Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

Esherymack t1_ja7wpcu wrote

Reply to TIL: The concept of steganography which is the hiding of messages in plain sight. For example, Phyllis Latour Doyle (British spy) parachuted into France to spy on Nazis before D-day. She used knitting to record messages. by Geek_Nan

this is actually something i've studied! As an avid knitter and software engineer I had to take cryptology classes in school, and it was the topic of one of my research projects.

Knitting is ultimately a binary system (knit, purl) and as such it's fairly straightforward to figure out how to send messages on a basic level (say, assign a "knit" as a 1 and a "purl" as a 0). this is at least suspected to be similar to the method Madame DeFarge used in "A Tale of Two Cities", underneath a further level of code (although instead of calling it binary, we can assume certain combinations of knit/purl = a singular letter). I've also done encoded lace in base-16, morse, and binary in colorwork.

I believe it got to the point that during one of the world wars, the sale of knitting patterns was prohibited overseas for fear of sending encoded messages. Alas, they did not forbid the sale of or shipping of knitted objects.

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bhillen83 t1_ja7vdg7 wrote

Reply to comment by RealJonathanBronco in TIL: The concept of steganography which is the hiding of messages in plain sight. For example, Phyllis Latour Doyle (British spy) parachuted into France to spy on Nazis before D-day. She used knitting to record messages. by Geek_Nan

I stumbled onto the cicada stuff when I was in school for my BA in info systems. Really interesting stuff. Especially when we were learning about steganography in our security classes.

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carcinoma_kid t1_ja7tugw wrote

Reply to comment by PrettyText in TIL a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English sent their own Armada to Spain, leading to similar losses of ships and men, and an ignominious English defeat by malektewaus

>While the UK was obviously important in WW2, frankly its role is a bit overstated while the Soviet Union’s role is a bit understated

I would say ‘a bit’ is an understatement in itself. The British lost 800,000 soldiers. The Americans lost 400,000. The Soviets lost possibly up to 14,000,000. Only one in 5 Russian men born in 1926 lived past 1945. They absolutely won the war for the Allies, and did so with unimaginable losses.

Edit: corrected numbers

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TheRealVillain666 t1_ja7tqaw wrote

Reply to comment by PrettyText in TIL a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English sent their own Armada to Spain, leading to similar losses of ships and men, and an ignominious English defeat by malektewaus

We were taught "the good bits" in school where we explored new worlds, brought civilization to savages, etc but I learned more about English history when I left school than when I was in school.

We stole, plundered and enslaved en route to our explorations.

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Perpetual_Doubt t1_ja7t4qt wrote

Reply to comment by malektewaus in TIL a year after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the English sent their own Armada to Spain, leading to similar losses of ships and men, and an ignominious English defeat by malektewaus

One of the reasons not to mention it was that England was a second rate power at the time. This is easy to miss given the later strength of the british empire - but back in the 16th century the Spanish Empire was one of, if not the most powerful nation in the world.

If I remember correctly the English Armada was meant to be opportunistic raids, while the Spanish Armada planned to entire subdue the English kingdom. This makes the former's humiliating failure far less significant than that of the Spanish Empire's.

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