Fibonacci

I cannot resist talking to my blog after reading during the last few days story of a clever British judge who got entangled in a law suit involving a mega hit book by Dan Brown. Incredulously, the respected judge, while rendering his written opinion, could not resist himself to embed his own coded message inside the text of the court document. Of course, I got a hold of this PDF file from where else but the internet to see it with my own eyes. Seeing is believing, as the wise men said.

The plainly readeable clue "Smithy code" is embedded mostly in the Introduction section, on page 5 of the 71 page PDF file. The coded message started with the letter J in paragraph 8 of section 2 entitled "The Claimants."

All in all, the court opinion is a good and compelling read so I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, it was not easy to concentrate on the entire content while searching for his embedded codes, one hidden letter at a time.

The supposedly last letters are found in paragraph 43 - 44 on page 13 of 71 pages.The last z was not found, instead, I found an "i" in paragraph 46.

After getting some serious eye strains, this is what I found:

JAEIEXTO TGPSACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVI

I could not find a missing supposedly "S" that must come between the "O" and the "T" lest the entire message is but a jumble. Applying the Fibonacci key sequence, the message should be decoded to read:

JAFKIEFISTHRWHOAREBOUDREADQOUGHC

What is going on here? Who is the sloppy party in all this? The media reports that the solution is suppposed to read:

JACKIE FISHER WHO ARE YOU DREADNOUGHT

London lawyer Dan Tench and The Times newspaper on Friday this week both claimed to have solved the riddle hidden in the ruling in "The Da Vinci Code" copyright lawsuit.

It reads: "Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought."

The judge himself issued a statement that made to print, affirming that "there is a deliberate typo to create further confusion." I am not sure about that. It may be just this coding business is too high tech for a judge. Or perhaps his clerk, when asked to insert weird bold and italicized characters in a haphazard manner into a solemn court opinion, freaked out and did not do a good job.

Judge, your honor, if you really want to encode the foregoing message using the Fibonacci sequence 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21, the embedded text should have been, exactly:

JABIEXTOSHDPSACGREXMQWFKADMMQZVZ

I am sure this is the right sequence because I did not trust myself, so I cheated and get my computer to do the encoding for me. Trust me, it's correct as above and not as it is widely reported on the internet as the incorrect version seen higher. For those of you who are history buffs...

It was Admiral John (Jackie) Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who was the driving-force behind the development of the Dreadnought that was built at Portsmouth Dockyard between October 1905 and December 1906. The Dreadnought was the most heavily-armed ship in history. She had ten 12-inch guns (305 mm), whereas the previous record was four 12-inch guns. The gun turrets were situated higher than usual and so facilitated more accurate long-distance fire. In addition to her 12-inch guns, the Dreadnought also had twenty-four 3-inch guns (76 mm) and five torpedo tubes below water. In the waterline section of her hull, the Dreadnought was armoured by plates 28 cm thick.



The Dreadnought was the first major warship driven solely by steam turbines.

Now, back to the origin of this royal battle for the mighty greenbacks... the book by Dan Brown himself: The Da Vinci Code. I bought an ebook version of it several years ago, and it is langushing somewhere in my laptop and in another PC in my house. Since I am still waiting to get a decent ebook reader (supposed to be released in April this year) but still nowhere to be found, I need to read it in my laptop, which, incidentally is a pain in the neck. You see, this book is protected so it conspires with my Adobe reader to make things very interesting before I am allowed to peruse it. My favorite ebook reader that I love is the WONDERFUL "Adobe eBook Reader."

Unfortunately, all I get is a cryptic message reporting to me that "an error has occured" when The Da Vinci Code is handed to it. Every time I upgrade my PDF reader to a new version, the alliance between my protected eBooks and my reader is lost, and I would have to do something very traumatic like going to some invisible web site to download some invisible patch to do something "God knows what" to my poor laptop. Then I would have to hunt for my .NET passport account and Oh My God! what was the associated password to reforge the lost alliance. Needless to say, I can never finish reading my protected eBooks because it usually takes me years to finish one book due to these lost alliances. But I managed to finish The Da Vinci Code, and I can tell you that Dan Brown has his shares of making written statements that may not be so easy to substantiate. If you do not believe me, reread (if you have the eBook and know how to open it again) page 138-139 where you can find a discussion about a Leonard da Vinci's painting, the famous "Virgin of the Rocks."



Dan Brown does not agree with most scholars in interpreting the individuals in this painting and their intentions as expressed by their gesture.

Now, you may find it interesting that in our modern "digital everything" days, "we," meaning all of us who can, routinely falsify images, pictures, photographs to satisfy our fun loving free spirit; looking back at these museum paintings, one can also realize that the same practice was carried on hundreds of years ago. While the supposedly "original" painting "Virgin of the Rocks." by the master himself hangs in the Louvres, a copycat version is found in London, with a few additions to the painting such as a cross to identify John the Baptist and a halo over the head of Jesus Christ himself while a hand belonging to angel Uriel has magically disappeared.



Makes one wonder about the "Mona Lisa." Is this all hype? Who really painted the mystic lady with the half smile? Does that painting have any hidden "stegano" text to be discovered some day? Of course, I sometime embed hidden text in my digital photos but they can never be decoded because I do not keep a good record of my keys. Too many passwords and too little time to encode them in a safe place...

You now can clearly see where I am heading...This blog cannot end without my own coded parting words, so here they are...

THDPABGGFIQCXNFTINFGJFMNEAQR
ANCRDXDARPKCSTHKRKDCLLFANNHLCNDZHEGGHE

Same scheme, same key so they are practially given away already... as good as open text. Finally, below is a bonus, a well known ancient coding method wrapped inside Fibonacci, hiding the magic words from a master movie maker:

ASZLELWSASZ

Absolutely one of my most favorite!

Mulholland Drive

My system is a bit worn out. A treatment that would do me good is: 300 ml of holy water, 3 doses to be taken at 15 minutes intervals on an empty stomach. Mud bath every other day, after the mud bath, 10 minutes in the mineral water as prescribed. In case you do not know, the above is stolen straight out of a movie script, but I think it does apply to me for the moment. Like the character in the movie, I am more than a bit worn out, so I need to have some regenerative mechanism that can help me rebuilding my normal self. So, instead of working hard, which I think is a bad idea right now contrary to doctor's advice, I took time off to revisit my huge backlog of movies that I relentlessly collect.

I was told about a movie by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, that picked my curiosity. With so much brouhaha I've discovered on the internet discussing the "mysteries" of this movie, even on salon.com, I read these forums, and was intrigued enough to pull out that movie from the pile, watched it and came up with my own interpretation... The best, of course!



Nothing complicated at all.... a simple story told by David Lynch... in a rather clever way...

1. Diane Selwyn, who suffers an indeterminate mental illness, hallucinates and sets up an elaborate story....

about a mysterious beautiful brunette who was about to be killed by two hit men when she was miraculously saved by a freak car accident. The scheme is elaborate to the point that it leaves enough clue to establish that someone vanished from the scene of the accident (one of her pearl earing is left at the accident site, just to confuse the audience and make the mystery believable.)

This brunette, suffereing from amnesia caused by the accident, made her way to a vacant luxurious apartment to later be occupied by Diane Selwyn, imagined to be perky and always in control Betty. Betty helps amnesic "Rita" to learn who she really is. The scheme is again elaborated with twists and turns to introduce a large sum of cash, a mysterious blue triangular key, a menacing cowboy and a mysterious clairvoyant man in a coffee shop. There is even a scene of a savage killing of three persons related to a black book... supposedly containing information regarding the whereabout of Rita, just to throw the audience off on a wild goose chase. To me a most deceptive trick thrown by David Lynch is the scene in which the real Diane Selwyn/Betty came to her "real" apartment #12 to see her "real" one time lover, a woman who, in the movie is not shown to know Diane Selwyn. That is a real cheap trick setting up the scene showing the dead and decaying body of Diane Selwyn.

While helping Rita and in total control, Betty fantasized to have a lesbian relationship with her and inserted her real name Diane Selwyn into the scenario. In this scenario, "Betty" sees vision of Diane's death. This is clue that Diane is suicidal.

The real story is told at almost the end, at 2 hours 12 minutes into the movie... by Betty/Diane...

2. Diane Selwyn won a dance contest and came to Hollywood trying to make it in the movie business. She lost an audition to Camille/Rita, a stunning brunette and told the story of her life during a party given by the movie director who is about to marry Camille. The reason Diane Selwyn is invited to this high society party is obviously because she has a relationship with Camille. In this scene, it is evident Camillle clearly enjoys lesbian relationships. In reality, Diane Selwyn lives in a run down apartment inherited from her aunt where she does have a lesbian relationship with Camille. This relationship is terminated by Camille and confirmed to Diane Selwyn during the fateful party at the director's home on Mulholland drive.

This is the reason that Diane Selwyn descends to the deep end, hires a hit man to kill Camille. It is obvious that the contract did come to a successful conclusion because a blue key was delivered to Diane Selwyn as the hit man's confirmation of the kill. This confirmation of Camille's death pushes Diane Selwyn to commit suicide, just as she had vision and finally carried it out.

David Lynch threw in all kinds of side shows to glue the various plots imagined (or invented) by Diane Selwyn to tell the story, which is quite simple which is:

An aspiring movie actress has a lesbian relationship with a mvoie star and was dumped. She gets revenge by hiring a hit man to kill her ex lover and committed suicide after her deed was carried out. Simple story, nothing complicated.

Every forum I read talks about "dream." This is no dream, just a psychotic woman who goes berzerk, transcribes all her realities and beautifies them into an elaborate story as told by David Lynch. There is no car accident, no clairvoyant man, no amnesic woman, and no blue box. David Lynch is a clever story teller telling a simple story in a mysterious and intriguing way that got his fans all worked up. But that is what movies are all about: story telling. The best directors tell the best stories that make the best movies.

The moral of this short story of mine? Do not believe what you read on the internet, especially worked up forums discussing famous movies... and do not believe what you read on this page either. This is but one interpretation... yours may be quite different. I am still trying to figure out how many days elapsed during the entire story of Pulp Fiction as it was told by Tarantino.

I can't believe June 1st is around the corner. Hurricane season again! Bring it on!