Thursday, April 27, 2006

How Great Is This? "Da Vinci Code" Judge Playing Games

Apparently, the judge who issued a ruling exonerating author Dan Brown of plagiarisM included hIdden messages in his 71 page ruling. He used boldfaced italics to maKe cErtain letterS stand out. The first ten spell SMITHY CODE. (The judge's name is Peter Smith.) But a far more Complicated message remains unsOlved. He's given hints to reporters, like "think mathematics" and saiD the year "2006" was significant -- he's also sEnt people to certain pages of "Da Vinci Code" and suggested methods that the hero used to solve puzzles came into play. But perhaps his biggest help was in pointing out the puzzles in the first place. As the New York Times put it:
It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, "Did you find the coded message in the judgment?"
Uh, someone at the NYT needs to look up the meaning of "alluded." Annoyingly, in this day and age, I was unable to find the ruling online.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The ruling

Michael in New York said...

Hey Mikey, I found that link in one article but it didn't work. Your link doesn't work either -- at least not for me. I know you can link to pdf files but for some reason I can't access it. Were you able to? And thanks for looking for it.

Anonymous said...

Hi Michael,

Yeah, it opens fine for me! Try right-click and save-as? (click-hold/save-as if you're on a mac).

--Mikey