Da Vinci Code Inspires Judge

April 26, 2006 6:06 PM

“Smithy code” The secret lies in HBHG and DVC. According to news reports the Judge who recently ruled in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case has included his own code in his high court ruling (PDF). At this time, no one seems to have decoded it all...
posted by tiamat (39 comments total)

That's completely fantastic - I'm fascinated as to what he put in there (even if he did do it as a bit of fun, a mystery's still a mystery) - thanks for the link!
posted by terpsichoria at 6:25 PM on April 26, 2006

Reminds me of Judge Alex Kozinski's decision in US v. Syufry (anti-trust suit against a theater owner), which incorporated the titles of more than 200 Hollywood movies.
posted by grobstein at 6:42 PM on April 26, 2006

OJ DID IT!
posted by soyjoy at 6:45 PM on April 26, 2006

Why isn't he considered biased for doing this?
posted by unsupervised at 6:54 PM on April 26, 2006

crypoto mystery
Amused judge pens jumble code
creates fun headline
posted by edgeways at 6:58 PM on April 26, 2006

biased how? He obviously had to read the texts to make a ruling, in his ruling he used (presumably) methods within those texts to have a small amount of fun. I personally think it's great.
posted by edgeways at 7:00 PM on April 26, 2006

unsupervised, biased in favour of whom? The key is apparently requires reading both "HBHG and DVC", and both books involved codes and ciphers, so there's really no way to say he's favoring the style of one book over the other by putting a code in the ruling.

grobstein, that's the single funniest judicial ruling I've ever read, the close second being the one throwing out the case against "Satan and his staff", due in part to the lack of jurisdiction and the plaintiff not supplying instructions on where/how to serve the summons. (I couldn't find the actual ruling.)
posted by tiamat at 7:20 PM on April 26, 2006

It's like Justice Blackmun quoting "Casey at the Bat" in Flood v. Kuhn. Judges don't have to wear permanent scowls all the time, so long as their decisions have properly grounded legal reasoning.
posted by Maxson at 7:25 PM on April 26, 2006

My favorite is a little footnote from a bankruptcy court judge's response to a badly written (and titled) motion. It's on page 2 here.
posted by jedicus at 7:39 PM on April 26, 2006

When I posted this I thought people would go for the 'solve the code' angle, but the 'funny things judges do' angle is turning out to be pretty damned funny. Thus is the power of Mefi.
posted by tiamat at 7:54 PM on April 26, 2006

10 bucks says it decrypts to "stop wasting your goddamn time reading junk and playing spy"
posted by ori at 7:58 PM on April 26, 2006

jedicus: that is fucking fantastic.
posted by I Love Tacos at 8:10 PM on April 26, 2006

Another zany opinion: U.S. v. Abner, 825 F.2d 835 (5th Cir. 1987), which contains titles (as section headers, no less) to numerous Talking Heads songs.

It's discussed here.
posted by jayder at 8:34 PM on April 26, 2006

It's a sailboat.
posted by dial-tone at 8:35 PM on April 26, 2006

More precisely, it is here.
posted by jayder at 8:36 PM on April 26, 2006

Where is the code? Am I missing something?
posted by Kickstart70 at 9:40 PM on April 26, 2006

Remember to drink your ovaltine.
posted by thecaddy at 10:33 PM on April 26, 2006

Man, if more legal decisions were written like this, there's a good chance I'd make my parents very happy and go to law school. Three cheers for Judge Smith!
posted by ford and the prefects at 11:05 PM on April 26, 2006

Come on, guys! Surely if we band together, we can break this code together?

Or we can just sit back and let the lazyweb work for us - someone will post it to AskMe.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 6:06 AM on April 27, 2006

(Two togethers together to emphasize the togetherness.)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 6:07 AM on April 27, 2006

Reminds me of Judge Alex Kozinski's decision in US v. Syufry (anti-trust suit against a theater owner), which incorporated the titles of more than 200 Hollywood movies.

That was a clever idea, and I enjoyed looking through the decision -- but I would have enjoyed it more if whoever went through it linking the movie titles had been a little less determined to squeeze in as many as possible. It's ridiculous to highlight words like it and out as though they were cleverly incorporated titles. Using those rules, you could make any decision look like this. Me, I would only have used phrases (two words or more), and tossed the single-word small fry back.

I eagerly await the solution to the Smithy Code. Internet, do your stuff!

*looks at watch, drums fingers*
posted by languagehat at 6:24 AM on April 27, 2006

the code is:

smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz
posted by empath at 6:45 AM on April 27, 2006

It's not a simple Caesar cypher...
posted by runkelfinker at 6:55 AM on April 27, 2006

empath, I think you may have missed a couple. I get

smithycodeJaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv

I got those by copy/pasting the formatted text and saving as RTF, then searching the raw RTF for italics. I discarded any italic section that included more than one letter.
posted by Silki at 6:59 AM on April 27, 2006

With any luck the Judge will have been trying to make a point about using good encryption, which is to say this thing will have been done in a one time pad that he plans to reveal only after he's retired.
posted by tiamat at 7:08 AM on April 27, 2006

Off-topic, but -- there was also this humorous judgement (well, footnotes in the judgement). (Or use the direct PDF Link).

Part of it reads:
"The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”"

posted by inigo2 at 7:08 AM on April 27, 2006

inigo2, what thread have you been reading? I'm pretty sure that IS the topic now. ;)
posted by tiamat at 7:41 AM on April 27, 2006

"It's a sailboat."

It's a schooner.
posted by majick at 9:01 AM on April 27, 2006

You dumb bastard. It's not a schooner... it's a Sailboat.
posted by dial-tone at 12:17 PM on April 27, 2006

There is no Easter Bunny!
posted by greycap at 2:08 PM on April 27, 2006

This is very cool. Thanks for noticing this tiamat. I'm thinking Mefi should undertake either a competition or a collective effort to solve this. But I'm too busy to post to Meta right now.
posted by Dasein at 4:48 PM on April 27, 2006

There
fnord
is
fnord
no
fnord
code.
posted by nlindstrom at 5:25 PM on April 27, 2006

The solution:

Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought.

(Unless the Times are tossing us a red herring...)
posted by Creosote at 6:38 PM on April 27, 2006

I tried the Times's solution (assuming the Fibonacci value of 1 meant no change) and this is what I get. There may be something I'm missing, but it doesn't work for me.

j 10 01 10 j
a 01 01 01 a
e 05 02 06 f
i 09 03 11 k
e 05 05 09 i
x 24 08 31 e
t 20 13 32 f
o 15 21 35 i
s 19 01 19 s
t 20 01 20 t
g 07 02 08 h
p 16 03 18 r
s 19 05 23 w
a 01 08 08 h
c 03 13 15 o
g 07 21 27 a
r 18 01 18 r
e 05 01 05 e
a 01 02 02 b
m 13 03 15 o
q 17 05 21 u
w 23 08 30 d
f 06 13 18 r
k 11 21 31 e
a 01 01 01 a
d 04 01 04 d
p 16 02 17 q
m 13 03 15 o
q 17 05 21 u
z 26 08 33 g
v 22 13 34 h
z 26 21 46 t


posted by Silki at 9:57 PM on April 27, 2006

It's explained at http://www.thesmithycode.com/ - there's two typos, and for some reason the third letter of every sequence is shifted in the opposite direction to the others. See also.
posted by flashboy at 5:42 AM on April 28, 2006

Then, oddly enough, dial-tone was pretty close!
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 5:58 AM on April 28, 2006

More.
posted by ND¢ at 8:22 AM on April 28, 2006

That was pretty quick. I bet even the NSA couldn't have done any better.
posted by tiamat at 11:37 AM on April 28, 2006

And The Smithy Code
posted by Silki at 5:05 PM on April 28, 2006