Auteur/autrice : Lucien Noir
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AI Meets Historical Codes: What Machine Learning Has Cracked, and Has Not
In December 2020, an Australian computational linguist named Sam Blake, working with American software developer David Oranchak and Belgian programmer Jarl Van Eycke, announced that they had broken the Z-340 cipher — a 340-character cipher mailed by the Zodiac Killer to the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969 and unsolved for fifty-one years. The team’s…
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Ancient Astronomical Alignments: What the Sites Actually Show
Around 5:30 in the morning on the winter solstice, December 21, a narrow shaft of sunlight enters the entrance of the Newgrange passage tomb in Ireland’s Boyne Valley, travels approximately twenty metres through a low stone passage, and illuminates the inner chamber for roughly seventeen minutes. The tomb was constructed around 3200 BCE — older…
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The Voynich Manuscript: Why Six Centuries of Cryptographers Have Failed
In a humidity-controlled vault in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, call number MS 408, lies a 240-page codex that has defeated every professional cryptographer who has attempted to read it since it surfaced in European collections in the early seventeenth century. Carbon-dated by the University of Arizona in 2009 to between…
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Six Cold War Programs the Public Did Not Know Existed Until Recently
The first time I read the actual declassified MKULTRA budget memos, in the National Security Archive’s George Washington University reading room, I was struck not by the dramatic content but by the bureaucratic boredom of the documents. Most of the file is procurement requests and conference minutes. The genuinely disturbing material was always going to…