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Deep in the archives of the Vatican library, a mysterious hand-written book, scrawled with strange symbols, had lain unread for more than 400 years. Its cryptic pages apparently concealed secret remedies "for affections of the human body", according to some text scratched inside the cover. Such healing practices were kept under wraps at the time since they could attract suspicion or even accusations of witchcraft.Known as the Borg cipher, the 408-page-long manuscript is mostly incomprehensible -- coded using 34 obscure symbols with a few Roman letters and a front page written in Arabic. There was no known key to reveal...

I’ve been thinking a little more about how to go about cracking Scorpion Cipher S5. I mentioned before that I thought that the encipherer might well have started from an elegant-looking 26×16 grid filled with diagonally-downward families of shapes, and that this arrangement might offer codebreakers some additional kind of “spatial logic” to support their efforts that traditional ciphers don’t usually provide. From the letters that accompanied the ciphertexts, my inference is that the Scorpion is like a smart 12-year-old who has just ‘got’ the elegance of maths: but this leads me to a secondary inference that he/she probably didn’t...

NOTE: If I know anything about the rabid naysayers on FR, at least some of the RELIGIOUS [vs spiritual] types will wail and rant that ANYTHING having to do with numbers and The Bible has to be crossing the line into dealing with Biblically forbidden NUMEROLOGY. This is nonsense. The dictionary definition of “numerology” makes clear that numerology is the study of numbers, as the figures designating the year of one’s birth, “to determine their supposed influence on one’s life, future, etc.” [Quix color, bold emphasis on the definition from: HERE: http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0562554.html Clearly, the Biblically prohibited issue is INTEREST IN,...