Recent Articles:
- PJ O'Rourke returns to form with a piece on Afghanistan
- Uncensored and off-the-record
- Why taxes are low in the Middle East
- TIME announces new magazine aimed at grown-ups
- The slow whiny death of British Christianity
- An interactive post on the Guerilla War waged by hippies 1965-1970
- The Last Days of Disco
- The best magazine article ever is about Amway
- Vancouver FC aka The Whitecaps
- Copyright termination
Usual Suspects:
- The Bigge Idea
- Chuck Dollarsign
- Heather Faulkner
- Martha Gall
- Alan Hindle
- Michael Klassen
- David Look
- Amil Niazi
- Christy Nyiri
- Cameron Reed
- Ginger Sedlarova
- Adam O. Thomas
Home Papers:
17 June 2010
Telegraphs and code words
Code words for the day of the year
[Some enterprising telegraph operator] realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”
For example ‘crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” and ‘flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine.”’ But then the operator created 366 (even leap year!) codes to cover every single day.
Have a happy Joltingly.