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animation, peace, video, working together in Art, Inspirational, Videos | Permalink | Print Article Saturday, July 4, 2009 at 9:13AM "A democracy cannot be both ignorant and free." - Thomas Jefferson
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 9:22AM "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book." - Groucho Marx
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 9:17AM macabre (muh-kah-bruh) - adjective
Macabre means " gruesome and horrifying; ghastly; horrible."
First used in the written form around 1400–1450. Macabre is now generally used for "ghastly," but that is a late 19th-century development. It originated in the very specific phrase dance macabre, which denoted a dance in which a figure representing death enticed people to dance with him until they dropped down dead. This was borrowed from the French danse macabre, which was probably an alteration of an earlier danse Macabe. This in turn was a translation of medieval Latin chorea Machabaeorum (dance of the Maccabees), which is thought originally to have referred to a stylized representation of the slaughter of the Maccabees (a Jewish dynasty of biblical times) in a medieval miracle play.
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French, Latin, Maccabees, etymology, macabre, word, word origin, words in Etymology, Word of the Day | Permalink | Print Article Thursday, July 2, 2009 at 2:07PM I thought that this article by Rachel Emma Silverman in the Wall Street Journal was so fascinating that I just had to share. Enjoy!
Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code
For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.
The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.
Robert PattersonIn this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. "The art of secret writing," or writing in cipher, has "engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages," Mr. Patterson wrote. But, he added, most ciphers fall "far short of perfection."
To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."
Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.
There is no evidence that Jefferson, or anyone else for that matter, ever solved the code. But Jefferson did believe the cipher was so inscrutable that he considered having the State Department use it, and passed it on to the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston.
The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.
A couple of years ago, Dr. Smithline's neighbor, who was working on a Jefferson project at Princeton University, told Dr. Smithline of Mr. Patterson's mysterious cipher.
