kryptos

was reading a wired.com article today about kryptos, a sculpture by james sanborn that sits in one of the courtyards in CIA headquarters, made more famous by the execrable dan brown book that shall not be named. the sculpture contains a four-part cipher, of which three parts have been solved; one remains uncracked after 17 years. so yes, this is where my geek quotient bursts through the roof and keeps right on going, but i find the whole deal fascinating and terribly romantic, especially since the first three messages have been quite lovely. particularly:

message #3, paraphrased from the diary of howard carter, discoverer of king tut's tomb:

Slowly, desparatly (sic.) slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything? q

(the answer to which is: 'yes, wonderful things', thought to be a clue to decrypting the final piece of the code)

while recrunching some data, i starting meditating a little bit more on why the puzzle should appeal to me so, and i figure that one of the reasons is this: it's incredibly complex, and brilliant minds working on it for the better part of two decades have not yielded a solution, but unlike the other gordian puzzles of nature scientists work on, this one has a solution that a living somebody knows. so if our faith is that in Nature there is an answer, kryptos is our deliverance story, the sure sign, noah's rainbow, the parable that reaffirms our faith in the Truth being Out There.

and, for interest, the unsolved section:

?OBKR
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR