It was the recent incident during their geography class that had him working on a code.
Note-passing was common practice among the pupils. It all came about when their teacher had stood on a chair to take down a large atlas, showing just how broad her hips actually where. That’s when his friend on the desk behind tapped him on the shoulder and passed the note. The truth is, if he hadn’t sniggered, and had the note not got passed around, nothing would have come of it. As it was, she became aware of all the commotion and giggling, she seized the note and read it for herself.
What followed was very unpleasant, with her trying to find out who actually wrote it. There were threats of a visit to the principal’s office and possible expulsion. Naturally, she never got to the bottom of it, no pun intended, but it did leave everybody rattled. That’s when he started to work on his code. It had to be something they could all use to keep their messages private. He felt himself to be more than competent in the business of creating something robust; something unbreakable.
It was a couple of nights later, at his home, that he and his friend from the desk behind sat looking at what he had come up with so far.
“It has to be robust,” he was saying, as he spread several sheets of paper out across his bedroom floor. “I started by finding a word that would be the key word to base the code on.”
“Key word?” asked his friend.
“Yes. That’s the word, the secret word if you like, that you need to know in order to read the message.”
“OK. Did you find one?”
“I did.”
“Wow! Go on.”
“I didn’t want it to contain too many letters, which would only make it unnecessarily complicated, no more than ten. After all, even ten is almost half of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Also, I had to find a word of that length where none of the letters were repeated.”
“And you found one, you say?”
“Yes. Guilderton.”
“What’s that?”
“Not what… where. It’s a place name. Found it in the class notes. It’s a small town on the west coast of Australia.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Gee! You really have put a lot of work in on this. It’s going to be great!”
“I hope so. The next step was to assign numbers to each letter. Each of these letters is represented by a number from one to twenty-six. Here’s the chart I made.”
At this point he produced a printout and they both studied it.
“Wow! Looks good.”
“Thanks. Anyway, at first, I thought I would convert the ten numbers 4, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20 and 21. These being the letters used to make the key word, then put the letters down in the order originally shown in the alphabet. This gave me the word ‘degilnortu’. I wasn’t happy with that.”
His friend shrugged and said, “No.”
“No. What I did was add all ten numbers up. This gave me 125. Then, I divided this number by the number of letters; ten. Unfortunately, the result was 12.5.”
At this point his friend frowned. “I can’t see how that helps.”
“It doesn’t.”
“OK. What do we do then?”
“Ah!” he said, thinking hard. “I think we should be more careful about writing notes.”
I like the valuable info you provide in your articles. I’ll bookmark your weblog and check again here frequently. I am quite certain I will learn lots of new stuff right here! Good luck for the next!
Wonderful beat ! I wish to apprentice even as you amend your website, how can i subscribe for a blog web site? The account aided me a applicable deal. I were tiny bit familiar of this your broadcast provided bright clear concept
Hi my loved one! I wish to say that this article is awesome, nice written and come with almost all vital infos. I?¦d like to look more posts like this .
You made some first rate points there. I seemed on the web for the issue and located most people will associate with along with your website.
Hi! I’ve been reading your blog for a long time now and finally got the courage to go ahead and give you a shout out from Kingwood Tx! Just wanted to mention keep up the excellent job!
I like what you guys are up too. Such smart work and reporting! Keep up the excellent works guys I¦ve incorporated you guys to my blogroll. I think it will improve the value of my site 🙂
I am now not certain where you’re getting your information, however good topic. I must spend some time learning more or working out more. Thanks for great info I was on the lookout for this info for my mission.
Just desire to say your article is as astonishing. The clarity in your put up is simply great and that i can think you are knowledgeable in this subject. Well with your permission let me to grasp your RSS feed to stay updated with forthcoming post. Thank you 1,000,000 and please keep up the enjoyable work.
It is really a nice and useful piece of info. I’m glad that you shared this useful information with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.
Pretty great post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wished to say that I’ve really enjoyed surfing around your weblog posts. In any case I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I’m hoping you write again very soon!
Great ?V I should certainly pronounce, impressed with your site. I had no trouble navigating through all the tabs as well as related information ended up being truly simple to do to access. I recently found what I hoped for before you know it in the least. Reasonably unusual. Is likely to appreciate it for those who add forums or something, website theme . a tones way for your client to communicate. Nice task..
Regards for this terrific post, I am glad I detected this web site on yahoo.
I have not checked in here for a while since I thought it was getting boring, but the last several posts are great quality so I guess I’ll add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend 🙂
l67xop