WWII Paper Puzzle Machine – A Podcast

Today’s word is enigma. It is noun meaning puzzle or something that cannot be understood or explained. Such as “Dawn Miceli’s infatuation with Adam Curry is an enigma.”

Enigma was also the name for the WWII era encryption machine used by the Germans to secure their military communications. The Enigma machine and cryptography were the subject of Neal Stephenson’s excellent novel Cryptonomicon. If you are interested in WWII history or cryptography I strongly recommend Stephenson’s book.

I choose enigma for today’s word after coming across an updated version of the Enigma machine. It is a PDF file that does the same encoding and decoding as the original Enigma machines. You can find the PDF and a thorough explanation at mckoss.com.

Now I must give credit to hackaday.com/. Phil Torrone of Engadget fame is runs great site with daily hacks including this PDF Enigma.

Paper Enigma Machine @ www.hackaday.com

Thanks to Sean at Microsoft for telling me about onelook.com. “Onelook indexes over 5 millions words from over 900 dictionaries. The cool thing is that it include specialty dictionaries (e.g. technical, medical, scientific, etc.).”