Kryptos - Jim Sanborn

It is perhaps one of the C.I.A.’s most mischievous secrets.

“Kryptos,” the sculpture nestled in a courtyard of the agency’s Virginia headquarters since 1990, is a work of art with a secret code embedded in the letters that are punched into its four panels of curving copper.

“Our work is about discovery — discovering secrets,” said Toni Hiley, director of the C.I.A. Museum. “And this sculpture is full of them, and it still hasn’t given up the last of its secrets.”

Not for lack of trying. For many thousands of would-be code crackers worldwide, “Kryptos” has become an object of obsession. Dan Brown has even referred to it in his novels.

The code breakers have had some success. Three of the puzzles, 768 characters long, were solved by 1999, revealing passages — one lyrical, one obscure and one taken from history. But the fourth message of “Kryptos” — the name, in Greek, means “hidden” — has resisted the best efforts of brains and computers.

And Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created “Kryptos” and its puzzles, is getting a bit frustrated by the wait. “I[..]umed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,” he said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected.

So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture’s final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN.

But there are many steps to cracking the code, and the other 91 characters and their proper order are yet to be determined.

“Having some letters where we know what they are supposed to be could be extremely valuable,” said Elonka Dunin, a computer game designer who runs the most popular “Kryptos” Web page.

None of this was really envisioned when the Central Intelligence Agency planned the expansion known as the New Headquarters Building in the 1980s and asked artists to submit proposals to create a work of art for the courtyard. The broad principles it provided for the $250,000 commission included the notion that it should “engender feelings of well-being, hope.”

The winner was Mr. Sanborn, and the agency introduced him to Edward Scheidt, a retiring C.I.A. cryptographer, who gave him a crash course in the arts of concealing text and helped devise the codes used in the sculpture.

One reason the fourth puzzle has proved so difficult is because, with just 97 characters, it is shorter than any but the first. Longer chunks of text are easier to crack because there is more information to study for patterns.

The messages form the two left-hand panels of the sculpture’s wall of text; the other two panels on the right side provide the key to cracking some of the text. Each is encrypted in a different way from the others.

The first reads: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.” (Mr. Sanborn admitted to introducing misspellings to add a degree of difficulty.)

The second passage includes the latitude and longitude of the C.I.A.’s headquarters and asks, “Does Langley know about this? They should: it’s buried out there somewhere. X Who knows the exact location? Only WW.”

This is a reference to William Webster, the former C.I.A. chief — Mr. Sanborn gave him a key to deciphering the messages.

The third passage paraphrases, with an intentional misspelling, the account of Howard Carter, the renowned Egyptologist, as he opened King Tut’s tomb. Mr. Sanborn has said the passage has inspired him since childhood.

“Slowly, desparatly slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q”

Though “Kryptos” has long been famous in code-busting circles, it gained wider notoriety when Mr. Brown slyly referred to it on the dust jacket of his best-selling novel “The DaVinci Code” and incorporated it into the plot of “The Lost Symbol.”


While many artists might be thrilled with such publicity, Mr. Sanborn was deeply irked by the way his work was portrayed as a possible key to “ancient Masonic secrets” in “The Lost Symbol.”


“As far as I’m concerned, he did me no favors,” Mr. Sanborn groused about Mr. Brown.

The message of his artwork, and its relevance to the C.I.A., is more nuanced than a plot point in a potboiler novel, he said.

“Anybody holding a secret has a position of power, even if it’s a trivial secret,” Mr. Sanborn said.

To code breakers, Mr. Sanborn, not the C.I.A., is in the real position of power. They e-mail him. They call him. Some have produced papers of 100 pages or more explaining their theories on the final 97 characters. “In their world, a complete tour de force,” said Mr. Sanborn, save for one thing: “It doesn’t have anything to do with ‘Kryptos.’ ”

He likes and respects many of the fans. But some others? “Certifiable,” he said.

Recently, one even showed up in the front yard of his home on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, brandishing a three-ring binder that she was convinced contained the answer. It did not.

He has asked a friend — Mr. Sanborn has given him some of the answers, but not all — to handle inquiries from those who say they have solved the puzzle.

“My friend says, ‘What do you have in letter-position 27?’ ” Mr. Sanborn explained. “If that’s not the same letter, ‘Game over, and you didn’t crack the code.’ ” (He recently set up a Web site to take submissions automatically.)

So far, no one has had more than two letters right, though some dispute this. “They say, of course I cracked the code — who are you to say I didn’t crack the code?” Mr. Sanborn said. Some of them even suggest that he does not know the answer himself.

He hopes others will hurry up and solve it.

“I can’t do this for many more decades, O.K.?” Mr. Sanborn said. “I’m 65 now. They might get some more clues at 75. But 85?”

Found Here: http://slumz.boxden.com/f5/nov-22-can-you-crack-c-i-s-kryptos-code-1451559/

Mystery Crypto Letter Has Coders Stumped

A coded letter sent last year to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois has the lab, and outside coders stumped. The letter was sent anonymously last March in a hand-addressed envelope via regular mail to the physics lab’s public affairs office.

After sitting on the letter for more than a year, the lab posted it on a physics blog in May, hoping to get help cracking it.

Thousands of sleuths have taken a stab at it so far and have succeeded to crack two parts of the letter. An engineer at the Canadian Space Center used a variation of the base-3 system to uncover a line that reads “Frank Shoemaker would call this noise,” which refers to an 86-year-old retired Princeton University physicist who helped design the magnets used with the lab’s first particle accelerator, known as the Main Ring. Another line in the letter has been cracked to read, “Employee number basse sixteen.”

A Chicago Tribune story about the letter offers some possible explanations behind the two sentences and what appears to be a typo in the second sentence.

But, like the famous CIA Kryptos sculpture (which also has a typo), one final section of the letter (pictured above) remains unsolved. The lab is hoping outsiders will help them unravel the clues. You can see the entire letter on the physics blog where it was posted. An undated update to the blog post indicates that they suspect they now know who may have sent the letter.

Coders post your solutions in the comments section below or send them directly to me (you’ll find my e-mail address in this blog’s righthand column) with an explanation about how you cracked it.

Found Here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/mystery-at-ferm/

Jim Sanborn

Jim Sanborn has had work exhibited at the High Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection and the Hirshhorn Museum. He has been commissioned to create artwork for such sites as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sanborn was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C. His father, a print maker, was the Director of Exhibitions at the Library of Congress for 30 years. His mother was a pianist and photo researcher. Sanborn grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, attended JEB Stuart High School in Fairfax, and went on to study archaeology and Romanesque cathedrals. He studied archaeology at Oxford University, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in paleontology, fine arts, and social anthropology in 1968 from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland Virginia, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1971. He taught at Montgomery College in Rockville, and for nine years was the artist-in-residence and taught classes at Glen Echo Park. He has also traveled extensively in Asia, and in 1983 was commissioned to install a piece in Japan.

Mr. Sanborn is noted for his work with American stone and related materials that evoke a sense of mystery and the forces of nature. He is probably best known for the "Kryptos" sculpture installed at CIA Headquarters in 1990, which displays encrypted messages which continue to stump code-breakers to this day.

Sanborn contact info: This website is not directly associated with Mr. Sanborn.

Found Here: http://elonka.com/kryptos/sanborn.html

Burning Ship fractal

The Burning Ship fractal, first described and created by Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler in 1992, is generated by iterating the function:

in the complex plane which will either escape or remain bounded. The difference between this calculation and that for the Mandelbrot set is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration. The mapping is non-analytic because its real and imaginary parts do not obey the Cauchy–Riemann conditions.^[1]

1. ^ Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler (1992). "The "Burning Ship" and Its Quasi-Julia Sets". In: Computers & Graphics Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 435–438, 1992. Reprinted in Clifford A. Pickover Ed. (1998). Chaos and Fractals: A Computer Graphical Journey — A 10 Year Compilation of Advanced Research. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. ISBN 0-444-50002-2

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Ship_fractal

The images described here are generated by analysing the following series for each point (c_x,c_y) on the plane.

The grey level assigned to each point (cx,cy) is determined by how fast the series tends to infinity. For example, the points shown in black in the center of the form don't ever diverge to infinity. The points shown in light grey diverge very quickly. This is exactly the same technique used to create the Mandelbrot image. In all cases the starting point (x0,y0) is (0,0).

This fractal gets its name from the images obtained by zooming into regions along y=0 (x axis) an example is shown below

Source code

This C source code gives the basic idea of how the images on this page were created. As it stands it is run given a centre coordinate, a image width in world coordinates, and the name of the output file. It writes a raw RGB or greyscale image, this can be opened with most image editors or you can modify the code to save the image in your favorite format.

Found Here: http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/fractals/burnship/

U.S. Cyber Command logo / 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

Researcher cracks 'secret' code in U.S. Cyber Command logo MD5 cryptographic hash translates into cyber defense command's mission statement

A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country's military networks from attack.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom's official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group's mission statement. MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. " Mr. Correll is correct...it's a MD5 hash," said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

"It wasn't very difficult," said Correll, adding that thanks to the clue on Wired.com's Danger Room blog, it took him just a few minutes to figure out that the characters -- 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a -- were the hash value for Cybercom's mission statement.

"I knew right away it was an MD5 hash, and I was fairly confident that it wasn't a specific file," said Correll, adding that security professionals will often use an MD5 hash as reminders, or to verify that a file's contents after downloading match the original edition.

Correll said he figured out the mystery shortly after 10 a.m. PT Wednesday, within an hour of Wired.com publishing its story.

At least one other code-breaker came up with the same solution. Buried in the nearly 500 comments added to the Wired.com story was the solution, posted Wednesday at 12:46 p.m. PT by someone identified only as "jemelehill".

In a follow-up story, Wired.com credited jemelehill with first decoding the message.

"Information security professionals are very challenge driven," said Correll, so tackling the problem was fun...while it lasted. "Absolutely, this was definitely fun," he said.

Correll is familiar with code-breaking problems, since Panda regularly sponsors secret code challenges. The next challenge is scheduled to go live at 3:00 a.m. ET Saturday, 12:00 a.m. PT.

The MD5 value is a hash of Cybercom's 58-word mission statement, Correll noted on his blog: "USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

Cybercom was created in June 2009, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved the group. Two months ago, the Senate appointed Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander as the head Cybercom. Alexander is also the director of the National Security Agency (NSA).

U.S. Cyber Command is part of the U.S. Strategic Command, and is based in Fort Meade, MD. Several units of the U.S. military, including ones from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines comprise Cybercom.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com.

Read more about Cybercrime and Hacking in Computerworld's Cybercrime and Hacking Topic Center.

Found Here: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179004/Researcher_cracks_secret_code_in_U.S._Cyber_Command_logo?taxonomyId=13

The Voynich manuscript

The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript suggests that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended. Here are only a few of them:

Herbal - The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.

Sunflowers - Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family - which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other species from all over the world.

Alchemy - The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed, etc.) or standard textual symbols (circle with cross, etc.); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Astrological herbal - Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise).

Microscopes and telescopes - A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable: on close inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like a pool of water.

Found Here: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages of handwritten text,^[1] of which the majority have illustrations.^[2] The text of the manuscript has never been deciphered, and the author, script, and language remain unknown.

Since its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and Britishcodebreakers of World War II fame, all of whom failed to decrypt any portion of the text. This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University as item "MS 408". The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.^[3]

The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain—specifically, a philosophical or a priori language. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organized according to a category system, so that the general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colors, and any word beginning with those letters would name a color: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the Library of Congress Classification used by many libraries—in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.)

This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.

In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintext^[25] This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read." His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of Middle Dutch with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words. transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue".

According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was none other than the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle.

This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism, and not in any way associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is several centuries earlier than most experts believe based on internal evidence. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Q3-85 - CARET Program - Isaac

The Technology

A lot of the technology we worked on was what you would expect, namely antigravity. Most of the researchers on the staff with backgrounds in propulsion and rocketry were military men, but the technology we were dealing with was so out of this world that it didn’t really matter all that much what your background was because none of it applied. All we could hope to do was use the vocabulary of our respective fields as a way to model the extremely bizarre new concepts we were very slowly beginning to understand as best we could. A rocket engineer doesn’t usually rub elbows much with a computer scientist, but inside PACL, we were all equally mystified and were ready to entertain any and all ideas.

The physicists made the most headway initially because out of all of our skills, theirs overlapped the most with the concepts behind this technology (although that isn’t saying much!) Once they got the ball rolling though, we began to find that many of the concepts found in computer science were applicable as well, albeit in very vague ways. While I didn’t do a lot of work with the antigrav hardware myself, I was occasionally involved in the assessment of how that technology was meant to interface with its user.

The antigrav was amazing, of course, as were the advances we were making with materials engineering and so on. But what interested me most then, and still amazes me most to this day, was something completely unrelated. In fact, it was this technology that immediately jumped out at me when I saw the Chad and Rajman photos, and even moreso in the Big Basin photos.

The “Language”

I put the word Language in quotes because calling what I am about to describe a “language” is a misnomer, although it is an easy mistake to make.

Their hardware wasn’t operated in quite the same way as ours. In our technology, even today, we have a combination of hardware and software running almost everything on the planet. Software is more abstract than hardware, but ultimately it needs hardware to run it. In other words, there’s no way to write a computer program on a piece of paper, set that piece of paper on a table or something, and expect it to actually do something. The most powerful code in the world still doesn’t actually do anything until a piece of hardware interprets it and translates its commands into actions.

But their technology is different. It really did operate like the magical piece of paper sitting on a table, in a manner of speaking. They had something akin to a language, that could quite literally execute itself, at least in the presence of a very specific type of field. The language, a term I am still using very loosely, is a system of symbols (which does admittedly very much resemble a written language) along with geometric forms and patterns that fit together to form diagrams that are themselves functional. Once they are drawn, so to speak, on a suitable surface made of a suitable material and in the presence of a certain type of field, they immediately begin performing the desired tasks. It really did seem like magic to us, even after we began to understand the principles behind it.

I worked with these symbols more than anything during my time at PACL, and recognized them the moment I saw them in the photos. They appear in a very simple form on Chad’s craft, but appear in the more complex diagram form on the underside of the Big Basin craft as well. Both are unmistakable, even at the small size of the Big Basin photos. An example of a diagram in the style of the Big Basin craft is included with this in a series of scanned pages from the [mistitled] "Linguistic Analysis Primer". We needed a copy of that diagram to be utterly precise, and it took about a month for a team of six to copy that diagram into our drafting program!

Explaining everything I learned about this technology would fill up several volumes, but I will do my best to explain at least some of the concepts as long as I am taking the time to write all this down.

First of all, you wouldn't open up their hardware to find a CPU here, and a data bus there, and some kind of memory over there. Their hardware appeared to be perfectly solid and consistent in terms of material from one side to the other. Like a rock or a hunk of metal. But upon [much] closer inspection, we began to learn that it was actually one big holographic computational substrate - each "computational element" (essentially individual particles) can function independently, but are designed to function together in tremendously large clusters. I say its holographic because you can divide it up into the smallest chunks you want and still find a scaled-down but complete representation of the whole system. They produce a nonlinear computational output when grouped. So 4 elements working together is actually more than 4 times more powerful than 1. Most of the internal "matter" in their crafts (usually everything but the outermost housing) is actually this substrate and can contribute to computation at any time and in any state. The shape of these "chunks" of substrate also had a profound effect on its functionality, and often served as a "shortcut" to achieve a goal that might otherwise be more complex.

So back to the language. The language is actually a "functional blueprint". The forms of the shapes, symbols and arrangements thereof is itself functional. What makes it all especially difficult to grasp is that every element of each "diagram" is dependant on and related to every other element, which means no single detail can be created, removed or modified independently. Humans like written language because each element of the language can be understood on its own, and from this, complex expressions can be built. However, their "language" is entirely context-sensitive, which means that a given symbol could mean as little as a 1-bit flag in one context, or, quite literally, contain the entire human genome or a galaxy star map in another. The ability for a single, small symbol to contain, not just represent, tremendous amounts of data is another counter-intuitive aspect of this concept. We quickly realized that even working in groups of 10 or more on the simplest of diagrams, we found it virtually impossible to get anything done. As each new feature was added, the complexity of the diagram exponentially grew to unmanageable proportions. For this reason we began to develop computer-based systems to manage these details and achieved some success, although again we found that a threshold was quickly reached beyond which even the supercomputers of the day were unable to keep up. Word was that the extra-terrestrials could design these diagrams as quickly and easily as a human programmer could write a Fortran program. It's humbling to think that even a network of supercomputers wasn't able to duplicate what they could do in their own heads. Our entire system of language is based on the idea of assigning meaning to symbols. Their technology, however, somehow merges the symbol and the meaning, so a subjective audience is not needed. You can put whatever meaning you want on the symbols, but their behavior and functionality will not change, any more than a transistor will function differently if you give it another name.

Here's an example of how complex the process is. Imagine I ask you to incrementally add random words to a list such that no two words use any of the same letters, and you must perform this exercise entirely in your head, so you can't rely on a computer or even a pen and paper. If the first in the list was, say, "fox", the second item excludes all words with the letters F, O and X. If the next word you choose is "tree", then the third word in the list can't have the letters F, O, X, T, R, or E in it. As you can imagine, coming up with even a third word might start to get just a bit tricky, especially since you can't easily visualize the excluded letters by writing down the words. By the time you get to the fourth, fifth and sixth words, the problem has spiraled out of control. Now imagine trying to add the billionth word to the list (imagine also that we're working with an infinite alphabet so you don't run out of letters) and you can imagine how difficult it is for even a computer to keep up. Needless to say, writing this kind of thing "by hand" is orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of the brain.

My background lent itself well to this kind of work though. I'd spent years writing code and designing both analog and digital circuits, a process that at least visually resembled these diagrams in some way. I also had a personal affinity for combinatorics, which served me well as I helped with the design of software running on supercomputers that could juggle the often trillions of rules necessary to create a valid diagram of any reasonable complexity. This overlapped quite a bit with compiler theory as well, a subject I always found fascinating, and in particular compiler optimization, a field that wasn't half of what it is today back then. A running joke among the linguistics team was that Big-O notation couldn't adequately describe the scale of the task, so we'd substitute other words for "big". By the time I left I remember the consensus was "Astronomical-O" finally did it justice.

Like I said, I could go on for hours about this subject, and would love to write at least an introductory book on the subject if it wasn't still completely classified, but that's not the point of this letter so I'll try to get back on track.

The last thing I'd like to discuss is how I got copies of this material, what else I have in my possession, and what I plan to do with it in the future.

Found Here: http://isaaccaret.fortunecity.com/

Judaculla Rock - Tsul'kalu'

The meaning of the Judaculla petroglyphs remain a mystery to us. In the late 1800's ethnologist James Mooney documented the Cherokee legend of Tsul'kalu', a slant eyed giant. Tsul'kalu' was considered a great hunter who lived in nearby mountains. As legend describes, the giant leaped down off his mountain to a creek below where he scratched the rock with his 7 fingered hands. Other versions say he scraped it with his toes. Over time the name Tsul'kalu' evolved to Judaculla.

Outcropping soapstone boulders behind Judaculla Rock show evidence of prehistoric quarrying scars where stone bowls were carved from the soft stone. A limited archaeological excavation in 1993 revealed quarrying tools as well. In the Southeastern U.S., soapstone bowls were being manufactured between the Late Archaic Period (3000 -1000 BC) to the early Woodland Period (Sassaman et al), (1000-200 BC), and so by association the glyphs may date to this period.

Found Here: http://www.cs.unca.edu/nfsnc/rock_art/judaculla.html