Welcome to tonight’s $27-group open thread. Tonight’s diary features several quotes I’ve enjoyed recently and wanted to share. I saw one in Thursday night’s open thread; I saw another in something Elena Carlena posted; and the third one is a classic Bernie Sanders quote.
I’ll be sharing a few more quotes in tomorrow’s open thread, and in future weekend open threads as well. I hope you enjoy them and I look forward to your comments on them, especially the Sanders quote.
(But if you don’t have any comments about these quotes, please feel free to post about other things, especially about how we can work together to achieve better and fairer social and economic conditions for all people.)
Before you can comment on the quotes, of course, you’ll need to see them.
Let’s start with the one from Elena Carlena:
"Cat cydrint oscar itself used cat ymcs ymut pshm camcd qtztem kskf fdr oser, fdr'yt hcsnnt em ymcr."
— Nsnf Cdjnses
Here’s one I saw in Thursday’s open thread:
"Mxnr asleep fntlbrntat arfux clao vt but ilabdtaap goal ctlnlcet bxdep bunxrku exit."
— Flnex Alkldl
And last but definitely not least here’s a classic quote from Bernie Sanders which, to me, sums up perfectly what the $27 group is about:
Ufo cpegugbled aohpemugprm ngxl rpum slipmug ypro coeobugprd spam ypro blrzgzluo. Tgup ngxl slipmug ualrxypakgrtp Xlkoagbl ulrzp bprugrmgrto ufo ygtfuo ypad xobprpkgbo, xpbgled, albgled hlrzg uorhgaprkorulep jmxugbo. No flho up bprugrmo up npasm uptoufoad up klzhlrbo ufo captaoxxgho ymumao no sleep xmccpauo.
Oh! That’s interesting — my NSA source feed is indicating puzzled expressions on a couple of you. And I think I just heard someone ask: ‘Did Bernie Sanders really say that? ’
Yes, he really did.
‘ In those words? ‘
Yes, of course in those words …
… but not in those letters . I enjoy cryptograms, and thought some of you might also enjoy a few cryptograms, so I did a letter substitution before posting these quotes. If you enjoy code puzzles you can have fun playing with these as well as enjoying what they say.
And if you don’t enjoy code puzzles, don’t worry; I’ll post the quotes in their unencoded form 45 minutes after this diary goes up if no one else posts the answers before then. (And in the meantime you can have fun speculating what the quotes might say or inventing your own translations ...)
Before you attempt to solve any of these, though, here are a few things it might be helpful to know:
- 1. There are now computer programs which can solve most cryptograms very quickly by running through every possible set of letter substitution possibilities.
- 2. Those programs will not work on the cryptograms in this diary.
- 3. These are a special kind of cryptogram. They’re actually easier to solve than a regular cryptogram if you think like a human but much harder to solve if you think like a computer.
Yes, really! These are easy to solve. I’ll show you. First I’ll explain how these are different than regular cryptograms, and then I’ll walk you step by step through how to solve Elena’s quotation.
How These Cryptograms Differ from Regular Cryptograms
The key difference is that before encoding a quotation I alter the text so that every word begins with a consonant or consonant sound and that every word ends with a vowel or vowel sound. If the words don't naturally begin or end that way, I add letters of my choosing to make sure they do. (In adding on letters, A, E, I, O, U and Y count as vowels and all other letters count as consonants.)
Take, for example, the sentence The cats are attending university to learn ballet.
- 1. The words The and to begin with consonants and ends with a vowels, so they're fine and would be left alone: The, to
- 2. The words cats and learn begin with a consonants, so that's okay. But they also end in consonants, which is not okay. Therefore I will add a vowel of my choice to the end of each: catsa, learni.
- 3. The word are ends with a vowel, so I don't need to adjust that; but it also begins with a vowel, so that does need adjusting: qare.
- 4. The word attending begins with a vowel and ends with a consonant, so it needs adjustment at both ends. I'll change it to something like kattendingu.
- 5. The word ballet looks like it would need adjustment but it doesn't; the word ends with a vowel sound, so it gets left alone: ballet.
- 6. Similarly, university looks like it would need adjusting but it doesn't; the u at the beginning has a consonant sound so it's left alone: university.
Now the sentence reads The catsa qare kattendingu university to learni ballet, and that's what I'll encrypt.
Notice that all 6 of the vowels — A, E, I, O, U and Y — appear at least once at the end of a word. In order to help make solving easy I try to do that with all the quotations. That means that right away at the start of solving you know all the letters which stand for vowels.
A few additional rules:
- 1. If a word is capitalized in the original quotation it will be capitalized in the encoded version as well. (So if you see a capitalized 2-letter word, it’s probably actually the word I.)
- 2. If a word is hyphenated, then each of its parts is treated as a separate word.
- 3. The add-ons to a word in a puzzle will be consistent; if catsa is changed to catsa once in a quotation, then cats will be changed to catsa every time it appears in that quotation.
A Demonstration of How to Solve These Puzzles
Here’s the quotation Elena posted which I liked enough to share tonight:
"Cat cydrint oscar itself used cat ymcs ymut pshm camcd qtztem kskf fdr oser, fdr'yt hcsnnt em ymcr."
— Nsnf Cdjnses
- 1. First, let’s make a list of all the vowel add-ons: T, R, F, D, S, and M. So those stand for A, E, I, O, U and Y (although we don’t know yet which one stands for which).
- 2. Now let’s look for 3-letter words. (With other word lengths, we don’t know if they have add-on letters or not. A 4-letter word could be an actual 4-letter word, a 3-letter word with an add-on at the end, a 3-letter word with an add-on at the beginning, or a 2-letter word with add-on front and back. A 2-letter word could be an actual 2-letter word or it could be a 1-letter word with an add-on. But except for rare exceptions where the word in the quote consists of 2 consonants or 2 vowels, any 3-letter word you see in the code is probably a genuine 3-letter word.)
- 3. And, aha! The very first word, cat, has 3 letters and the pattern consonant-consonant-vowel. That means there’s a very good chance it’s actually the word the (since the word the appears very frequently in ordinary English, and since I try to find quotations which include the word the to make solving easier.) If it’s not the, it might be who, two, she, why, shy, try, cry, fry, fly, sly … but the is an extremely good possibility, so it’s worth trying that out to see what it leads to.
- 4. Ah, but there’s an even better 3-letter word to look at: fdr! Notice something interesting about that one? All three of the letters are part of our vowel set. That means fdr is almost certainly you. So in addition to plugging in c=t, a=h, t=e, lets plug in f=y, d=o, r=u.
- (NOTE: Here's a site you might find useful; just copy the encoded text, paste it into the box you’ll find there, and you’re all set to try out letter substitutions to your heart’s content.)
- 5. Okay, looking at the partial translation we’ve got, the word camcd jumps out. It translates so far to th_to. The o at the end is almost certainly and add-on so we can ignore it. The t at the start has to be genuine, since it preceded a consonant rather than a vowel. So the word itself must be that. Plug in m=a.
- 6. With A, E, O, U and Y accounted for, that means the last vowel left, I, must be the last vowel translation letter left, S. So plug in s=i.
- 7. Now we can see that oscar translates to _ithu. That almost certainly with; plug in o=w.
- 8. We can also see that cydring translates to t_ou__e. That means y must be either an h or an r (the only consonants that could follow a t at the start of a word). And since h is already accounted for, it must be r. Plug in y=r.
- 9. Aha! Cydrint must be trouble. Plug in i=b, n=l.
- 10. At this point it’s easy to see from hcnsst that h has to be s, it’s easy to see from itself and oser that e has to be n, and the whole quotation becomes apparent:
“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.”
Lily Tomlin
See? Didn’t I tell you it was easy? Okay, not so easy that Donald Trump could solve it, but easy enough that Sarah Palin could if given enough hints and help (and a multiple choice list to select the answer from).
And the longer the quotation is, the easier to solve the code is. So go ahead and give the Bernie Sanders quote a try. Have fun, and I’ll see you in comments!
PS: for those of you who don’t enjoy cryptograms but do enjoy Bernie Sanders quotes, here’s one fresh off the e-mail presses:
One of the ways we effectively oppose Trump's right wing extremism is with strong and progressive leadership at the local and state level. One of those leaders is Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort who is running for Mayor of Atlanta, Georgia.
Vincent Fort has always been a powerful ally of our movement. As a state senator, he was arrested for protesting Wall Street greed with Occupy Atlanta, and again when protesting a lack of Medicaid expansion in the state of Georgia. He drafted and passed the strongest law against predatory home lending in the nation, and he has been a tireless advocate for reforming our broken criminal justice system. Senator Fort is a popular Atlanta politician, especially in low-income African-American neighborhoods and, with our help, he can become Atlanta's next Mayor.
When we started our political revolution, very few elected officials had the courage to stand with us. Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort was one of the first, and he paid a hefty price for it.
The establishment in Georgia did everything they could to exact their revenge on Senator Fort – they even recruited a primary opponent to run against him in the last election cycle as punishment. They failed to take him down then – and now that he’s running to be the next Mayor of Atlanta, we expect the entrenched political establishment and their billionaire backers to do everything in their power to defeat him.
We need Vincent Fort’s leadership in the Atlanta Mayor’s office. Winning this campaign will send a strong message to the establishment that the struggle continues to create a government, at the local, state and federal level, that works for all of us, not just the one percent.
Georgia state senators are forbidden from raising money into their campaign accounts during legislative session starting January 9th. That means that we have to do as much for Senator Fort as we can before this fundraising deadline.
If enough of us are willing to come together right now, then we can elect one of our own as a powerful rebuke to the corrupt establishment. And Senator Fort will be able to focus on fighting for the people of Georgia without having to worry about his mayoral campaign next week.
You can learn more about Vincent Fort here (and there’s a handy donation link there as well, if you’re able to contribute.)