This is the 200th blog post I've published. Thank you so much all you readers who make doing this worthwhile!
To mark the occasion, I've got a game for you excellent readers. I've made a cryptographic puzzle and encoded it into the base of my Feejee mermaid.
To mark the occasion, I've got a game for you excellent readers. I've made a cryptographic puzzle and encoded it into the base of my Feejee mermaid.
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| First up, a couple of shots of the mermaid sitting on its nice new base. Sculpture looks so much better when it's mounted on a base. |
The base is my acknowledgement of P. T. Barnum and his original mermaid, as well as being my signature. There are 120 characters in total, which doesn't allow for a very large message, but there are several in there and in two different languages which is not bad for a piece of text smaller than a tweet. I've used a mix of cryptography and steganography to encode the words, but none of the techniques I used are very sophisticated. I'm not trying to recreate Kryptos here, I wanted to make something that any moderately determined person can figure out.
So, let's get down to it. I mucked around with the contrast on these photos a bit, which will hopefully make it easier to see the letters - as you'll see contrast is quite important.
There is nothing encoded into the image files themselves or the blog text. Most steganography today relies on hiding data in digital files, but I haven't used any digital methods because this is, after all, a sculpture. If the message is actually hidden in a photo of the object, it isn't a cryptographic sculpture.
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| Image 1 |
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| Image 2 |
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| Image 3 |
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| Image 4 |
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| Image 5 |
There is nothing encoded into the image files themselves or the blog text. Most steganography today relies on hiding data in digital files, but I haven't used any digital methods because this is, after all, a sculpture. If the message is actually hidden in a photo of the object, it isn't a cryptographic sculpture.
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