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Dave Oranchak's Throw the Book At Him

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Richard Grinell
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Dave Oranchak showed how a piece of text from a publication of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, fitted into the 408 cipher. In fact 46 consecutive characters were utilized. http://www.zodiackillerciphers.com/?p=144

Dave wrote "So, only one piece of text, from a vast collection of eleven billion pieces of text, fit into this chunk of cipher text. A one in eleven billion chance seems to suggest some significance. But don’t be fooled by this. Just because this rare event occurred, doesn’t mean it is anything more than a simple coincidence. If we didn’t already know the real solution to the 408, how do we know that this chunk of old and obscure text isn’t the correct solution?" When the rest of the 408 was decoded using Clarendon’s inserted text it was pure gibberish. Dave rightly stated that coincidences happen. But what I would like to know, bearing in mind the author of the 408 cipher may have had access to the Riverside library, is how many coincidences do we need before it’s not a coincidence anymore.

I looked at the preceding communication to the 408 cipher, that had any meaningful value. Therefore looked at the Riverside Desktop Poem. Its title was "sick of living/unwilling to die." So, I looked through more publications by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and found another of Edward Hyde’s quotes: “They who are most weary of life, and yet are most unwilling to die, are such who have lived to no purpose, — who have rather breathed than lived.” http://izquotes.com/quote/385232

For comparison "weary of life, unwilling to die" to "sick of living, unwilling to die." Although not identical, the Zodiac Killer may have gone on memory while titling the poem, and this reading material may have been available at the library. But the broader question is – how many coincidences eliminate doubt?

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon was also an avid user of ciphers as revealed here in literary manuscripts;
"Naturally a substantial portion of Clarendon’s surviving manuscripts comprises his personal correspondence — both letters received by him from numerous correspondents and his own letters, written or signed by him, whether drafts, retained copies, or the letters actually sent. Among many notable examples are his letters written in August 1646 to William, Lord Widdrington, and to Sir John Berkeley, announcing the beginnings of his History of the Rebellion, and the letter he wrote on 12 November 1646, to Sir Edward Nicholas, describing his plan for the work and stating that he had already completed sixty sheets of it. Some of his letters, particularly those dating from the Civil War period, are wholly or partly in cipher or make use of pseudonyms in both salutations and signatures. The codes to sixteen such ciphers used by the Royalists are written out in Bodleian, MS Clarendon 94, and see also British Library,"

St Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430), was a Roman African, Christian theologian, whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western Philosophy. He wrote ""I do not know whether I would have been willing to die for him in the way that Orestes and Pylades, if the story is true, were willing to die together for each other. And yet a strange feeling had grown in me, and it was very different from theirs; I was sick and tired of living but I was too afraid to die." St Augustine of Hippo wrote the Confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_(Augustine )

https://www.zodiacciphers.com/

“I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” Edward R. Murrow.

 
Posted : April 1, 2019 11:40 pm
(@pseudio)
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Even ten million coincidences added together may indeed just be ten million coincidences. Which is not to say that if you had ten million coincidences you shouldn’t investigate to see if there is something more to those coincidences. But it is certainly possible there may not be anything more to them. Adding coincidences one on to the other does not, in and of itself, eliminate doubt or necessitate some sort of meaning behind the coincidences.

Sure, there is only one piece of text from project gutenberg that fits those 46 characters of the cipher – but in a 408 character cipher, there are somewhere around 360 different 46 character sections you could isolate and search for matches in project gutenberg. Those character sections themselves are already enciphered to ‘mask’ the message of the entire cipher, meaning there is an intentionally introduced change from regular written English patterns to the cipher text. Furthermore, the exact 46 character section that Oranchak is discussing was chosen to search project gutenberg for matches specifically because it had a large number of repeated symbols in it, so that the number of pieces of text from project gutenberg that could fit it would be small.

If we pick chunks that have too few repeated symbols, then there are way too many solutions that will fit.

So, if we think ‘only one piece of text from the entirety of project gutenberg’s eleven billion characters of text fits this 46 character section of the 408 cipher’ it feels like it is so unlikely that it almost must mean something. But, if we think ‘searching project gutenberg’s eleven billion characters of text for matches with 360 different chunks of 46 character sections from a cipher, lots of those chunks did not have many repeated symbols in them and they had a lot of matches, some of those chunks had a lot of repeated symbols in them and had a few different matches, some of those chunks had a lot of repeated symbols in them and had no matches, and one of those chunks had a lot of repeated symbols in it and had only one match’ makes it seem less like that match must mean something. Don’t you think?

Not saying one should never look into whether there is anything more to a coincidence, it could mean something. Just saying I think this one is just that: a coincidence. Even with the other coincidences you mention, I think they are all just coincidences.

 
Posted : April 2, 2019 3:56 am
Richard Grinell
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Posts: 717
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Cheers for the reply, I suspect you are right.

https://www.zodiacciphers.com/

“I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.” Edward R. Murrow.

 
Posted : April 2, 2019 11:20 am
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