Codebreakers decipher Mary, Queen of Scots' secret letters 436 years after her execution A team of codebreakers discovered – and then cracked – more than 50 secret letters written by Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I. In total, the team deciphered 57 letters penned between 1578 to 1584. Most are addressed to Michel de Castelnau de Mauvissière, the …
I'm not going to deny that when reading an article like this, I sometimes regret going into Engineering and then to working in Industry. You never get to do something this cool and interesting in industry, you have to stay in Academia to get that sort of thing. Then again, in Academia you have to deal with ahem.. Students.. (imagine that word being said as if you've just trod in something slimy). So I guess it all evens out in the end...
The students aren't always the worst part.
The worst part is constantly being forced to waddle up to companies / research councils begging for tiny amounts of funding.
Being pushed into the educational side and having to deal with the students is simply the punishment for being unsuccessful in the begging.
You're forgetting the glacial pace of University decision making that means that the successfully won funding gets eroded away by bureaucracy before you get to do anything meaningful with it.
The second round of funding is generally there to fund the first project because it only paid for you to be allowed in to the building. Ends up being a ponzi scheme to deliver research papers.
My own experience from working at a Uni was their left hand didn't even know the right hand existed, and they lived in an age when you employed someone as a 'Computer' as the mechanical version hadn't been invented, and the electronic version wasn't even a pipe dream.
Oh, and funding was for academics to talk about a project, perhaps even getting students to do the work. Even if the project needed skilled people to carry out.
Thankfully that was just a two year contract, and I only had to talk to students when they came into the office by mistake. Lecturers, however... There's a saying: Them that can, do, and them that can't, teach, and them that can't teach, lecture. While I would say that's not true of all lecturers... I did meet some it was very true of.
> The worst part is constantly being forced to waddle up to companies / research councils
My wife works for the research councils. Fortunately, she does IT (well, Sharepoint which is sort of IT adjacent) and thus doesn't have to get into the whole sordid money thing. Or meet.. you know... academics.
Last I heard, only around 2 or 3% of all the tablets ever found have actually been read/translated (half a million, give or take, are in museums, with more being found daily). I started learning cuneiform in it's various guises when I was young and deluded, thinking one could actually make a living contributing to knowledge of the past ... and it seemed more interesting than the mundane Latin and Greek, or even Aramaic. Perhaps I'll take it up again if I ever retire. There has GOT to be something of interest in all those unread tablets besides "<this year> billy-bob had 15 she-goats with 24 kids, harvested 22 bushels of wheat and made 75 gallons of wine and 40 pounds of cheese" and the like ... wouldn't it be cool to be the first to read it after 5,000 years or so?
or complaining about the quality of Ea-nasir's copper, and how crtap he was at delivering it on time, apparently.
Imagine that, 3000 years down the line, and what survives of your legacy, what people know of your time is "That Ea-nasir, he was a bit crap, wasn't he?"
Apparently (if I am remembering this correctly), the reason he is so well known, isn't just that he was a shit copper merchant, but that he kept all the "letters of complaint" from his customers in a kind of trophy room, and being clay tablets, when his house "unexpectedly" burned down, they were baked and preserved.
So, not only was he a bad merchant, he was a proper sociopathic one too. All you need to do to ensure your name lives on for eternity is to be a right proper bastard.
A good thing then that Boris Johnson wasn't thrown in the Tower and subsequently hung, drawn and quartered by Queen Elizabeth II, for trying to prorogue parliament.
He's bagged a half million or so publishing deal
The BBC have reported that the publishing deal pales into insignificance compared to the fees he's earned from speaking engagements - £1.8M, and an advance fee of £2.5M for more this year. You wonder how he squeezes it all in alongside his full-time job as a constituency MP. Somebody should give him a medal...
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With £5m trousered and no doubt counting, what I can't understand is why the Bamfords are picking up his accommodation costs. Apparently, £74,000 since leaving office, in which time he's banked millions. If they want to do charity work, then, donate that money to the homeless - it will do more good. The optics are just not right.
As for a medal, I expect Zelenskiy will give him a medal or two or three.
Not just the speeches, but freebie holidays during the time Westminster is sitting also takes up time. He'd have been a definite winner on Supermarket Sweep
"what I can't understand is why the Bamfords are picking up his accommodation costs. Apparently, £74,000 since leaving office, in which time he's banked millions. If they want to do charity work, then, donate that money to the homeless - it will do more good."
Would Boris become homeless if they didn't pay for his digs? Have you seen rents in London?
... and despite all that we are paying best part of quarter of a million quid for his legal advice during the enquiry into Partygate, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/01/watchdog-examines-220000-public-funding-for-boris-johnson-partygate-defence
You refer to famous people writing about important events of their time in their private correspondance, and then mention Twitter which, in my experience, tends to be the opposite...a bunch of nobodies/pseudo-celebrities writing about trivial things in public.
tells Castelnau about alleged plots against her cousin, advising him to report them to the queen without letting on that Mary was the source of the info.
Knowing she was beheaded for being accused of plotting, either she was wrong not to claim she was the source, or her cousin was well aware she was innocent of this but decided to execute her anyway to avoid a potentially dangerous competitor.
Is that so clear?
The Wikipedia's article about this said that ". However, Walsingham and Cecil realised that that decree also impaired their ability to entrap Mary. They needed evidence for which she could be executed based on their Bond of Association tenets. Thus Walsingham established a new line of communication, one which he could carefully control without incurring any suspicion from Mary". To what point did they modify the deciphered text to reach their goal or manipulate Mary to reach that goal?
Mary "was not permitted legal counsel, not permitted to review the evidence against her, nor to call witnesses. Portions of Phellipes' letter translations were read at the trial".
REalpolitik-ally speaking, her execution even if potential unfair was an important political move, as was the execution of Louis XVI or Ceaușescu. If the pretender to the supreme power is dead, it's one problem less to deal with
"To what point did they modify the deciphered text to reach their goal or manipulate Mary to reach that goal?"
There is little doubt that she had knowledge of the plot and greenlighted it, but yeah, Walsingham played her by letting her believe the comm channel was secure so that she would disclose her involvement.
"her cousin was well aware she was innocent of this but decided to execute her anyway to avoid a potentially dangerous competitor"
Actually Elizabeth was cornered into executing Mary (much against her will) by Walsingham. It appears that Elizabeth might have preferred to have Mary secretly murdered.1 rather than publicly executed, as the political imperative was to quell growing insurrectionist unrest as quietly as possible.
1: John Cooper, The Queen's Agent, Pegasus Books 2013, ISBN 978-1-60598-410-0
These letters, and others, were written in code by Mary, Queen of Scots, but how? Did she do all the encryption in her head, or did she write down the original message and encrypt that with some algorithm that she remembered? As she was in custody at the time it must have been tricky to say the least, it would be interesting to know the mechanics of it all.
Everything I know about Mary, Queen of Scots comes from watching Reign, which I gather may not have been entirely historically accurate. But I believe she was kept in a somewhat gilded cage, a castle rather than a prison cell, with servants etc. As such, she probably had considerably more scope for such things than you might think for someone being held prisoner.
I spent a good part of the afternoon reading the published research. Queen Mary had a full-time secretary, Jacques Nau, who scribed her letters for her, and sometimes added post-scripts of his own to her letters to the French ambassador. She wasn't languishing in a dungeon in Sheffield, she had a modest household of her own; indeed she complained when her privileges of riding out and travelling in her carriage were curtailed.
So what did Walsingham use when he had Mary's letters deciphered contemporaneously?
"Walsingham was able to intercept and decode her correspondence. The relatively simple code used by Mary was quickly deciphered, and translations were provided for Elizabeth. These letters were then resealed and sent on to their destination or delivered to Mary in prison. And so the plot progressed."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/spying_01.shtml
So what did Walsingham use when he had Mary's letters deciphered contemporaneously?
From the sounds of it, the letters weren't particularly difficult to decode either then or now; it was the discovery that the existed that's news. It reads like, "we were decoding some stuff in an Italian file, but turns out they were previously-unkknown letters from Mary Queen of Scots!"
If I had to guess, these weren't preserved on the English side of the channel since it seems like there isn't much value to the information at the time.
>So what did Walsingham use when he had Mary's letters deciphered contemporaneously?
They weren't very complex, it was a simple substitution cypher with a few extra symbols meaning 'ignore the last 3 characters' etc
It helped that they were very formal with lots of stock phrases and long-winded titles of people
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No, there's a lot of times people don't expand acronyms, then you have to spend time playing "guess which is the expansion of this TLA for this particular usage" on Google, which is annoying.
I'd much prefer El Reg error on the side of too much, rather than too little.
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More to the point a GUI is just a user interface, it doesn't do anything, it certainly doesn't decrypt unknown codes into guessed at languages. At the most it might provide a way for them to input the ciphertext and read out the plain text once some backend bit of program has done the useful work.
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