Dreams and Crypto-Fiction… now that’s weird.

So the other day, Sunday morning I think it was, I woke from a dream in which my wife was asking me, “Who is iang?” She was pronouncing it as a word, but in my mind I saw it spelled that way. I take dreams as hints, so I immediately cracked open the laptop (what? we don’t ALL sleep with a laptop within reach?) and opened a Google window, typing in iang. Imagine my surprise when the second entry is directly relevant to recent experience and reading:

iang.org

Blog on Financial Cryptography · Free Banking Page · Papers · European Digital Money · Rants · Crypto Fiction Reviews · SSL Considered Harmful
iang.org/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
Relevant because I recently read the prime example of modern crypto fiction, Cryptonomicon, and of course isn’t everyone in the IT industry touched by examples of encryption these days? SSL certificates, encrypted file systems, VPNs, PGP, etc. I’ll wager that 10-20% of us can wax poetic about which encryption algorithms provide the best protection and which have been cracked.
Fascinating because I had never heard of IanG or his blog/site, and it came to me in a dream.
It gets weirder. Of course the first link I clicked on IanG’s Crypto Fiction Reviews page was down at the bottom:

Unsolved and Solved Ciphers

Elonka maintains a list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes.

Elonka’s list includes a mention of the fascinating Voynich Manuscript, an old unsolved illustrated manuscript. Voynich is very similar to the Codex Seraphinianus in that it is also illustrated and unsolved. I actually own a copy of the Codex. I found it interesting that Elonka doesn’t mention the Codex, and emailed to mention that fact. No response yet.

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