D. B. Weldon Notes. Who Is Behind It?

My curiosity got the better of me and I ran a search of people associated with Western University or the Weldon Library that had an interest in codes/ciphers and puzzles.

I found quite a few but one person stood out from the group. Mainly because he has such an interest in it and (that I could find) has not even mentioned the mystery notes.

He is an assistant professor there. An author of books on the same subject. All his interests would fit in with the social media aspect and the data that one could gleam from it.

I have spent most of my day reading about him. He is one cool dude!

Would it be wrong to post a name if it is just a guess? What do you think?

D. B. Weldon Notes…Update

I found something interesting. Another type of game was played in the same library in 2011.

A blog called “Intangible Harmonics” has an article posted. Here is a quote:

“In the D.B. Weldon library they followed a series of clues from book to book. You can see the results of the search on Adriana’s blog http://ayersa.wordpress.com/ and scans of the pages at http://www.captainsmith.wikispot.org/Library_Finds”

“Our players determined that Smith’s words were from an obscure poem called Tecumseh, Or The Warrior of the West by John Richardson. The players then somehow figured out that the words on the scrap of paper were in the Shawnee language, the same language spoken by the great Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa. The words were actually a library location code.”

The actual post from the ayarsa WordPress site can be found here.

They leave a link to the Museum of Ontario Archaeology that outlines the whole story.

Also mentioned this  Cipher translation site:

Sharky’s Vigenere Cipher

and

wiki’s  Polyalphabetic cipher might be a good read. Quote:

“A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. The Vigenère cipher is probably the best-known example of a polyalphabetic cipher, though it is a simplified special case. The Enigma machine is more complex but still fundamentally a polyalphabetic substitution cipher.”

The Alberti Cipher. A quote:

“Compared to previous ciphers of the time the Alberti Cipher was impossible to break without knowledge of the method. This was because the frequency distribution of the letters was masked and frequency analysis – the only known technique for attacking ciphers at that time – was no help.”

and Tabula recta. A quote:

“In cryptography, the tabula recta (from Latin tabula rēcta) is a square table of alphabets, each row of which is made by shifting the previous one to the left.”

This mystery is disrupting my sleep. I hope someone solves it soon.  🙂

Note: D. B. Weldon passed away in February, 2014.

D.B. Weldon Library Notes. Thought Number Three.

You can find out about the mystery notes here.

You can keep up-to-date on the D.B. Weldon Library Notes and my thoughts on Post One and Post Two.

Chaos Theory continued:

Chaos Theory according to wiki:

Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including meteorology, physics, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a paradigm popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.^[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.^[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.^[3][4] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. This was summarized by Edward Lorenz as follows:^[5]

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as weather.^[6][7] Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps.

Okay, I could be wrong about the Ivey Business School. It could be anyone taking a course involving any one of the disciplines mentioned above.

Another interesting article about using symbols as a means for counting and record keeping can be found here. It is titled  “Tokens of plenty: how an ancient counting system evolved into writing and the concept of abstract numbers.”

A quote from the article:

One, two, three, four…. We learn to count at such an early age that we tend to take the notion of abstract numbers for granted. We know the word “two” and the symbol “2” express a quantity that can be attached to apples, oranges or any other object. We readily forget the mental leap required to go from counting specific things such as apples to the abstract concept of number as an expression of quantity.

Just such a leap may have occurred roughly 5,000 years ago among people living in ancient Mesopotamia, a fertile region watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. Ten thousand years ago, counting was a concrete affair. Residents of small agricultural settlements kept track of their goods by maintaining stores of baked clay tokens–one token for each item, different shapes for different types of items. A marble-sized clay sphere would stand for a bushel of grain, a cylinder for an animal, an egg-shaped token for a jar of oil.

Hmmm…baked clay? The new note includes a brick.

Maybe this isn’t about any of the above but a way to show how people can take the same thing and turn it into whatever they choose. Just how many theories we can conjure up and mangle the original data or marketing test? LOL!

One of the more interesting things I happened to find was a book written by Ivar’s Peterson called “The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari”

I wish he had been my math teacher. I can’t stop reading it! Here is a quote from his book:

Mathematics encompasses the joy of solving puzzles, the exhilaration of subduing stubborn problems, the thrill of discerning patterns and making sense of apparent nonsense, and the immense satisfaction of nailing down an eternal truth. It is above all a human enterprise, one that is sometimes pursued simply for its own sake with nary a practical application in mind and sometimes inspired by a worldly concern but invariably pushed into untrodden territory. Mathematical research continually introduces new ideas and uncovers intriguing connections between old, well-established notions. Chance observations and informed guesses develop into entirely new fields of inquiry. Almost miraculously, links to the rest of the world inevitably follow.

With its system of theorems, proofs, and logical necessity, mathematics offers a kind of certainty. The tricky part lies in establishing meaningful connections between the abstract mathematical world that we create in our minds and the everyday world in which we live. When we find such links, mathematics can deliver accurate descriptions, yield workable solutions to real-world problems, and generate precise predictions. By making connections, we breathe life into the abstractions and symbols of the mathematicians’ games.

Intriguingly, the mathematics of randomness, chaos, and order also furnishes what may be a vital escape from absolute certainty—an opportunity to exercise free will in a deterministic universe. Indeed, in the interplay of order and disorder that makes life interesting, we appear perpetually poised in a state of enticingly precarious perplexity. The universe is neither so crazy that we can’t understand it at all nor so predictable that there’s nothing left for us to discover.

Isn’t that beautiful writing? Math just not be so scary after all.  🙂

Because of that, I am still sticking to my numbers, chaos and pattern theory.

D.B. Weldon Library Notes. Thought Number Two.

Continuing on from my last post.

Thought Number Two:

This may be way out there and grasping desperately at straws. But for fun I will add this:

I think the person is using or has an interest in Apache Software.

The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good.

Why?

Well, for one, check out the logo:

and this is on their site:

“Forest Hill, MD –03 March 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that the Apache Open Climate Workbench Project (a.k.a. “Apache Climate” or “Apache OCW”) has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Climate is a climate evaluation toolkit used to leverage model outputs from organizations such as the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), coupled with remote sensing data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other agencies.

“Collaboration and science go hand in hand so it’s great to see NASA, CORDEX, NARCCAP, universities from around the world, and the greater climate science community embracing Open Source and the ASF,” said Michael Joyce, Vice President of Apache Climate. “The Open Climate Workbench has had an amazing journey with a great team of contributors and I’m excited to see where it’s going.”

That could account for some of the books the notes have been found in.

Just saying…

 

 

 

 

D.B. Weldon Library Notes. Thought Number One.

I have decided to write several mini posts instead of one long boring one.

Please remember I am not claiming to be right or that I am anywhere close to being clever enough to solve the puzzle. I just want to play because it grabbed my interest. I have never even been inside a university let alone attended one.

I have an irrational fear of math and my highest grade in high school for it was 51%. I think my teacher just passed me to be nice. 🙂 (Not proud of it, just stating a fact.)

You can find these on my pinterest board:

Onto my first thought…

I think this  is the doing of a student or professor at Western’s Ivey Business School.

Why?

Because I can’t solve it using the alphabet! (smiles) All the pictograms I did, the publisher’s were kind enough to provide spaces, periods and question marks, making it easier to solve.

I’m not saying there isn’t a message. Any of the symbols might end up being used for them. The 2 “wall fish” are the things that keep making me second guessing myself. They could end up being quotes or brackets.

There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. (Presuming they are using it) I read there are 52 different symbols being used in the notes. Someone said there might be a simple explanation: Upper and lower case. (26 times 2 is 52)

There are also 52 cards in a deck…which leads me back to math and it being a numbers game.

It may not be the message, it may be about patterns. Making order out of chaos. Finding a pattern where we think one might not exist. The trick is to find a connection in what might seem random, then use it as way to count or to keep a record of. Statistics.

Just a thought…

My next one will be up shortly.

 

 

 

Remember The Cryptogram Notes at D.B. Weldon Library?

Remember The Cryptogram Notes at D.B. Weldon Library?

I can’t stop  thinking about them! Even though I will never solve it (way out of my league) I do love a good mystery.

I have come to my own theory and will post it some time today. It doesn’t solve it, just some thoughts.

Before I do, for those of you not aware of these notes, I will leave you with a list of sites where people are talking about it.

If there are more, please drop me a comment. I am not on twitter or facebook, which is probably where most of the action is. It ALMOST makes me want to join up because I am feeling left out of the loop!

Here is how it all started:

A professor at Western University blogged:

I was in the D.B. Weldon library at Western University on Sunday and discovered some form of cryptogram in one of the books in the 3rd floor stacks. This puzzle is really bothering me – I will pay $100 to anyone that can solve it.

His blog can be found here. It doesn’t seem to be updating or very active lately. I heard there has been a new note found but it has not been posted there. Questions are asked and not answered. But all the notes and information can be found there.

Since then, several people have been blogging about this puzzle.

The empty blog that was written on one of the notes can be found here.

Reddit has a section on it here.

Some awesome person has digitized the notes in MS paint. It can be found here. All 18 letters have been put neatly into one post here.

Maiza Strange has blogged about it here.

I’ll start working on my post and what I think it might be about. It could take a while. Until then, if you have something to add or want your stuff included in the list, drop me a comment.