Lunch With George!

January 31, 2002 - Fazoli's

NEW! Lunch With George! Restaurant Reviews. Click here for this week's review!

Agenda

• The Jason Project
• Show and Tell
• Cryptography
• Newspaper at Dawn
• MR Ducks

The Jason Project

Prior to meeting George for lunch, I accompanied my oldest daughter (Emily) on a field trip to the Arizona Science Center. What I didn't know was that we weren't actually visiting the exhibits... instead, we were ushered into the big-screen theatre to be part of a nation-wide live broadcast hosted by

What is the Jason Project? It is a year-long research and educational program directed by Dr. Robert Ballard (the man who discovered the Titanic). This is the 13th year of the program.

The Jason Project selects a new region of th Earth to study each year. They design a complete 9-month middle and high school curriculum which encompasses Science, Math, English, and Social Studies which is then made available to schools who wish to participate.

Participating schools can also nominate promising students to be Argonauts-- those who are selected by the project get to spend two straight weeks at the site under study, working and learning side by side with researchers. Some teachers are invited, too!

This year, the Jason Project was in Alaska, studying glaciers and arctic ocean mammals. The geological team was studying Glaciers near Portage Lake in the Chugach National Forest, while the zoological team worked at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, about 90 minutes south of the glacier. In Seward, they were working with harbor seals and steller sea lions.

during the live broadcast, the teams of scientists and students presented what they had worked on, and answered live questions from students all over the U.S.

As seems to be typical in such situations, I believe the teachers and the parent chaperones had more fun than the students!

Even so, Emily was interested in applying to be an Argonaut when she is old enough (14). I found it interesting that one of the staff Geologists in Alaska was a young man who had been an Argonaut on the Jason Project several years before. He credited his career in science to the inspirational program.

Next year's program, Jason XIV, is entitled "From Shore to Sea", and will explore the terrestrial and marine ecosystems in and around the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary.

Show and Tell

George and I both had stuff to show off-- and it all related to

I brought in the trasure I extracted from the Kinder Egg that George gave me-- it's three nested bears! Click here to see the slide show!

Cryptography

1. You must begin by shuffling a deck of cards many times. At least 6 times. More is better.
2. Order the second deck of cards to match the shuffled order of the first deck.
3. Give the second deck to the person who will later receive an encrypted message from you.
4. Encrypt a message as follows:
   1. Write out your message in letter groups of five, removing punctuation and changing all letters to upper case. For example, the message "Would you like fries with that?" would look like

      WOULD YOULI KEFRIE SWITH THATX

   2. Convert letter to its ordinal value in the alphabet (e.g. A=1, G=7, Z=26).
   3. Generate numbers from the random key stream (this is using the algorithm associated with the deck of cards-- see this page for the algorithm), one for each letter in your message.
   4. Add the key stream numbers to the numbers representing the letters in your message. If the resulting number is greater than 26, subtract 26 from the number until the result is less than or equal to 26.
   5. Convert the resulting string of numbers back into letters (you know, 1=A, etc.).
   6. This is your encrypted message!

5. Send the message to the person with the other deck. They will decrypt the message using the same key stream generated by the card deck. The only difference is that they will subtract each key from its matching letter, rather than adding.

George and I ordered the decks and practiced generating key streams using the algorithm. George has since sent me an encoded message containing only 10 letters, and it took me an hour to generate the key stream and decode the message! I also made a mistake somewhere when generating the key stream, and only part of the message makes any sense.

Keep your eyes open for the next LWG Puzzle, because it will involve the decrypting of an encoded message using this very technique!

Newspaper at Dawn

Ducks

C M Ducks

M R Ducks?

M R Not

O S M R

C D E D B D Feet?

L I B...

M R Ducks!