Substitution Ciphers in Popular Culture
- Sherlock Holmes breaks a substitution cipher in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men".
- The Al Bhed language in Final Fantasy X is actually a substitution cipher, although it is pronounced phonetically (i.e. "you" in English is translated to "oui" in Al Bhed, but is pronounced the same way that "oui" is pronounced in French).
- The Minbari's alphabet from the Babylon 5 series is a substitution cipher from English.
- The language in Starfox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet spoken by native Saurians and Krystal is also a substitution cipher of the English alphabet.
- The television program Futurama contained a substitution cipher in which all 26 letters were replaced by symbols and called "Alien Language". This was deciphered rather quickly by the die hard viewers by showing a "Slurm" ad with the word "Drink" in both plain English and the Alien language thus giving the key. Later, the producers created a second alien language that used a combination of replacement and mathematical Ciphers. Once the English letter of the alien language is deciphered, then the numerical value of that letter (1 through 26 respectively) is then added to the value of the previous letter showing the actual intended letter. These messages can be seen throughout every episode of the series and the subsequent movies.
- At the end of every episode of the cartoon series Gravity Falls, during the credit roll, there is a hidden +3 Caesar cipher message.
- In the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer there are three substitution ciphers; Gnommish, Centaurean and Eternean, which run along the bottom of the pages or are somewhere else within the books.
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Famous quotes containing the words substitution, popular and/or culture:
“To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imperative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.”
—Max J. Friedländer (18671958)
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“We belong to an age whose culture is in danger of perishing through the means to culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)