Unfortunately, when I opened it up, I saw the first comment which included a correct guess.

Could you remove the #cutid1 from the URL?

Possibly append ?mode=reply to the URL to hide all comments from view.

But the Queen flow chart is neat. Thanks for pointing out the community.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:21 PM by Lis Riba

All done as you suggest.

Linking to the Queen flowchart was Patrick's doing. He got me going on these things.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:28 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Got it! Unfortunately, I had only gotten as far as svkngvat ba gur
yvggyr ercrngvat jbeq va gur ynfg irefr -- yn? on? -- jura V abgvprq
gur gnt, "Enzbarf," ba gur ragel. That was all I needed to make the
leap. I feel sorta cheated. Or like I sorta cheated. One of those.

But I got to learn about gur Funivna nycunorg! Groovy.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:31 PM by Andrew Willett

I recognized the phonetic writing system immediately— I've been
putting off getting a tattoo for two years now written in that system
using a font I designed— and I know all the words to the song by heart.

By the way, there are several free fonts you can
download from various sources. Sadly, the last time I tried to post to
MakingLight with one of them, the Movable Type system decided it didn't
like the extended Unicode characters.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:32 PM by j h woodyatt

I looked at it for a while, saw the patterns, scratched my head, and
nothing clicked. Then I scrolled down and encountered that first
comment. ={Light Bulb Moment}= It turns out there's a very good reason I couldn't get it -- I've never heard the song.

I googled the lyrics, but... well... I suppose it must have a catchy tune.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:38 PM by Sylvia Li

And the tag for the post is a clue.

Posted March 3, 2008 10:51 PM by Avram

I'm trying to figure out the world in which Sylvia Li lives, and
whether it would be worth visiting for a period of time. Scarily, I
suspect it might be.

(Of course, my instinct on glancing was "Doo-Wah Diddy," which I
consider precursive to the solution, but which is such a bad clue it's
probably not giving anything away.)

Posted March 3, 2008 10:52 PM by Ken Houghton

I've never heard the song, but I could read the words. I've seen the Funivna nycunorg before

Posted March 3, 2008 10:57 PM by Marilee

Sylvia, judge for yourself.

Avram, if there's a way to turn off tags, I must have done it.

Posted March 3, 2008 11:07 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

I am going to have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the
night. (It took glancing at the second-to-last stanza to get it, and
realizing how the writing system worked.)

Posted March 3, 2008 11:15 PM by Nomie

I didn't get the song, but I did recognize the Funivna nycunorg right away. I can't read it, but I recognize it.

Good song. Not one of the artist's best, but good nonetheless.

Posted March 3, 2008 11:18 PM by ethan

you're
all welcome for the Queen flowchart (wire_mother = me). i didn't create
it, and it was pointed out to me by others, but i figured that was a
good place to put it.

Posted March 3, 2008 11:32 PM by c.

Put me on the same planet as Sylvia Li. I just never liked that
group, and didn't listen to their music. From the patterns, however, I did recognize the song, from the rockabilly cover by Two Tons of Steel. I could only find this long, boozy clip. The song starts about a minute in. The recorded version is much, much faster.

Posted March 3, 2008 11:57 PM by LMB MacAlister

I didn't get it. Was never good at this sort of thing. Oh well, glad someone is.

Posted March 4, 2008 1:18 AM by Greg London

What are 'normal methods' except patterns? Maybe I just have a broad definition of patterns, to include letter-counting in it.

I've never seen either song or writing system before. I started off
looking at the broader patterns because if something in those makes
one's brain click then it's easy to verify; when that didn't work I
looked at the one-letter words and thought approximately, "That's too
many. Yet this is bound to be English. ...I can't be bothered counting letters, I'll cheat."

In retrospect, counting letters doesn't work all that well with
something this short: working from the answer, eliminating the
blatantly repeated phrases, and counting the etaoins letters, which is
all I can
remember of the standard English order, I get a frequency order of
approximately otneasi - the last three trailing behind significantly -
which would have put me at least right off the trail.

I like the concept of deciphering, but I lack the patience to
actually do it myself. Fortunately cheating is the oldest standard
method in the book.

Posted March 4, 2008 1:37 AM by Zeborah

You know its a good puzzle when squinting actually helps.

Posted March 4, 2008 2:10 AM by Gursky

There's a big reason why conventional cryptanalysis doesn't work well. Go read
Shelock Holmes, and the Dancing Men story. It's a pretty decent
description of the process. (Though there are a couple of errors in the
account.)

But there are only so many single-character words in English, and
the single-character words in the puzzle just don't make sense when you see how the characters are used in other words.

So it's a cipher that can't be cracked with the frequency tables of standard English text. But it's no more secure than a cipher in French or Latin.

Anyway, Sherlock Holmes hadn't enough text to get anything from
frequency analysis. He had to look for patterns. But it's still a
simple substitution cipher.

(The Playfair cipher, which Lord Peter and Harriet crack, is more
difficult because it works on letter pairs. But it is manipulated by
the author to be crackable--words such as "Warsaw" can leave a distinctive clue, if they fit the digraph boundaries.)

Posted March 4, 2008 5:18 AM by Dave Bell

I'd never heard the song either, or (so far as I know) anything else by the Ramones.

Posted March 4, 2008 6:06 AM by David Goldfarb

Oh dear. I recognized the alphabet instantly. But that is my
specialty. And I'm laughing my ass off at seeing one of my favourite
songs from my distant and misspent youth chosen as the text. I've got
it on my iPod right now.

Posted March 4, 2008 6:43 AM by Scott Martens

David@18, The Ramones were interesting enough to be in the BBC's recent (and good) Seven Ages of Rock series.

digging down into the site, it says The Ramones was an American rock band often regarded as the first punk rock group.

The bit I remember from the series was they were talking with the
members of the band and they said they looked at the music around them
and saw stuff like Jimi Hendrix that would take years of guitar
practice to achieve and said they wanted to make music that anyone
could play.

The descriptor for their first album is "14 songs under 3 minutes, and every one a classic."

The series was really interesting. It tried to show all the
different, big rock bands in context of each other and how they
influenced each other in one way or another. And it had a lot of
interview bits of the artists from the time periods in question.

I don't know what the music experts think about the series, but a guy like little ol' me liked it.

Posted March 4, 2008 7:54 AM by Greg London

One thing I love about the Ramones is that they said they wanted to
sound like the girl groups of the early 60s, but faster. And they did.
And yeah, according to me at least they invented punk, onstage at the
Performance Studio on March 30, 1974.

They're also one of several artists (also including Leonard Cohen
and John Lennon) whom Phil Spector supposedly forced to do things they
didn't want to in the studio at gunpoint. I don't know if it's true
about any of them, but it's a good story anyway.

Posted March 4, 2008 8:33 AM by ethan

I've never broken a single-letter-substitution encryption by counting letters. In the easiest cases, you look for a three-letter word that's behaving like the.
Figure out which letters it corresponds to, and write in T, H, and E
wherever else they occur. That should turn up some obvious character
strings like TH-T and THE-. That will give you A and N. Fill those in too. Keep looking for words that have become obvious.

If you've got a recurring three-letter word that doesn't behave like THE, see whether it's YOU.

Posted March 4, 2008 8:37 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Ugh. Now I feel like V arrq gb or frqngrq. I tried a frequency count, and felt the first tremble of insanity as I reached 26 characters--and it kept going.
I right now have a piece of paper with "38!!!!!" scribbled on it. That,
plus the five different lone characters, made me feel like a
lobotomized freshman.

I guess I'll go take out my frustration on my irritating younger
sibling.* It's either that or start howling at the moon. If that
happens, don't hesitate to give me shock treatment. But not too much--I
want to live through my psych therapy. You'll know the right amount, I'm sure. That's what I like about you.

*Hey, it's not my fault! What am I supposed to do with a brat like that?

Posted March 4, 2008 8:52 AM by heresiarch

Since I'm not familiar with the group, the song, or the writing system, I'm glad I gave up quickly and read the replies.

Posted March 4, 2008 9:58 AM by Joel Polowin

I kept at it for a while (rotating and flipping the graphic to see if that helped), then read the thread. If it had been a song I knew, well, maybe...

Posted March 4, 2008 10:24 AM by Kip W

My world?

It's a world in which, while growing up, I actively didn't like
Elvis, and was vastly underimpressed by most of the top 50 songs of
that era. I was a bit older than the true Beatlemania generation, so,
at the time, they were no more than a weird curiosity to me. (I've
since come to appreciate their musicianship, but at the time I couldn't
get past the still-strong resemblance to all that music I hadn't liked.)

I happily had no contact at all with popular music in the 1970s, and
very little in the 80s until my young-teen daughter went nuts over
Duran Duran, and my son started listening to a lot of Queen. (That's
not all I heard, starting then, but it'll give you
the genres.) Then my son got into hand drumming and bass guitar, which
mostly led me into an appreciation of world-beat alternative music, the
kind you'll
hear at a con's music circle. If I heard of the Ramones at all, I
connected them vaguely with a revival of the kind of pop music I'd
disliked when I was fifteen.

It helped, I suppose, that I got bored with TV (except for nightly newscasts) around the mid-70s.

Posted March 4, 2008 10:36 AM by Sylvia Li

Folks looking for a good timewaster along these lines ought to check out the alternative writing systems page at Omniglot.Com.

Posted March 4, 2008 11:07 AM by j h woodyatt

Re#22, as a teen, I was addicted to GAMES Magazine's puzzles, and
could even solve some of the cryptograms where they eliminated
word-spacing.

I'm woefully out of practice, but still remember a few tips.

Generally speaking, one-letter words are A or I.

The top 3-letter words I look for are THE and AND.

But usually the first pattern I look for is THAT. Relatively common,
easy-to-spot, and a great key to unlocking other words by revealing the
TH.

Posted March 4, 2008 11:46 AM by Lis Riba

Add me to the list of people who had never heard of the song.

Posted March 4, 2008 11:48 AM by Mary Aileen

22: counting letters is good if your opponent hasn't put in any word breaks - or if you're trying to break a Vigenere cipher (you will need: LOTS of ciphertext and a few fortuitous repetitions).

(minor spoiler)

I always liked the cryptanalysis bit in "Enigma" where the analyst comes up with a plaintext of

HRUKBPTAKFDZENAJEWI...

and assumes he's done something wrong, when in fact it's a list of Polish names:

Hruk, B; Ptak, F; Dzenajewicz, K...

Posted March 4, 2008 1:11 PM by ajay

The Adventure of the Dancing Men

FM-34-40-2: Basic Cryptanalysis

Posted March 4, 2008 2:01 PM by Dave Bell

I'd never heard of the song.

Posted March 4, 2008 2:10 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Greg @ #20, glancing at the tag cloud at the BBC site, I have to
wonder how comprehensive it is. U2 gets more mention than The Beatles?
Bob Dylan is barely mentioned? The Yardbirds are bigger than The Who?

I know, everyone's a critic, but I was a big music buyer back then, and I feel like I know a little about it.

Posted March 4, 2008 2:17 PM by Linkmeister

Frankly, no. I don't even get to the decoding stage, as the text size is so small that it's too much of a struggle to read. It's made me realise that I normally read this site on partial guesswork and finally delurk to ask why you have set the site up so I can't alter the text size on screen.

Posted March 4, 2008 3:18 PM by Spacetime for Springers

And then and only then I finally notice the sidebar that lets me alter text size. That's the last time I delurk anywhere.

Posted March 4, 2008 3:20 PM by Spacetime for Springers

My favourite text on cryptography is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. Okay, it's the only book on cryptography I've read since the little Usborne books on pig-pen code etc when I was a kid. But I did devour it; it was beautifully readable.

If anyone's looking for a real challenge, try deciphering the Voynich manuscript.(1)

(1) May or may not involve Roger Bacon, sunflowers and capsicums,
Manchu, glossolalia and/or various other fascinatingly far-fetched
theories.

Posted March 4, 2008 5:54 PM by Zeborah

But Spacetime, if I may call you that, when you delurked (uncloaked?) you got a positive result! You found what you wanted to.

OK, there was some embarrassment involved, but sheesh, that's
probably almost a requirement of getting involved. I suspect there
would hardly be any one of us who've commented here who hasn't spent
some time picking shoe-leather from between our teeth, or at the very
least felt a hot flush of 'oopsie' at something only we ourselves
noticed.

History: The threads dealing with adding the font size change function (hello Dori Smith) are back around August 2006, e.g., Typography and Its Discontents, and Hard-won convenience.
(The Fluorosphere Picnic Grounds pictured there is one of those places
I'd like to visit if I ever travel to the North American continent.)

Posted March 4, 2008 6:12 PM by Mez

I got far enough to work out that it wasn't any kind of alphabetic
substitution and that the repetition pattern of the song didn't ring
any bells. Then I peeked at the word "Funivna" on this page, which led
me to the solution. I don't know the song and I've never seen the
alphabet before. Interestingly though, it's got a lot in common with
the code I used to write my diary in as a teenager, except that my code
had a lot more abbreviations.

Posted March 4, 2008 7:23 PM by Eleanor

Zeborah @ 36: I love the Codebook! It's quite excellent, and I
especially enjoyed the appendices, with examples of actual coded
messages for the reader to decipher.

Posted March 4, 2008 10:00 PM by heresiarch

34.35:

To save Teresa the trouble ofl telling yet another ignorant person this:

Try hitting the "command" and "+" keys at the same time. On most
websites this works three times, enlarging the text font two points (I
think) with each repetition. (On ill-designed sites this may make for
unpleasant formatting problems, but maybe we can blame it on Microsoft.)

I've been grateful to Teresa at least four times a day since she
described this technique (which, I suppose, is too basic for most of
The Experts who write computer books to even mention), though I expect
the frequency will decrease in about six weeks when I get computer
glasses adjusted to the new, unclouded-by-cataract, plastic lens that
was implanted yesterday.

Posted March 4, 2008 10:00 PM by Don Fitch

Hello Spacetime! Do you by any chance write poetry? Or make puns?

Posted March 4, 2008 10:58 PM by Nancy C. Mittens

I recognized the song, but what is the alphabet?

Is it shorthand or something?

Posted March 4, 2008 11:22 PM by Erik Nelson

And as long as we're discussing songs, look here to find the number one song on your birthday, or other historic dates.

Posted March 5, 2008 1:46 AM by Marilee

Cryptogram fans should know that Cliff "The Fool's Errand" Johnson's web site has a daily one using quotes from The Devil's Dictionary. Usually they're pretty easy, because most of them start with "The ... is", which gets you a bunch of common letters.

Posted March 5, 2008 3:43 AM by David Goldfarb

Got the song right away -- the final verse was a give-away -- and
felt like a genius for about a minute, until I found out what the
alphabet was. I once read an entire book in that alphabet, and I didn't recognise it at all.

Posted March 5, 2008 10:22 AM by Matthew B.

Until I turn 18, the list of songs I like which are on that list, is pretty good. After that, "the kids today".

Posted March 5, 2008 12:53 PM by Terry Karney

Marilee #43: Ugh, mine is "Chariots of Fire".

Posted March 5, 2008 6:05 PM by ethan

Terry, I was okay for about 30 years, but the last twenty? I didn't even know most of the artists.

ethan, maybe you're destined to ride the Sun!

Posted March 5, 2008 11:53 PM by Marilee

I'd heard of the song, and had heard it, or parts of it, at least
once (thanks for the YouTube, Teresa), but never would have gotten it.

Posted March 6, 2008 11:21 AM by Leslie in CA

I kept the dratted window open for... until now. And then I caved because there was a chance I'd never get it and I wanted to read the comments here.

That's one of my favorite songs to play on Guitar Hero. Other than
that, eh. There wasn't anything I could hook onto except the obvious
patterns, and they didn't help. I just don't know the source well
enough to flash-of-inspiration my way through.

One of my roommates in college created an alphabet with her
siblings. She taught it to friends and was often a bit put out that
they required a *key* for it. I never tried to write in it; it had a
great many subtle characters and my handwriting doesn't do subtlety
with any regularity. The alphabet is still evolving as she adds the
sounds she needs for non-English languages.

And here I thought I was cool with knowing random bits of IPA!

Posted March 6, 2008 6:48 PM by Diatryma

Marilee, yeah, we both lose the thread at about the same place, a few years of crap, followed by stuff I've never heard of.

Posted March 6, 2008 6:59 PM by Terry Karney

Okay, I'm coming in late, I'm new here and definitely not sure of
myself. Yep, the YouTube expressions are pretty interesting, but as an
Australian, and perhaps most Australian we see this whole election
thing you
guys have going as a popularity contest like American Idol. Obama
definitely has more money than Clinton, he's shown me that much, he is
popular and would win a phone in, but is he the one? The last POPULAR
US President nearly started a nuclear war and got himself assassinated.
Smart is good - Clinton is one smart cooky, smarter than all the men
chomping at the 'I am God' bit.

Sorry this was about YouTube, and the fun being had - it just
concerns me a little that popular vs capable is the key point in a US
election.

Posted March 7, 2008 8:17 PM by Robert N Stephenson

oops, wrong thread - sorry peoples, and T, haven't got my glasses on.

Posted March 7, 2008 8:21 PM by Robert N Stephenson