[HN Gopher] A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pock...
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A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a
mysterious note
Author : rmason
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-01-15 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| rappatic wrote:
| The article hints at, but doesn't really discuss, the concept of
| information entropy [1]. Each word in that message has a very
| high entropy because it conveys a lot of information. I read an
| XKCD What If article [2] a while back that gives a really cool
| and intuitive introduction to the concept. I don't know all that
| much about computer science so it was a great way to get learning
| more.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
|
| [2] https://what-if.xkcd.com/34/
| neilv wrote:
| > _As part of Chan's research, the National Oceanic and
| Atmospheric Administration provided old weather maps that helped
| him determine the precise date of the weather observations in the
| coded note: May 27, 1888._
|
| When the article introduced the weather report idea, I was hoping
| that this note was spy communications made to look like weather
| reports.
|
| (Maybe the coded note wound up in a pocket because Elizabeth
| Bennet was joking with her sisters, pretending to be a spy.)
| belltaco wrote:
| The note seems to have more than two lines? Have they decoded the
| other ones as well.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Anyone have a link to a document with the codes?
| coldpie wrote:
| A couple links from the article leads to Chen's paper, which I
| think contains everything you would want: https://canwin-
| datahub.ad.umanitoba.ca/data/publication/brea...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A previous comment had this link:
| https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu55719287
|
| I think that's it.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The code referred to is a "commercial code". There's a scan of a
| page from a 1910 code on Wikipedia.
|
| Amazing that a phrase like "Confined yesterday, Twins, both dead,
| Mother not expected to live" was given a single code word
| ("Annosus").
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...
|
| "Unicode -- The Universal Telegraphic Code Book"
| https://archive.org/details/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog/mode/2...
| Symbiote wrote:
| From Unicode, it's interesting but not surprising that so many
| of the codes are for significant personal and business
| problems, like the birth of children, missed travel connections
| etc. "Diota" "Amputation is considered unnecessary". "Annexus"
| "Confined to-day, Twins, one alive, a girl, Mother not expected
| to live".
|
| Towards the back of the book is shown a very early 'DNS';
| abbreviated addresses for businesses. "Supplies, London" meant
| "Junior Army and Navy Stores Limited", a bit like a generic
| supplies.co.uk. "Jowoto, London" meant "Johnson, Walker &
| Tolhurst".
| bombcar wrote:
| You have to remember that telegrams were expensive, you'd not
| just send one for anything; it would be for major events
| (like a birth, or death) and so encoding the variations of
| that would be worth it.
|
| In fact, it's just bitmapping.
| sorokod wrote:
| BTW "Confined" has the meaning of being in labour, child birth.
| OJFord wrote:
| Or almost. They're both euphemistic really - confined to bed;
| soon to labour.
| kristianp wrote:
| Man, as a parent this chills me. Before modern medicine the
| statistics of deaths in childbirth were scary.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| Reminds me of when I first encountered the extraordinarily
| compressed 12 bit "words" in a ARINC717 data stream, where
| they're conserving bits that are written as-is, serially. Like
| three decades of computing passed it by. If something has four
| distinct values, it gets two bits. Then, right on top of that: is
| it a syncro response curve? Output the binary for the curve
| function. On and on, for thousands of "words", all jammed
| together. I used to imagine being a future researcher, trying to
| decode these big blocks of undifferentiated binary, the amount of
| legwork I'd have to accomplish to get just a few layers deep.
| Animats wrote:
| Ah, yes, telegraphic codes. I once found a large code book for
| one of those in the stacks of a Stanford library. Every "word"
| had four syllables, and mapped to a longer phrase.
|
| In the book was a loose piece of paper with a note that the
| telegraph company was changing their billing rules and that only
| known words would count as one word for billing purposes.
| Anything else would be charged at a higher rate for random
| letters and numbers.
|
| Here's a typical telegraphic code, "The Anglo-American Code to
| Cheapen Telegraphy and Furnish a Complete Cypher".[1]
|
| [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.cu55719287
| hinkley wrote:
| It's easy to judge in retrospect, but shouldn't the slashes
| have been a clue? Once I saw them my first thought was this was
| a checklist and someone marked each line off as it was sent.
| mpeg wrote:
| The CNN article makes it seem like it was a mystery for a
| long time, but if you look at the original blog, it's clear
| in the comments that from the very beginning readers of the
| blog suggested it might be a telegraph code, but they didn't
| know exactly from which book.
| sombragris wrote:
| CNN blocks ad-blockers (seemingly):
|
| > Browser Blocked
|
| > We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way
| that it is preventing this site from implementing required
| components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and
| change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for
| privacy legislation in your region.
|
| > We recommend you use a different browser or disable the
| "EasyList Cookie" filter from your "Content Filtering" settings
| (found under "Settings" -> "Shields" in the Brave Browser).
|
| UPDATE: The blocking is triggered by the "I don't care about
| cookies" browser extension (Firefox); disabling the extension on
| the site gets me past the block. Utterly stupid move on CNN's
| part.
| adventured wrote:
| Using uBlock Origin [on Firefox Win10] and didn't have any
| problems.
| ale42 wrote:
| Exact same for me... didn't notice anything strange. I also
| erase cookies when I close the browser, might also perhaps
| have an impact depending on previous visits to CNN.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Maybe try the "lite" version ... substitute "lite" for "www"
| i.e.:
|
| https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/15/us/antique-dress-maine-encry...
| bmacho wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2000/https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/15/us/an...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I block ads, don't really mind when a site doesn't feel like
| serving me as a result. I'm intentionally accepting their ads-
| for-content trade and asking what they'll send for nothing. If
| that's nothing, fair enough.
|
| I am surprised nowadays, given how bad the trade has gotten,
| that people are interested in discussing their content.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Why use Omit instead of t56? Or better yet, write the values in a
| pre-defined order and just do 56 0.08 32 no 12.
|
| Why did they feel the need to use actual words?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Can imagine this approach being less error-prone for laymen, in
| the same way that passphrases (word word word word word) can be
| friendlier than passwords (word12345678).
| renewiltord wrote:
| Presumably has built in error-correction. You don't want to go
| from t56 "Cholera, family dead, stock market crash" to t66 "Buy
| farmland, rains predicted good" in one typo.
| Mogzol wrote:
| They meant t56 as in "temperature is 56", not as in every
| random phrase gets assigned a jumble of numbers and letters.
| Though I suppose error-correction could still apply.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Actual words were easier for the telegraph operator to send and
| receive so they were charged less than a scramble of letters or
| nonsense. Words were charged individually, but could be up to
| 10 letters long. It makes sense to avoid the shortest words to
| get some error correction, "-- ." = "T E" could be misheard as
| "--." = "N".
|
| The international regulations limited the cheaper rate messages
| to only certain languages, of which one was Latin, so the
| codebooks used that to avoid confusion with modern languages.
|
| (See my other comment and read the introduction in the linked
| book.)
| INTPenis wrote:
| Oh so words were charged indiviually. That's strange but ok.
| So that means if you could hypothetically serialize/compress
| the whole data set into one word you'd be most cost
| effective.
| ale42 wrote:
| But as said before, it looks like words were limited to 10
| letters. So you could encode/compress a bit, but not a long
| message into a single 243-letters word...
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Good point to link to what3words.
|
| Have a look, it's a geographic encoding system.
| stevage wrote:
| Because the telegram company charges more for non words.
| UberFly wrote:
| Was hoping for secret treasure, but that was still very
| interesting. Thank you for the post.
| yurytom wrote:
| Anyone tried it to get access to Satoshi wallet?
| russfink wrote:
| But why stored in a secret pocket?
| dools wrote:
| Pockets are for the help, this is a nice dress so a secret
| pocket is probably the only type of pocket they'd want.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| It's encoded words for weather forecast.
|
| Save you a click.
| stevage wrote:
| The story is pretty interesting, and definitely worth the
| click.
| djur wrote:
| Why would someone encode words for a weather forecast?
| mkl wrote:
| As the article explains, it's to save on telegraph fees,
| which were charged per word.
| amelius wrote:
| I expected something like:
|
| "I'm a poor worker in an Asian sweatshop. Please get me out of
| this place."
| mertd wrote:
| These garments aren't washed with water?
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(page generated 2024-01-15 23:00 UTC)