Impudence

The photos are lovely, but the comments were even more interesting, because of the things I have learned from them:

1. I thought Bostonians had a love-hate relationship with their mass transit, but we are pikers beside the depth and fervor of contention from people in the San Francisco area.

2. San Franciscans have the same problem New Yorkers do: They think they are better than everyone else because of where they live, and then they wonder why everyone else hates them.

(Bostonians like where they live, but they try never to admit it to anyone, because we don’t want anyone to know about it. We also don’t label our streets, because if you need street signs, you don’t belong here.)

3. Apparently Marin is the Georgetown of the SF area.

4. Mass transit is far too important, and its scope too wide, to let municipalities and other localities in an affected area have a stranglehold over its construction and operation. In this case what that means is that the state of California should have stepped in with the big hammer and said, “This is how it will be.” This was, of course, back in a time when the government of California was not totally broken.

5. Unfortunately, most Americans do not feel that mass transit is very important at all, so such high-level mandates do not happen. We can’t even get air and auto regulation right.

(Hat tip: Dan Lyke.)

One of the things even my friends may not know about me is that I am, or was, a fairly serious amateur student of cryptanalysis. For years I solved ciphers recreationally - and I’m not just talking the monoalphabetic substitutions found in newspaper puzzles, those are child’s play, I’m talking serious ciphers. (“Ciphers” operate on a letter-by-letter basis; “codes” encrypt in chunks of words, concepts, or even whole sentences.) I don’t do that any more, having better things to do with my time, but I do still follow the science and lore of codebreaking very closely, and I’ve got a shelf of books about various aspects of the topic to prove it.

All of which is by way of explaining why, when I heard reports via Twitter and other sources that a gent in Massachusetts named Corey Starliper claimed to have solved the “340” cipher of the “Zodiac” killer from the 1970’s, I did not even bother to go look at the source news material. (Typical example story here.) I’m not saying I knew immediately it was a hoax - I’m not that good - but I felt that the odds were very poor, if you will. We have gone well past the threshold of what sort of cryptanalysis can be done by humans, and we are past at least one threshold of what can be done by computers. Plain and simple: until there is some new quantum leap in computing tools for cryptanalysis, every tool we can bring to bear has already been applied to 340, with no success. To believe that some lone idiot has solved it purely by random insight beggars probability.

And, as it turns out, he cheated.

The link at the top may be difficult to understand unless you speak the lingo, so let me help. “Caesar” here just refers to shifting a letter a number of places forward in the alphabet (or sometimes backward). If my un-coded text (plaintext) has a letter A and I am doing a Caesar shift of 3, then I end up with a ciphertext of D - three places beyond A. Get it?

In the article where Starliper tries to incoherently explain how he did it, he cites some mumbo-jumbo about how he determined the values by which to shift the ciphertext. But the fact is - as the link at the top shows - not only is his sequence a lot more arbitrary than he says it is, but at various points, he lied about how far he shifted letters.

Notice the fourth letter of the solution. Starliper claims to have shifted four places according to his system. But the actual change - “V,” or what he has decided to assume is a V, to L - is ten places.

Imagine I have ciphertext BXWQ. I just chose those four letters at random. Now, if I have utter freedom to shift any of those four places any number of spaces I want, I can decipher that to any four-letter word I like. Do you see?

Of course, we can’t rule out the possibility that the Zodiac killer did exactly that, shifting letters up and down as he pleased without pattern, to make a ciphertext that is - from our point of view - utterly random. But deciphering is a matter of finding patterns, and nothing else but. If the Zodiac killer really did do that, then his cipher will never, never be deciphered.

Or - if you prefer - if the Zodiac killer really did do that, out of madness or malice, then you can say with some justification that any solution is as valid as any others. Pick Starliper’s if you like. Or make your own - shouldn’t be too hard to take that ciphertext and invent some other plaintext to match it.

I don’t want to call Starliper a deliberate fraud, and I apologize for using “Hoax” in the title because I didn’t have a better word that was compact enough. I think Starliper may genuinely believe he has found new insight into this and stumbled across some solution that has eluded trained professionals for forty-plus years. He may be genuinely puzzled as to why none of the law enforcement divisions connected with the case will give him the time of day. He may well think he is a genius. But he is mistaken.

And contribute to research while doing so!