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The esoteric implements of the medieval necromancer included magic circles, conjurations, sacrifices, swords, and prayer; magical alphabets were also highly significant. Circles were traced on the ground, often accompanied by various mystical symbols drawn from a mixture of Christian and occult ideas. At the opportune time and location, sacrifices and animal offerings were often provided [more...]  Just how the hobo chalk marks system developed, nobody knows, but as a means of providing vital information (frequently as a matter of life or death – or prison) of often considerable complexity, it remains unparalleled. The marks were left on boxcars, signposts, town signs, mailboxes, and fence posts.— Excerpted from The Book of [more...] The most popular and long-lived encoding language is called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). With this system all of the letters of the alphabet, all of the numerals, and many of the [more...] The Commercial Code of Signals (later called the International Code of Signals) launched in 1857 consisted of 18 flags. Unlike the secret naval codes, this maritime code was designed to be memorized and did not require a detailed code book to be understood. Each flag represents a letter or number (note that only letters are [more...] The Crack the Code Sweepstakes has begun. You have until midnight EST / 9PM PST tonight to crack this code, and send us a direct message on Twitter @ucpress with the answer. We’ll select a winner at random from all eligible entries and announce it on Twitter (limit one entry per Twitter account). The winner [more...] Probably the first substitution cipher to be described is that used by Julius Caesar in parts of his private correspondence to friends and colleagues in Rome while he was campaigning in Gaul. The code [more...] Next week, we’ll be holding our Crack the Code Sweepstakes. Each day, we will be posting a new coded video. At around 9:00am PST/12:00 EST, each day, we’ll announce when the video is up via our Twitter feed @UCPress and on our Facebook page. You’ll have until 9:00pm/12:00 EST to Tweet us your solution. One [more...] |
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