know the YoYo was
a trademark untill the people who made the YoYo were really sloppy about their adverts
(saying things like "YoYo make the best yoyo's" the court ruled that that ment yoyo was the
generic name of the toy ) and they lost their trademark anyone can make a
YoYo. LEGO need to protect their trademark people recognize it, if everyone made 'lego'
there just another maker of socketed bricks
We were speculating how the Sith kept to the One Master One Apprentice thing for 1000 years.
that sort of discipline just does not seem to fit the average Dark Sider. Then we realised
that Darth Bane (the guy who started system) had probably patented the Sith and had a firm
of Darkside Lawyers to sue the crap out of any unlicensed Sith running round.
Now if we could only get spammers to use their ingenuity for good rather than evil, we could solve all of the worlds problems.
I could see this working for some image recognition problems. To get the
next page you have to perform some small task. Salt the tasks with 10% control images
for which you know the answer and a finders fee where you get a weeks free access
if you find X or do Y work units. Could be used in to check survalance video images...
This concerned me, too. How is it that a material susceptible to catastrophic failure is used to catch dust moving at insane speeds into it? One would think that in space it would be almost effortless to make it shatter.
This is a picture
from an experiment using "a special air gun, particles are shot into aerogel at high velocities. Closeup of particles that have been captured in aerogel are shown here. The particles leave a carrot-shaped trail in the aerogel". (source)
Slashdot Mirror
The Royal Society say there going to have the Video-on-demand of Pillinger's talk available 'soon' (the links worth a visit as it has some interesting previous lecture's)
One snag is the portrayal of the ring world in the films as a shifting harrowing place which is generally not nice to be in. I can't see Bilbo enganging in riddling talk with Smaug if everyting around him is shifting and swirling.... I suppose the way out would be not to show the Ring world, just shots of Bilbo not being there.
From here
In the first edition, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the outcome of the riddle game. Tolkien later revised this passage to reflect the concept of the One Ring and its powerful hold on Gollum, developed while writing The Lord of the Rings.
The nice thing about Polish is that not only can you read eye charts you can also pronounce them
I was right!
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
They'll sue me Tomorrow!
its only a dayyyyy-aaaaa----way!
Colossus was not used to crack Enigma it was built to crack the Lorenz machine (a high security teleprinter cipher). One of the interesting things was Bletchley Park was able to build a Lorenz machine without ever seeing a real one!
Here is a dirty great quote from here
The first intercepts
The teleprinter signals being transmitted by the Germans, and enciphered using Lorenz, were first heard in early 1940 by a group of policemen on the South Coast who were listening out for possible German spy transmissions from inside the UK.
Brigadier John Tiltman, one of the top codebreakers in Bletchley Park, took a particular interest in these enciphered teleprinter messages. They were given the code name Fish. The messages which (as was later found out) were enciphered using the Lorenz machine, were known as Tunny. Tiltman knew of the Vernam system and soon identified these messages as being enciphered in the Vernam manner.
Because the Vernam system depended on addition of characters, Tiltman reasoned that if the operators made a mistake and used the same Lorenz machine starts for two messages (a depth), then by adding the two cipher texts together character by character, the obscuring character sequence would disappear. He would then be left with a sequence of characters each of which represented the addition of the two characters in the original German message texts. For two completely different messages it is virtually impossible to assign the correct characters to each message. Just small sections at the start could be derived but not complete messages.
The German mistake
As the number of intercepts, now being made at Knockholt in Kent, increased a section was formed in Bletchley Park headed by Major Ralph Tester and known as the Testery. A number of Depths were intercepted but not much headway had been made into breaking the cipher until the Germans made one horrendous mistake. It was on 30 August 1941. A German operator had a long message of nearly 4,000 characters to be sent from one part of the German Army High command to another probably Athens to Vienna. He correctly set up his Lorenz machine and then sent a twelve letter indicator, using the German names, to the operator at the receiving end. This operator then set his Lorenz machine and asked the operator at the sending end to start sending his message. After nearly 4,000 characters had been keyed in at the sending end, by hand, the operator at the receiving end sent back by radio the equivalent, in German, of didn't get that send it again.
They now both put their Lorenz machines back to the same start position. Absolutely forbidden, but they did it. The operator at the sending end then began to key in the message again, by hand. If he had been an automaton and used exactly the same key strokes as the first time then all the interceptors would have got would have been two identical copies of the cipher text. Input the same machines generating the same obscuring characters same cipher text. But being only human and being thoroughly disgusted at having to key it all again, the sending operator began to make differences in the second message compared to the first.
The message began with that well known German phrase SPRUCHNUMMER message number in English. The first time the operator keyed in S P R U C H N U M M E R. The second time he keyed in S P R U C H N R and then the rest of the message text. Now NR means the same as NUMMER, so what difference did that make? It meant that immediately following the N the two texts were different. But the machines were generating the same obscuring sequence, therefore the cipher texts were different from that point on.
The interceptors at Knockholt realised the possible importance of these two
I thought that it was the US Navy. Did U-571 lie to me?
U-571 had it right... Bletchly Park is just part of a British disinformation program to make you think we were involved in the D-Day landings.
The problem with Enigma was that Enigma was unbreakable and if its unbreakable you don't have to bother with all this singals discipline. Some operators were allowed to select their own 'random' message keys (thus the code breakers became experts on German swearwords!)
I'd guess machine was probably already set up and the other end was having problems decrypting
One of the interesting weaknesses of the Enigma cypher was no letter could be encoded as itself. One part of the cracking process was to look for messages that had a known content (weather reports were a favorate, the Germans were very keen on standard formats in their reports) This could be used to narrow down the number of possible keys
Source A tired German operator has been told to send out dummy messages and he typed only the last letter of the keyboard : ``L''. The British code breaking expert immediately recognized the missing ``L'' in the enciphered message and they got a very big crib.
* [cipher]DAOACQAOFFNNHDYAPSGZHEPTWCFZEPAARVDZOSWJDH XMESGWSGRQYOZL LLLLL
* [plain] LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
from the Red Dwarf FAQ
What does "smeg" mean?t .html
It's a word made up by Grant Naylor for the characters to use as an all-purpose profanity. Some fans have theorised that it was derived from "smegma" (a particularly unpleasant bodily secretion), but Rob and Doug deny this. In the interview on the CD included with the Six of the Best box set, they state that "we wanted to invent a futuristic curse word which had the right sort of consonant and vowel arrangement to make it sound like a genuine . . . curse word." In an online chat session, Doug Naylor said "I think it's Latin for clean, also there's an Italian washing machine company called Smeg. Also each of the letters S-M-E-G stand for smelting metal and something to do with the washing machine process." A detailed list of "smeg" references in the show is available at http://www.bristol.u-net.com/smegweb/docs/smeglis
For pitys sake does anyone take 'user reviews' seriously??? Even if there not written by interested partys, the chances of them being written by someone clueful are scant and its more trouble than its worth to establish any track record for a given reviewer.
A system of meta moderation would add credibility to the system, if someone buys a product get them to evaluate a few reviews (if encouragement is needed pay them in 'loyalty points')
Its more effective than harsh language
In one of the commentarys he did muse about fixing Gollum appearance in Fellowship of the Ring to match The Two Towers. Possibly a minor tweek to the mega-collector's set
This user agreement may be a joke, but its also a legaly binding joke. Anyone who knows about it is going to be much less inclined to use the site (I am!), which is counter productive to the aims of a museam.
I'm interested do you have any links for this?
>You Americans are truly weird.
Brits are weird too.... or more to the point Pepsi vs Coke is annoying. The pop pushers will offer 'good deals' to universitys etc only if they don't sell the opposition's products. Pepsi vs Coke war is a fight to the death
>Wouldn't that have run out after 20 years? Or had the Galactic Republic had one too many Cher Acts?
Your Quite Right... I suppose tradmarking Sith could pass muster
Do you own a hoover? Who made it? Was it the Hoover company? Did you know the YoYo was a trademark untill the people who made the YoYo were really sloppy about their adverts (saying things like "YoYo make the best yoyo's" the court ruled that that ment yoyo was the generic name of the toy ) and they lost their trademark anyone can make a YoYo. LEGO need to protect their trademark people recognize it, if everyone made 'lego' there just another maker of socketed bricks
We were speculating how the Sith kept to the One Master One Apprentice thing for 1000 years. that sort of discipline just does not seem to fit the average Dark Sider. Then we realised that Darth Bane (the guy who started system) had probably patented the Sith and had a firm of Darkside Lawyers to sue the crap out of any unlicensed Sith running round.
I could see this working for some image recognition problems. To get the next page you have to perform some small task. Salt the tasks with 10% control images for which you know the answer and a finders fee where you get a weeks free access if you find X or do Y work units. Could be used in to check survalance video images ...
somehow I think landmines will not blow up if a small weed seed falls on them
You could just buy them bulk bulk and if you don't see what you want they do special orders
If you remember could you pass it on to me, mlush AT hgmp dot mrc dot ac dot uk
This is a picture from an experiment using "a special air gun, particles are shot into aerogel at high velocities. Closeup of particles that have been captured in aerogel are shown here. The particles leave a carrot-shaped trail in the aerogel". (source)