The finished socks

I did finish one other thing over break - the Appaloosa socks. These were knit from a Lisa Souza specialty-dyed yarn; the proceeds from the yarn sale went to help support a horse sanctuary.

I used a basketweave stitch on these. The version I used was out of the Charlene Schurch "Sensational Knitted Socks" book, which is mostly a compendium of different stitch patterns arranged to be knit in the round. There are lots of other basketweave patterns out there, too; I may even have a purchased pattern in my collection for a pair of basketweave stitch socks.



The basketweave stitch doesn't show up quite as much as I thought it would.

Still, they make nice socks.

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***

I also finished one book over break (and started two others). It's "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. He has chapters devoted to early codes (there's a long discussion of Mary, Queen of Scots' trial; part of the evidence centered on whether she authorized a certain plot or not, and some coded documents were found that implicated her). He also discusses the Navajo Code Talkers (and their earlier counterpart, the Choctaw Code Talkers - they were in WWI). The Navajo Code Talkers was a particularly brilliant thing - it was the one "code" (and not a code at all; just the men speaking in their native language and using terms like the Navajo word for "hummingbird" to refer to fighter planes) that was never broken in WWII - because Navajo is so different from any of the languages likely to be known to the Japanese. (The Navajo code talkers were widely used in the Pacific theater).

He also had a chapter or two dealing with Bletchley Park and the breaking of the Enigma code, including something I hadn't known - that the Poles had essentially cracked an early form of Enigma and used that in their resistance, until the Nazis came up with a tougher code, and then some of the Poles worked with the Brits to try to crack that....I guess eventually it took several very daring raids on U-Boats by Allied forces to get the key books, and then Enigma was broken.

The earlier codes were pretty simple - he discussed the Caesar substitution, which is essentially a letter-shift (so A in the "plaintext" would be represented by, say, C in code, B by D, and so on) and other types of simple substitutions (Like the "Cryptoquips" that some newspapers run with the crossword puzzle).

He also talked of an early cipher that was thought to be unbreakable (but was not) - the Vigenère cipher. This is a complex alphabetic substitution and there's a whole table of each possible substitution - the idea is, the person encrypting can use different lines of the table to multiply-encrypt their message, and it's harder to break without a key.

You can see a version of the "tabula recta" (that's what it's also called) here. And here's the funny thing: I looked at it and thought, "That looks like a potential layout for a simple quilt - you take 26 different fabrics, cut 26 squares or rectangles from them, sew them up, and you have a quilt.

And I think I might do that some time: it struck me this morning that it would be particularly clever to use typography-print fabrics (there are some out there; I have a few in my collection but certainly not 26 different ones; perhaps interspersing the letter-print fabrics with plain solid colors would also work).

One of the blurbs about the book was that you would feel smarter after having read it. And yeah, on one level, I guess so - I now understand a lot better how the layers of Internet encryption (at least as of 2000, when the book was first published), work, and I understand the Alice-and-Bob (and Eve) problem, and I know what RSA is. But on the other hand: several of the people profiled (including one of those who worked on the decipherment of Linear B - yes, figuring out a 'dead' language is akin to breaking a cipher) were VERY young. Like, they were breaking codes at an age where I was still making paper dolls.(And, okay: I was still making paper dolls at what would be considered an oddly old age today....kids grow up faster now than they did even in the late 70s and early 80s). Or they were freaking GENIUSES. And it reminds me that really, I'm not, that whatever "genius" I had mainly centered around being able to get good grades. And it makes me a little sad. I often feel that way when I read about someone who has that kind of single-minded purpose and who does a Big Thing because the Big Thing is their entire life.

I do lots of things, but they're all little things. And I'm not good at the leaps of logic or the big new creative ideas that some people have. I'm not sure why. I don't know if it's that I'm more afraid of failing (and of the concomitant having-wasted-my-time), or that I'm unwilling to sacrifice a lot of the little things I do in favor of focusing on one big thing, or that I just lack the capacity for those kind of big creative leaps.

I don't know. One of my friends in grad school claimed that the reason people watched shows like Jerry Springer was so that they could look at the people on them and go, "Well, at least my life isn't THAT bad." But I tend to look at people who did stuff like create encryptions that allow us to buy stuff from Amazon without the "bad guys" getting our credit card info, and I go "And I'm not making enough of a contribution to the world...."