This is another exploration into the unknown unknowns. The premise is that by removing the veils, walls, fogs, camouflage and now codes, that it will be possible to see more clearly natural reality hidden behind those obscuring things.
Code Breaking – A History and Exploration by Rudolf Kippenhahn is 260 pages of history and descriptions of basic codes that have been used since Roman times. Early in the book there is an exploration of what is named the Caesar code. It is simply skewing the standard alphabet a given number over to one side and copying the aligned shifted letters of the message onto the missive to be sent. The resulting text if short appears as random text, but if it is a paragraph long the letter frequency becomes apparent and it is easily decrypted even if the code’s method isn’t known. The book moves historically through various methods of increasingly more obscure forms of encoding text and numbers.
My motivation for reading this book was to watch for natural methods that might be used for obscuring natural information, and not to understand the intentional obscuring of information that might be transmitted to a friendly person through compromised channels which contain enemy factions. That ability might be helpful for discovering naturally embedded materials in the natural physical world, and the pre-human living world, or not. However, entering the world of cryptography is entering the domain of extraordinarily intelligent people, with millennia of specialized cultural learning. It is entering the realm of the intentionally unknown unknowns, which isn’t the primary goal of these blog posts. The field of cryptography is dedicated to obscuring mundane information of interest only to enemies, and I am still seeking the low hanging fruits. I have been searching for, or at least intending to search for, basic principles for discovering natural truths which can be used for enhancing humanity’s stay on earth, and life in general.
One distracting factor for our search into the unknown unknowns embedded in encoded intelligence is that the underlying things being hidden are so commonplace. Such things as the time and place that a certain action will be performed, and organizing the specific cooperation needed to reach the common goals. There isn’t anything abstractly interesting about those mercantile activities; they are ordinary activities such as the acquisition and maintenance of relative abundance of money and power. They are hidden and encoded things that if seen clearly would be no more than ordinary human aspirations and behavior, and the code is simply aiding the devious ways of achieving those mundane goals. Of course ordinary life is the most important.
The real interest is in finding new ways for humans to live more abundantly, and not so much for exploiting humans striving for personal superiority.
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