The Body on Somerton Beach (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The Body on Somerton Beach (2011)

smithsonianmag.com

77 pointsboca14 comments

There have been interesting developments since the article was written. From Wikipedia:

In November 2013, the family of "Jestyn" gave an interview to the Australian TV program 60 Minutes which was aired on 24 November. On the program, Kate Thomson, daughter of Jessica and Prosper Thomson, claims that her mother had told her that she had lied to police and that she did know the identity of the "Somerton Man" and that his identity was also "known to a level higher than the police force." She also stated that she believed her mother and the "Somerton Man" may have both been Russian spies, noting that her mother was a communist sympathizer and could speak Russian although she would not disclose to her daughter where she had learned it or why.

Link to article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case

Many interesting facts there.

Can't help but see, MLIABO, AIAQC as an initial-ism of My Life Is All But Over, And I Am Quite Content, or some permutation therein.

Likely false.

Also interesting how that sideways '<' shape with an X through it appears to be the first character of the last line(rotated ninety degrees, much smaller and without the x).

Actually there is decided inconsistency with how he writes his "M's", "W's", and "I's".... And they all happen to be the first character... In the second to last line, there's a clearly written W, but the 'W' and 'M' from the first and second line respectively both appear to have the same symbol overlain as the final line starts with, albiet, once again, rotated...

If I were a wagering man, I would say that the X on the symbol (which is directly above an 'O') marks a ROT-value somehow, and that the first letter of each line references that symbol(or doesn't in the case of the second to last line) and the orientation of the symbol shifts the ROT value in some pre-determined manner.

If the X in that symbol is indeed referencing the "O" of the line below, it could make sense that that is the only line which isn't character rotated and therefore doesn't have the symbol appear at the beginning of the line in some manner.

>WRGOABABD

>MLIAOI(striked-through)

>WTBIMPANETP

>MLIABOAIAQC

>ITTMTSAMSTGAB

^That "I" is the rotated shape I'm talking about.

[0]-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case#mediaviewer/Fil...

I wonder have they thought of using strontium isotopes to determine areas he lived in/hailed from. http://www.kuleuven.be/english/news/strontium-in-bones-revea...

Also no mention of looking at his DNA?

Interesting and the HN angle must be the cryptography. Wondering if anyone has checked the actual texts of the poems in the made up 7th edition and the bespoke edition. If significant departures from accepted text, could be significant. Should be identical to each other if we assume used for messaging.

OA mentions witnesses walking past assuming the victim was drunk and sleeping it off, and again seeing a man carried on another's shoulder and assuming it was a friend carrying a drunk colleague home.

Tells you a lot about the times (I grew up in UK near Liverpool 1970s/1980s and public drunkenness was basically not commented on then).

I think those activities in broad daylight would attract more attention now, despite our problems with binge drinking in early hours of morning. I've seen local police checking out walking drunks to make sure they are ok and have a plan to get home.

I'm interested to see if any of the cryptographers on HN can take a stab at the strange code he was carrying (featured in the picture near the bottom of the story), which no one has cracked, or at least share some thoughts about how it could be analyzed.

I took a stab at using google's n-grams library to look at potential sentences if the code was an initialism. It generated too many nonsense values at the value of 'n' that I picked (driven purely by download size concerns really) and any kind of names or codes or abbreviated language wouldn't have worked well with that approach.

I think at some students of the mentioned Prof. Abbot looked at the letter distributions and found the highest correlation with an english language initialism.

If the top comment - stating that he might have been a Russian spy - is true, it might be worth checking correlation with Cyrillic (or it's Latin transliteration) instead of English.

If the book was indeed a disguised one-time pad, as the article and evidence suggests, then no one's going to get anywhere cracking the code without the book.

Is this the Talman Shud case? Has anyone made a movie about this yet?

If you read the article:

  Previous examiners had missed it, and several accounts of the case have
  referred to it as a “secret pocket,” but it seems to have been intended
  to hold a fob watch. Inside, tightly rolled, was a minute scrap of paper,
  which, opened up, proved to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate
  printed script. The phrase read “Tamám Shud.”

Tamam Shud, as the article points out

I'll leave the accent over the second 'a' to your imagination

Bad article.

I like wikipedia's more (btw it is also known as Taman Shud case).

First 4 paragraphs:

>Most murders aren’t that difficult to solve.

>Of course, there are always a handful of cases that don’t fit the template

>They certainly were baffled, though, in Adelaide

>a story that began simply

>has bec0me ever more mysterious.

>In fact, this case (which remains, theoretically at least, an active investigation) is so opaque

>add up to one of the world’s most perplexing cold cases.

>It may be the most mysterious of them all.

Why do you need those four paragraphs full of buzzwords?

Just tell us the story!

The only interesting part of this comment was learning that the article has a 0 for an o in it.

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