The plot seemed ok. He sometimes just seems very patronising somehow.
Eventually one of them explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code-a "cipher-text"-groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers' job was to study the code and extract from it the original message, or "cleartext." The NSA had called Becker because they suspected the original message was written in Mandarin Chinese; he was to translate the symbols as the cryptographers decrypted them.
Cryptonomicon went into even more detail, but somehow it seems to be suggesting that on learning you can replace letters with different ones and that's a code you should be in awe of Brown. Maybe it's just me.
And I was bothered by the girl in Da Vinci Code -- if my grandfather had KILLED someone I'd give him at least one sentence to explain if there was a reason, and she never spoke to him again because he had sex. DUH! He's your grandfather, he logically must have had sex. And if that's SUCH a big deal to you, then why does the idea that someone built a religion round it make it BETTER?
no subject
Date: 2005-01-18 05:02 pm (UTC)Eventually one of them explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code-a "cipher-text"-groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers' job was to study the code and extract from it the original message, or "cleartext." The NSA had called Becker because they suspected the original message was written in Mandarin Chinese; he was to translate the symbols as the cryptographers decrypted them.
Cryptonomicon went into even more detail, but somehow it seems to be suggesting that on learning you can replace letters with different ones and that's a code you should be in awe of Brown. Maybe it's just me.
And I was bothered by the girl in Da Vinci Code -- if my grandfather had KILLED someone I'd give him at least one sentence to explain if there was a reason, and she never spoke to him again because he had sex. DUH! He's your grandfather, he logically must have had sex. And if that's SUCH a big deal to you, then why does the idea that someone built a religion round it make it BETTER?