At last! Jordan Himelfarb of the Toronto Star has managed to crack the mystery of the Weldon Ciphers, with nothing more than a well-judged bit of social probing.
Online forum member “+Myst0wn” had cleverly unearthed the owner’s page for the mysterious blog “000xyz.blog.ca” referenced on the back of each envelope. Jordan thought about the owner’s name (“Sculpture 2.0”), and decided it must be something to do with “social sculpture”, a kind of art that is defined by people’s reactions to encountering something unusual.
But how was he/she connected to Western University? Jordan found an art instructor there called Kelly Jazvac whose art interests seemed fairly similar: and it turned out, after some to-ing and fro-ing, that Jazvac had taught the (still unnamed) “Sculpture 2.0”.
“She explained that the Weldon code was an art project that came out of a second-year sculpture and installation class she taught in 2012. The artist, then an undergraduate student, placed 121 letters in the Weldon stacks and moved on with her or his (but probably her) life. Jazvac told me the artist was shocked by the project’s recent fame and wished to remain anonymous lest she be treated unkindly in the media. (The artist later declined my offer, via Jazvac, for an interview under the condition of anonymity.)“
So it was, after all, simply a puzzle-like thing composed of 26 upper case and 26 lower case letters in a hand-built font (one that the artist christened “Sculpture 2.0”), but with a meaningless plaintext, and left abandoned in the stacks at Weldon. A thing of oddness and careful beauty, defined more by people’s collective reactions to it than its actual internal content.
Bugger I thought I was on to a good one LOL
It seems to end like it started : how appropriate 🙂
George: I hate being proved right, it just gets people annoyed. 😐
Although I was hoping it was a real cipher, I suspected it was either a hoax or meaningless because of the first 17 letters not repeating. This might happen once but for it to happen 3 times on 3 different notes was pretty unlikely; even a polyalphabetic cipher would show some repeats.
This is not to say I didn’t bust my butt trying to solve it. I created the 52 character font and used it to chart all 3 frequency distributions, did all the standard crypto tests and even ran stats on each note comparing it to the others. Excel got a serious workout.
Good fun nonetheless, as I had put crypto aside for awhile in favour of lock picking – a very similar addiction. Maybe I’ll dig out my Dorabella work and bang my head against that for a bit.
Thanks for the update. Interesting that the lfpress story seems to indicate that actually Jordan Himelfarb is the art teacher Kelly Jazvac’s brother?! That would have significantly helped with the sleuthing, and would explain why he himself wrote it up as such a dramatically enhanced story.
I too enjoyed the sleuthing, and am glad to have some resolution.
Kudos to MystOwn too!
So, just another form of jabberwocky? Heh!
Well well…the first sixteen characters of the first Moustier cryptogram are non-repeating too. Now there’s a (nearly) coincidence…
SirHubert: it is certainly an interesting coincidence…
The reason the Weldon
CiphersNotes looked suspicious to my eyes was that the letter-to-letter contacts seemed unstructured (which would normally point either to modern machine cryptography or to transposition ciphers), yet I was pretty sure that I could eliminate both machine cryptography (too whimsical, and the instance frequency counts weren’t quite flat enough) and transposition (specifically because of an insertion in Note #20, which I found out about only in the last couple of days). Which didn’t really leave a lot of anything else to try.Perhaps it would be worth going back to the Moustier cryptogram with that experience under one’s belt, to see what we would now think of it, hmmm?
the documents portray an existent universal language , one especially loved by sensible children .
I don’t think he’s her brother… no evidence to suggest that anywhere.
Hello Nick,
Is it possible to use the Weldon Code table for a free OpenSource app which is published under the GNU License? The GC Wizard is a tool collection with also includes several symbol tables as the one. We were requested to add this after a user founds it in a museum (Geocaching Muzeum in Czech). We would be proud of receiving a permission 🙂
Kind regards
Mark on behalf of GC Wizard
Hi Mark,
This blog post has everything I know on the topic (which isn’t really that much). I guess the original author has left the stadium (and so probably isn’t patrolling this), but you could ask Jazvac, she may have a more definitive answer than anything I could throw your way.
Cheers, Nick
Was it a serious cipher? Looks to me as if an alphabet has its letters provided randomly-assigned graphics from some such font as Dingbats, potentially reproduceable in 3-D as elements that could be used to create sculpture. But that’s just a guess from the context provided.
Nick Pelling: I refer to Steve Hurwood’s posting as Sisyphus on Tbt today’s date that includes in part her admission that “A few years before then (2020) I was posting as Robert Nowak..etc.” Sure Peteb won’t mind if the full wording be included here as evidence of her deception from August 2022 when she posting under alias ‘Anne O’ then others to numerous to mention up until now.
One one was a race horse; two two was one too; one one won one race and two two won one too..as in ‘too numerous to mention up until now’. Don’t know why her emphatic denial, possibly because she also claims to be a full blown Brit and not Australian which be debatable too, based on contradictory evidence to hand.
John – many ‘full blown Brits’ have Australian residence or citizenship. If they prefer to present themselves as one or the other is their choice, but given the massive prejudice against Australians in England (because so many British-born criminals and ne’er do wells used to be sent there), a preference for claiming one’s British-ness is understandable, I think.
Diane
I class myself as a Brit because I am British. I spent two years in Australia in the ’80s and haven’t been back since. No relations in Oz at all as far as I know although a famous cricketer from Qld shared my (uncommon) surname. I am not prejudiced against Aussies unless their name is John Sanders, who seems to take a great delight in maligning other contributors here especially if they are female, which I am not, although he insists on referring to me as “she”. Seemingly in his world being a woman is a state of existence much to be derided, mocked and attacked in the most depressingly familiar reactionary old git manner imaginable. Yawn. Double yawn.
Syph: thanks for clearing that mystery up, I could’ve sworn you were a full blown sheila at first blush, then you done changed your name from Ann O to Bob Dylan and so on down the line to suit your antsie fancy backed by perverse slang. And so all our other Farce book straight lace lovelies knew at once they’d found in you a champion for sublime misandristic rites to promote their Dorothy cause be celibre.
PS: want to know whence the handle Syph derived, you’d be gob smacked, Indeed, guaranteed!