Knowledge is Powe

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est
. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Friedman

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[Ann]

Knowledge is Powe. I love it. What a fascinating video, too. Thanks for posting it!

But I don't understand anything when I look at that dark pink square with white dots. Not getting it is no powe!

Ann

[neufer]

But I don't understand anything when I look at that dark pink square with white dots. Not getting it is no powe!

[list]I really wouldn't expect a grille to understand.[/list]

[list]Friedman's Cryptographic Christmas Card[/list]Italian polymath, Girolamo Cardano (24 September 1501 – 21 September 1576) is credited with an invention that is still in use today. In the so-called “Cardan grille,” a sheet with narrow rectangles of varying widths cut out of it is laid over a blank page and the secret message is written in the spaces. The sheet is then removed and the rest of the spaces are filled in with innocent—or even misleading—text. When the recipient lays the same grid over the paper in the same position, the hidden message is revealed.

Undoubtedly the most ingenious of the Friedmans’ annual cryptographic Christmas cards came with a special kind of grille. Each 90-degree turn revealed a different hidden message, and the four directions yielded a rhyming quatrain:

[list]“FOR CHRISTMAS GREETINGS IN 28
WE USE A MEANS QUITE UP TO DATE
A CRYPTOTELEPHOTGRAM HERE
BRINGS YOU WORD OF XMAS CHEER.”[/list]

[b][color=#0000FF][size=125]Cardanus crater is located on the western edge of the Moon, in the western part of the Oceanus Procellarum[/size] [/color][/b]

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<<Hardin Craig, well known Professor of English at Stanford and the University of North Carolina, has made a careful study of the relationship between Cardanus Comforte and the creative background of Hamlet. Professor Craig is so convinced that the mysterious Bard's mind was saturated with the philosophy of the Comforte when he created his greatest play that Craig calls his essay on the subject "Hamlet's Book."

Not that Craig is by any means the first to cite these remarkable parallels. Francis Douce appears to be entitled to the honors of priority in this respect. More than a hundred years ago—in the 1839 edition of his Illustrations of Shakespeare—Douce pointed out the striking similarities between passages in the Comforte and Hamlet's soliloquy. He ends his comments as follows:

"There is a good deal on the subject in Cardanus Comforte, a book which Shakespeare had certainly read."

Again, in 1845, the Reverend Joseph Hunter's New Illustrations of Shakespeare verified the findings of Douce regarding the playwright's indebtedness to the Renaissance philosopher. Hunter sums up the Comforte with this striking statement (which has the warrant, we gather, of ancient English Stage tradition):

"It seems to be the book which Shakespeare placed in the hands of Hamlet."

A more modern commentator, Dr. Lily B. Campbell of Los Angeles, gifted author of an illuminating work on Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1930), also stresses the relationship between the youthful Oxford's favorite work of philosophy and Hamlet's views on life and death. She says:

"It is easily seen that this book of Cardan has long been associated with Hamlet. I should like to believe that Hamlet was actually reading it or pretending to read it as he carried on his baiting of Polonius."

Thus we have four able Shakespearean scholars of the past and present in virtual agreement that Oxford's own printing of Cardanus Comforte is preeminently "Hamlet's Book.">>

<<The History of Cardenio, often referred to as merely Cardenio, is a lost play, known to have been performed by the King's Men, a London theatre company, in 1613. The play is attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653. The content of the play is not known, but it was likely to have been based on an episode in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote involving the character Cardenio, a young man who has been driven mad and lives in the Sierra Morena. Thomas Shelton's translation of the First Part of Don Quixote was published in 1612, and would thus have been available to the presumed authors of the play.>>