Here's the video announcing the cracking and explaining the lengthy process.
Don't get excited about the message.
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH
The English words— revealed at long last — feel banal in comparison to the page full of mystifying symbols. What if all the great mysteries are grander left in the form of mystery?
But yes, hooray for nerds who figured it out, and I'm glad they demystified this murderer who somehow captivated so many people for so long and made a complicated code but didn't know how to spell "paradise."
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39 comments:
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
He got away with murder. Just like Joe Biden.
We have terrible police!
At least he didn't have a pairadice.
I figgered his "message" was random-ish gibberish, and that turned out to be pretty close.
I'm pretty sure Ted Cruz knows how to spell paradise.
I thought one of the things we did know about the zodiac killer was that he was a bad speller, which is why his code was so tough to crack. Tolstoy said it best: All correctly spelled words are alike; each misspelled word is misspelled in its own way.
So is that true? If you kill someone, they have to be your slave in the afterlife?
What if you just ran over them accidentally because you were drunk or something?
Asking for a friend.
There’s an association between spatially or algebraically reasoning (as found in cryptography) and not always caring about spelling and pronunciation, though I suspect the ‘c’ and ‘s’ swap might come from phonetics, a poorer education and not reading enough. Could be a different error.
Also, there’s a high correlation between serial killers and crazy.
In wanting to track somebody down, a message like this is extremely valuable, like a flash of light across a dark, desert plain.
Also, this guy sounds like a real jerk!
richlb's 6:29 made it no longer a waste of time.
Maybe he didn’t know how to spell “pair of dice”.
If the Zodiac's right, I better get my shit together. I don't really want to be doing my dishes and stuff in paradice.
Makes me wonder if 50 years from now we will read an article about how the FBI finally figured out how the DNC stole the 2020 presidential election (i.e., verified proof). Nah - that would incriminate the FBI...
And anyway, at this point (in 2070), what difference does it make, comrade?
But yes, hooray for nerds who figured it out, and I'm glad they demystified this murderer who somehow captivated so many people for so long and made a complicated code but didn't know how to spell "paradise."
Why do you assume they’re nerds? One mathematician I know races cars and was an All-American athlete. Typical feminist bigotry.
"So is that true? If you kill someone, they have to be your slave in the afterlife?"
Reminds me of the idea of burying the dead Pharaoh with his live servants:
'The practice of human sacrificial burials in Egypt, presumably to coincide with the pharaoh's own funeral, had long been suspected but never substantiated. Now it has been for the first time, and Dr. David O'Connor of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts said the discovery was ''dramatic proof of the great increase in the prestige and power of both kings and the elite'' as early as the first dynasty of the Egyptian civilization, beginning about 2950 B.C.... The discovery team, organized by N.Y.U., Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, found six graves next to the ruins of a mortuary ritual site dedicated to the departed Aha, the first pharaoh of the first dynasty, and not far from his tomb. Five of the graves have been excavated, yielding skeletons of court officials, servants and artisans that appear to have been sacrificed to meet the king's needs in the afterlife.... 'We may think of the ritual slaughter of a large number of retainers as a bit barbaric,'' Mr. Adams said, but the ancient Egyptians may have come to look upon the sacrifices as passports to eternal life, a guarantee of immortality accompanying their king into the afterlife.
A bit more than 60 years ago "Stranger in Paradise" was a very popular song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFrUsa5SUv0
Of course we, virgins all, sang it as "stranger with a pair of dice".
richlb suggests: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
I'm pretty sure it was an Ovaltine label I sent in to get my Captain Midnight Decoder Ring. When I finally got it, the series was over.
Reminds me of the idea of burying the dead Pharaoh with his live servants:
And there's this:
"The burning of wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands, widow-burning, commonly known as sati ("suttee" in English), has been practiced in India since at least the fourth century B.C.E. , when it was first recorded in Greek accounts. It was banned by British colonial law in 1829–1830 and survived in the native Indian states until the late 1880s, when it was effectively eradicated, although extremely rare cases persisted into the early twentieth century."
Although sati was generally voluntary...a suicide, essentially...by a woman who worried her husband might be just be happy in the afterlife.
Given the popular image of serial killers as people who are (or think they are) diabolically clever, the misspellings may have been intentional, and intended either to mislead the police or to conform to an image of serial killers as bad spellers (something that goes back to Jack the Ripper).
But if you thought you were diabolically clever would you really intentionally want to look uneducated? Serial killers are vain in that way. And if you really were devilishly brilliant wouldn't you be able to find better things to do than shoot at couples in parked cars?
Maybe Zodiac, like Son of Sam, had gone so far into delusion that he developed some mad religion of his own, but (maybe because of popular culture) it's hard to shake the idea that he wasn't having his little jokes with us.
Why do you assume they’re nerds? One mathematician I know races cars and was an All-American athlete.
Okay, so they can be assholes, too. But there's an "it takes a nerd to catch a nerd" subtext here that's hard to resist. Will it take a serial killer to catch Zodiac, assuming he's still out there? A real-life Hannibal Lecter?
Although sati was generally voluntary...a suicide, essentially...by a woman who worried her husband might be just be happy in the afterlife.
Ha. Ha. A suicide by a woman whose family and community didn't want to have to support her and so they pressured her to do the "dutiful thing".
Egyptian religion must be a lot older than the first pharaoh, or was the mass killing sprung on his non-union servants?
Hostess: But yes, hooray for nerds who figured it out
Alan Turing was a nerd by your definition and might have preferred that to dying "as a criminal, having been convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical castration." (NYTimes). But certain derogatory terms are okay with liberals (such as "redneck" and "Bible thumpers" and the like). If you use one of the non-approved labels of the protected groups, you might be cancelled.
Corrected: "hooray for the geniuses who figured it out"
On the burning of surviving wives:
Charles James Napier > Quotes > Quotable Quote
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati religious funeral practice of burning widows alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.]”
Presumably "paradice death" means that death will be a paradise for him. Paradice Death.
"What if all the great mysteries are grander left in the form of mystery?"
During a horror movie the tension is so much more when you don't know the dimensions of the evil force. Once revealed, and you know what you're dealing with, it's not so bad.
So it took 50 years to figure this out. But that covid vaccine is gonna work great the first time?
“ During a horror movie the tension is so much more when you don't know the dimensions of the evil force. Once revealed, and you know what you're dealing with, it's not so bad.”
Makes me think of the Twilight Zone where death turns out to be Robert Redford.
Nothing in the Dark.
With computers being very powerful for the last 30 years or so, what took so long?
This looks to be a very trivial problem for microprocessor...
"Although sati was generally voluntary...a suicide, essentially...by a woman who worried her husband might be just be happy in the afterlife."
Jeez, maybe the poor guy just wanted to get away from the old biddy.
Reminds me of the old joke:
Why do husbands usually die before their wives?
Because they want to.
He still isn't known, and the misspellings are likely purposeful.
Known murder sites are local for me, and I remember when Blue Rock Springs Park was a gravel area with telephone poles laying down against which one parfed. The rest was undeveloped.
Why do you assume they’re nerds?
Anyone who is better than Althouse (a large assembly) at anything, must have some defect. Althouse is the kind of person who cannot stand to know that others excel her.
It seems to me that if you want to make a code harder to break, you misspell all the words.
Ralph L said...
Egyptian religion must be a lot older than the first pharaoh, or was the mass killing sprung on his non-union servants?
12/12/20, 10:01 AM
The First Dynasty were the first kings over united Egypt: prior to this, there were hundreds of years of rule in Upper and Lower Egypt, with their own royal lines, religions, etc. So yeah, human sacrifice no doubt predates the First Dynasty.
The Pharaohs created a good incentive for their servants to keep them healthy and safe.
It's really fascinating to imagine what happened to that little fuck, Zodiac. Something stopped him. Did he die, get crippled in an accident, find Jesus, get murdered, protoCovid?
Maybe he learned to code.
Paradice have only four sides.
"The name most commonly put forth as the man likely to be the Zodiac is convicted child molester and Navy veteran Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo. However, he died at 58 of a heart attack in 1992 before police could build enough of a case to charge him."
- Actual facts printed by the SF Chronicle, news in itself.
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