Remembering Professor I.J. Good (Cryptography Expert)

REPOST OF A JANUARY 2018 BLOG ENTRY 

I wrote the original entry before I broke my face and wasn't sure it had been published, so I amended it a bit and here is the revised version.

During World War II,  I. J. Good joined Professor Turing at Betchley, England.  There, they worked their fantastic brains to successfully break German codes. 

We must not forget; however, that American  Elizebeth Smith Friedman did help them a little... even though nobody in the British group gave her any credit...while in the United States, J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her work as well. 

Her only attempt to get well deserved credit in any form was to put the initials CG on the bottom of all of her code submissions.  CG stood for the US Coast Guard, where Mrs. Friedman had set up her code-breaking office.

As a crypto analyst in Germany, I encountered Mrs. Friedman when I read her account in destroying the fallacy that the Shakespeare plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon. 

Her book has a long title, but don't let that stop you from reading about a marvelous code-breaking effort. I think it is "out of print," but I'll bet copies can be found somewhere on the Internet.

Here's the title:  The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined: An Analysis of Cryptographic Systems Used as Evidence that Some Author Other Than William Shakespeare Wrote the Plays Commonly Attributed to Him.

Whew!

Anyway, back to Doctor Good. I came across work by Professor Good through my membership in Mensa. 

Good came to the US after the war and became a professor at a Virginia college.  As a sideline, he published a mail-in project in the Mensa Bulletin from 1968 to 1980.  The project was called PBI (Partly-Baked-Ideas), and over the years he published 800 "ideas" from contributors and from his own fertile brain.   Here are a few that I retained:

#367  "Liar cretan.  Gordon Serjak sent me a Moebius strip with the words typed on it, 'The statement on the other side is false.'"

#386  "Cyclamates and Cancer.  Cyclamates in enormous quantities cause cancer in mice.  Perhaps small quantities (in humans) would give an immunity to cancer!"

(A cyclamate is a salt of a synthetic sulfamic acid.  When combined with sodium, it was once used as an artificial sweetener. Check me out on this.)

#397.  "Evolution is an enease.  Evolution may be a viral infection: see Newsweek, December 1974, p. 42, and relate this to one of Gordon Serjak's earliest ideas referring to a disease which does good instead of ill. [an 'enease?']"

(Gordon Serjak.. or GS.. was one of Good's most prolific suppliers of ideas.)

#398.  "Bleeps for the Blind.  Install bleep sounds at cross walks to assist blind people to cross the street."

(A heavily used intersection in Hanover, Pennsylvania has for years broadcast sounds when it is safe for vision impaired folks to cross the street.   I can't believe that other cities would not have that yet. While crossing that street, Elaine told me that she enjoyed the flirting-like emanations.)

#407.  "The Birth of Venus.  ... perhaps the red spot on Jupiter is a radio star's version of a sun spot... The red spot has dimensions 30,000 miles by 7000 to 8000 miles and the diameter of Venus is 7700 miles.. so perhaps Venus was thrown out of Jupiter at its red spot.  Is the material of Venus right for this hypothesis?  Israeli Immanuel Veliklovsky suggested that Pluto originated from Jupiter."

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Somewhere there is a book with all 800 of Good's "partly baked ideas"... but I can't get a handle on it. It was put together by Erik Smith and published by STAX  (I think.)