Too much information / the feeling of logic.
I posted last summer about popcorn thoughts, which allow a lot of things to be going on at the same time, and I have to say that they're a fairly normal state for me in a class. But today I got a logic headache, from information-related brainfreeze.
I'm in Cryptography - fun class so far, but I think that I'm the only middle-brained person in it, because the others are engaging logic and not yet applying it to everything. To borrow Mr. Sherlock Holmes, they see but they don't observe. So far I've been fairly good at the stuff in class, but when I want to jump ahead to what's all connected together people are still taking the long road. They get there eventually, though.
Anyway, we were working on the Enigma cipher, which is what the Germans used in world war 2 to send their messages, and which was considered unbreakable. Until, of course, an Englishman named Alan Turing got his hands on it and spent several years obsessively turning the bits of it over in his head. Now, we had the method that Turing used in his analysis laid out in the book, and we all had read it several times, but it's a pretty abstract process, and I got distracted by the distance of the letters. I'll give you an example: we knew that the text that had been encrypted started out as Wetternullsecht (german for "weather 06," as in a 6 AM weather report) and you'll see that there are two instances of doubled letters there: the tt and the ll. These two letters, due to the nature of the enigma, wouldn't be encrypted as the same letter: for example, they'd come out of the machine as OM or something similar. Since the Enigma changes its code after every letter (but the order in which it uses codes is fixed) this meant that in the third and fourth codes used in the message (corresponding to the two ts) the letters used to encode t were, assuming that the alphabet was arranged in order all the way around the circle and that it was impossible to go backwards, 28 spaces away.
That's as far as I got, because my class partner interrupted me and I lost my train of thought, but I know it was going somewhere. Things were happening fast and I was trying to hold onto an idea and prove it at the same time and I couldn't write it down because I couldn't find the right words yet. There was more, I promise, but it's gone now and my brain is fuzzy and I had to go stand outside and freeze my face so I wouldn't feel like I was going to tip over at any moment. And now I can't talk properly (typing seems unaffected) because most of my brain is still occupied with the dead idea that won't budge and it's interrupting most of the channels of thought. :(
And there's a hockey game or something tonight and I really don't want to go because everyone I hear is distracting and makes the fuzzy blob in my brain move. Also, I can hear the difference in the ticks of my roommate's clock now. This class has just strayed into "too much information, too many people, not enough time" territory, and I think I need to change the neural input now. I feel like I ate too much logic too fast: yeah, it tasted good, but now my brain feels kind of bloated and full and not wanting to move, only now I have homework and I don't want to be completely alone this evening. I had all sorts of extra energy at the moment and I feel like someone just sort of changed my course and sent me on into a wall. :/ Typing this did help, though.
I'm in Cryptography - fun class so far, but I think that I'm the only middle-brained person in it, because the others are engaging logic and not yet applying it to everything. To borrow Mr. Sherlock Holmes, they see but they don't observe. So far I've been fairly good at the stuff in class, but when I want to jump ahead to what's all connected together people are still taking the long road. They get there eventually, though.
Anyway, we were working on the Enigma cipher, which is what the Germans used in world war 2 to send their messages, and which was considered unbreakable. Until, of course, an Englishman named Alan Turing got his hands on it and spent several years obsessively turning the bits of it over in his head. Now, we had the method that Turing used in his analysis laid out in the book, and we all had read it several times, but it's a pretty abstract process, and I got distracted by the distance of the letters. I'll give you an example: we knew that the text that had been encrypted started out as Wetternullsecht (german for "weather 06," as in a 6 AM weather report) and you'll see that there are two instances of doubled letters there: the tt and the ll. These two letters, due to the nature of the enigma, wouldn't be encrypted as the same letter: for example, they'd come out of the machine as OM or something similar. Since the Enigma changes its code after every letter (but the order in which it uses codes is fixed) this meant that in the third and fourth codes used in the message (corresponding to the two ts) the letters used to encode t were, assuming that the alphabet was arranged in order all the way around the circle and that it was impossible to go backwards, 28 spaces away.
That's as far as I got, because my class partner interrupted me and I lost my train of thought, but I know it was going somewhere. Things were happening fast and I was trying to hold onto an idea and prove it at the same time and I couldn't write it down because I couldn't find the right words yet. There was more, I promise, but it's gone now and my brain is fuzzy and I had to go stand outside and freeze my face so I wouldn't feel like I was going to tip over at any moment. And now I can't talk properly (typing seems unaffected) because most of my brain is still occupied with the dead idea that won't budge and it's interrupting most of the channels of thought. :(
And there's a hockey game or something tonight and I really don't want to go because everyone I hear is distracting and makes the fuzzy blob in my brain move. Also, I can hear the difference in the ticks of my roommate's clock now. This class has just strayed into "too much information, too many people, not enough time" territory, and I think I need to change the neural input now. I feel like I ate too much logic too fast: yeah, it tasted good, but now my brain feels kind of bloated and full and not wanting to move, only now I have homework and I don't want to be completely alone this evening. I had all sorts of extra energy at the moment and I feel like someone just sort of changed my course and sent me on into a wall. :/ Typing this did help, though.