Yesterday, the Internet Solved a 20-year-old Mystery

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/yesterday-internet-solved-20-year-old-mystery/

by cgtyoder • 13 years ago

197 58 13 years ago

onthemedia.org

aw3c22• 13 years ago

Actual link is http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramb...

mcguire• 13 years ago

From the second compilation, by gingerest:

"{OR Please see that we all have blood pressure in the normal range & see that none of the rest of us have to take blood pressure medication}"

Now, there's a prayer.

(The alternative was: "Please see that we all have bodily perfection in the next realm, see that none of the rest of us have to bear painful memories." Which is more likely, I suspect.)

JTon• 13 years ago

I love when an online community comes together and solves puzzles like this. /r/Whatisthis turns up some gems here and there. An another note, I'm disappointed this particular puzzle turned out to be prayers... boring

cobrausn3• 13 years ago

Old woman dying of cancer didn't have the common courtesy to at least scribble down something more interesting for you to browse for 5 minutes on the internet later. What a shame.

Luc2• 13 years ago

What the hell. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to remark on. It was presented as a conundrum, and it turns out it's something disappointing to the grandparent. You're the one dramatising things.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

In HN we reserve consideration and respect for people who can't afford the rent in San Francisco. An old woman dying of cancer deserves none. She was probably a homophobe too!

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Go read the original story, there is a link above. Someone even went as far to parse out one version of the Bible to determine if the first letter combinations matched.

Even know what the basic thread of her thoughts, its the discovery and how to further that discovery that is the fascination. That is was prayers actually made it easier and leads to other methods to work it out.

interstitial2• 13 years ago

So do you think God lets you pray in index form? I mean, if he's the grand super dude, can't we just recite the index?

jccalhoun• 13 years ago

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.

protomyth• 13 years ago

If it was one of my relatives, it would have been that or some geo coordinates to an almost impossible to get to place resulting in nothing (or a sign that said "gotcha").

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

Ask Metafilter is a very very good place to get random questions answered - a smart and very diverse userbase, along with some sensible rules on how to ask a question, which gives it an edge over Quora for my tastes.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

Plus you don't have to create an account.

teraflop2• 13 years ago

Sorry, but that's wrong. Here are the rules for how to sign up: http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

IvyMike• 13 years ago

I thought this was going to be about the redditor who uncovered Tommy Wiseau's country of birth, but that's just a 10-year-old mystery.

http://www.reddit.com/r/theroom/comments/1vklp3/i_think_i_ha...

richardlblair• 13 years ago

I love the interweb.

snorkel• 13 years ago

I like the post but I don't care for the click baity headline. Please add a few more words to headline when posting to HN.

netcraft2• 13 years ago

HN policy is to always have the title the same as the source, for better or sometimes worse. There are many cases of them changing a link title even if the provided one was much more descriptive.

Edit: relevant discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466

aw3c22• 13 years ago

Actually it is not. And I wish mods were not so overzealous.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(...) please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

simias• 13 years ago

In this case the problem is that it's blogspam, a direct link to the metafilter thread would have been sufficient, it gives all the context we need.

shmerl2• 13 years ago

Such kind of "lossy compression" was used sometimes to transfer secret messages. It's impossible to fully decipher it without knowing the text, but it serves as a reminder for those who know it, so they can reconstruct it in full form if needed. This way the information could be kept in oral form for a long time (even for generations), while being preserved in written form only in such way that strangers couldn't decipher it in full. But since common patterns can be discerned (if you at least know the subject approximately), one can reconstruct some parts of it with pretty good accuracy.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

A sort of index.

chimeracoder• 13 years ago

Such kind of "lossy compression" was used sometimes to transfer secret messages. It's impossible to fully decipher it without knowing the text, but it serves as a reminder for those who know it, so they can reconstruct it in full form if needed.

This was the way that the Qur'an was originally passed down. Originally, the Qur'an was meant to be a recited work. Furthermore, at the time, Arabic writing wasn't so much a complete orthographic system as much as a reminder of the roots of words[0]

This works well in Semitic languages, in which the consonants denote the general meaning of the word, and the vowels change the specifics.

For example, one might write "SLM", which can be expanded to any of the following (capitalization for emphasis)

1) iSLaM = "submission" (literally)

2) moSLeM = "one who has submitted"

3) SaLaaM = a greeting, similar to "peace" (etc.)

The writing is not enough to reconstruct the entire text, but it's good enough for someone whose job it is to recite the work, and simply needs a little reminder.

[0] In fact, not only did traditional written Arabic lack vowels (much like Hebrew), but I am told that even consonants were difficult to distinguish from each other.

shmerl2• 13 years ago

Similar idea (using just the initial letters of words) was used in various Hebrew works. Such kind of text was usually called megilas sesorim (i.e. a "scroll of secrets").

adwf• 13 years ago

So they used language abbreviation as a kind of bloom filter? That's pretty cool!

ithinkso• 13 years ago

If mystery was not known then no one could say it was 20-year-old mystery. Media headlines.

interstitial2• 13 years ago

True, but viral it up: Minutes old mystery solved instantly, but what happened next made me fall off my chair.

jlgaddis2• 13 years ago

You'll never believe what happened next!

Jabbles• 13 years ago

How hard did the family actually try to solve this mystery though?

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTN

gry• 13 years ago

To be fair, this wasn't searchable in 1996. :)

They rediscovered the card a couple days ago and the string of characters only results in the content itself. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFU...

The solution was someone recognizing the pattern, not arbitrary Googling, which I find far more interesting.

smackfu• 13 years ago

Actually, arbitrary Googling works pretty well. Just start chopping letters of the end, and you get a hit on "OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIH" from 2007.

iM8t• 13 years ago

It's incredible what people can do just because of curiosity. I mean - there's no practical gain from helping another person decipher a code other than just out of curiosity. I'm fascinated by the message and the relentlessness of the person who kept the code and tried to crack it for 20yrs. This is just so cool!

sebnukem2• 13 years ago

spoiler: prayers.

thehme• 13 years ago

The title of this article does not reflect what the article is actually talking about. Also, while a nice gesture of the family member to write, as I read the article I was building up excitement and really wanted to know if she had written some interesting/secret information for the kids, but then found she was just praying. Nothing wrong or against that, just that my curiosity was sparked but ultimately my interest went unfulfilled.

judk• 13 years ago

Welcome to magazine journalism.

yetanotherphd2• 13 years ago

I wonder if n-grams could solve this automatically?

If we consider the actual words to be a latent variable, then we can use an n-gram model to compute the maximum likelihood estimate (sorry Bayesians) using dynamic programming.

There is also the Bayesian approach where you treat it as a Bayesian network and use belief propagation to compute the marginal posteriors over each letter.

EDIT: took a while to figure out the ML approach.

jjwiseman• 13 years ago

Yes, that's what I did: https://github.com/wiseman/finalletters

It uses a bigram model and Viterbi decoding. With the right corpora (the repo includes the King James Bible and some Lutheran hymnals, as the woman was reportedly Lutheran) it's easy to decode "OFWAIHHBTN" into "our father who are in heaven hallowed be thy name".

Yesterday, the Internet Solved a 20-year-old Mystery

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