Good Job, Brain! - 112: Cracking the Code

Episode Date: May 29, 2014

We give you the 001101000011000100110001 on the puzzling history and facts about codes, and hidden meanings! This origin story of the Enigma machine, code name quiz, and what the foxtrot is up with the NATO alphabet? Learn how James Brown, Beethoven, and Johnny Cash share a cryptic connection. And sit by the counter with a cup of joe and whistleberries so Chris can serve up the tasty (and weird) history behind coded American diner lingo.  ALSO: Lynda's Graduation quiz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, dreamy druids, dragons, dreadlords, dramataries, and dryads. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show in Offbeat Trivia podcast. This is episode 112 or 100. 12. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen, and we are your oodle of muggles who like to Google and eat coogles, strudels, and noodles. I'm Colin. And I'm Chris. No, Dana this week. She is. I believe she's in Vermont. That's what she told us, at least.

Serveying maple syrup. Before we dive in, Karen, it is time for another installment of... Um, actually. Um, actually. What you said just wasn't... true um actually do you mind if i correct you because actually factually and quite enthusiastically i was right and you were wrong that's exactly what inspired me to write this um actually song you were wrong in a segment from last episode i asked questions about pro sports teams

uh whose names don't end in the letter s and i had said there were only two n hl hockey, national hockey league teams that don't end in S, which was the Minnesota Wild and the Colorado Avalanche. So I need to offer my deepest heartfelt apologies to the good people of Tampa, Florida. I met no slight to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who also has a team that do not end in the letter S. They won the Stanley Cup one year, right? They did indeed.

Even if they hadn't, I still should not have slighted them. All right. And more housekeeping announcements. It's a lot of housekeeping. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. we're deciding to maybe experiment a little. We're going to put our barnyard buzzers out to pasture.

Well, no, no, no, no. Let's say they're on sabbatical. They're on a nice farm upstate. No. They're on vacation. And I have, I got two sets of new buzzers. One set just has a bunch of weird sound effects. Like you can hear Chris, you can play yours.

Here's mine. Morning Zoo talk show host sounds bored. Oh, yeah, it is. It's like morning radio. DJ show. Mine is. And I've got the much more direct. Yeah.

See, it's like a fighting ring. This is one set and I also have another set. Those are recordable buzzers so that we can record either voices or music or sounds. I kind of want to throw it out there to the good job brain listeners. Feel free to write in or send us like little sound clips or something that we can use for our new recordable buzzer. I don't know what we're going to be careful what you ask for yeah I don't know what we're going do but if you or even if you have ideas feel free to tell us you like oh I want to all

Christopher Walken isms right really I mean we're looking at like the you know like a one second short of a clip yeah I had no idea that home buzzer technology had progressed so far yeah what a time to be alive but if people can get hashtag bring back the barnyard buzzers trending We may have to listen I don't know Yeah This is going to be our new Coke Yeah we're going to have to

It might be yep And it's time for our first general Trivia segment Pop Quiz hot shot And it's you guys Versus each other Just us It's Boing versus Ding

That's our That's our morning zoo talk show Right there There you go Boing and ding Boing and ding in the morning And of course I have here, Trivial Pursuit Card, and you guys have your new buzzers.

Oh, I can't even call the Barnyard buzzers anymore. More radio buzzers. Here we go. First question. Blue Wedge for Geography. What will you see coming out of the hillside if you visit the chimera near Olympus Turkey? I'm going to guess steam? Incorrect.

River of human blood. No, it is flames. Uh-huh. Note here says the flames caused by natural gas pockets. Gas pockets. Uh, have amazed visitors for millennia. Oh, pretty cool. I can imagine how impressive that would be, yeah.

A thousand years ago. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right. Pink Wedge for pop culture. What high-waisted pants did Tina Faye and Amy Polar spoof on Saturday Night Live. Mom jeans. Yes. Correct.

Mom jeans. All right. Yellow Wedge. What kind of gene, another gene question. What style of jeans descended from naval attire? Colin. Bell bottoms? Correct. Stylish.

All right. Note here says, flared lower legs are easy to roll up for deck scrubbing duty. Right. Next question. Purple Wedge. Who wrote the? novella, the body, which the film Stand By Me was based on.

Stephen King. Stephen King. Yes, Stephen King. I knew it. I knew it for the first half of the question, too, which I was kind of. Oh, just called the body. Yeah, too many hints in that, true. Was that under a pen name or was that as Stephen King?

It was as Stephen King. Oh, maybe it was Richard Bachman. It might have been. It might have been. No, I think it was Stephen King, and it was in one of those, like, collections of stories. Like, oh, okay, right. Maybe, yeah. Green Wedge for Science.

Which of these might a cryptozoologist study? Bigfoot, burial practices, or code breaking? Bigfoot. Oh, really? Yeah. Like mythical animals. Yeah, like Loch Ness Monster. Right, right, right.

Oh, here it says. Right. Cryptozoologists study animal whose existence is disputed. Yes, jackalopes. Maybe they're real. Last question. an orange wedge. What dominant tennis player habitually tugs at his underwear before he serves? Colin. I think that's Raphael Nadal? Correct. Yeah. He says it's a habit he picked up as a kid. There's

nothing wrong with his shorts. Oh, I didn't know that. So it's actually more annoying now that I know he could stop if he wanted to. It's not like his underwear's bothering him. It's like a nervous He probably tries to finish things up in as few sets as possible, because if it keeps going on and on and on and on, he probably gives himself the biggest wedgey, which may or may not be helpful in those crucial final serves. Ow. All right, good job, brains. Are those new buzzers going? They're pretty good.

They feel good. They feel good in my hand. Yeah, it's got good buzzer feel. Yep, it's got a nice, you know, torque. So I want to apologize. Me and Chris are a little bit. We're kind of tired today. We're tired and my body hurts.

Yeah. Our brains are tired. Right, right. Yeah, you guys both asked if we could record a little bit later than normal today. We really did. We're typically kind of early birds and now we're just going to rolled in here. So we spent all day yesterday doing Shintechi DeCathlon. It is a once a year event that's held here in the Bay Area.

The best way to describe it is if you have ever seen the movie Midnight Madness, if you haven't seen the movie Midnight Madness, this is a terrible way to describe it, but if you've seen the movie, basically, it is teams of people get into cars and go to a certain location where you solve a puzzle, and then the puzzle's answer leads you to the next location that you then have to drive to. And unlike Midnight Madness, which takes place over the span of an evening and stars Michael J. Fox, this takes place in the daytime and does not star Michael J. Fox. It did, However, star Tyler Hinman, who has done this for many years running, a five-time United States crossword puzzle champion, our good friend, and one-time Chris Substitute on a previous episode of Good Job Brain. And myself, my wife Regina, and Karen, his teammates.

Really, the best of the best puzzle solvers do this. I mean, Tyler really is up there. We are able to help out. Mensa-level stuff. It really is. It's hard, hard stuff. You know, it always involves, I've been on two of these with Tyler. It always involves like figuring out that something is coded in binary and then converting the binary codes to letters, you know, I mean, that sort of stuff.

And just ability to recognize it so quickly and ability to execute on it so quickly and figure out, oh, is this good data? Is this bad data? Am I going down the right idea? There's layers and layers. Yeah, just having you guys describe it. I mean, just that for each one, you've got to figure out what are the rules. and then figure out how to solve it. Yep.

For my part, I definitely had a few nice insights where I'm like, oh, I get it. I know what this puzzle is. And then we were able to go from there. And any time we can get something. No, Tyler solved most of them. If we can get something before Tyler, we're avoiding spoiling any of the puzzles because it's running again this coming weekend. We don't want to spoil it for anybody who might be doing it.

But I got to tell you, it's called Shintechi, S-H-I-N-T-E-K-I. That's the name of the company that puts it on. You know, if you want to do it, I absolutely recommend that you try it. It was a whole lot of fun. Our video game skills also came in handy without giving too much away. We prepared. We packed the car full of sandwiches. We packed the snacks and drinks and everything in the car, so we never had to stop.

Adult diapers. They would give us a puzzle, yeah. They would give us a puzzle. And it would be like, we don't have anywhere to do this. So we're kind of driving around at one point, we parked on the side of the road and just spilled out of the car. And, like, the puzzle was all these cards and we just put all the cards on the sidewalk. And we're just like Tyler's sitting half in the car, half out of the car. We're sitting in the street.

People are walking by us. Also, our team name was Clufenschmerts Evil Incorporated. So we were all dressed in lab coats like Dr. Doof and Schmertz, for Phineas and Furb. Naturally. Of course. And of course, we're all carrying clipboards around. So children keep asking us if we're scientists. Which was kind of the point.

So you look at them solemnly, yes, we are. Yeah, oh, of course, yeah. So that really helped us towards today's topic. We're going to talk about culture and facts and stories around codebreaking. Oh was 12 and Q was 17. I still don't know what those numbers mean. That is how we won the war. My secret codes, no secrets.

anymore Well, I will start us off with code name quiz Grab bag quiz for you guys here about code names and hidden meanings and hidden codes And hidden names And I'm just going to say hidden again coded meanings Yeah, coded meanings, there you go, well said Get your buzzers ready Whoa, now I get to use mine.

Oh yeah, what's your new sound, Karen? What codename did George Lucas and his crew use while filming Return of the Jedi in order to help keep the project secret? Oh, Chris, emphatically. Blue Harvest. That is correct. Blue Harvest. Wow. What is that alluding to?

So it was, they crafted this sort of elaborate story. It was like a fictitious horror movie. So the idea it was called Blue Harvest. And I guess the tagline was horror beyond imagination. They basically wanted to make it sound as unappealing as possible, so no more pay any attention to it. It was to keep press off the trail, to keep fans from, like, invading the shooting sites. Oh, I see.

Just to kind of keep it on the down low and just verifying some of the sources on this. I found out, I guess one of the other reasons they did it was to avoid price gouging from, like, contractors and craft and service providers. Because if they're like, oh, you're filming the new Star Wars movie. Yeah, here's our. table of fees. Yeah, times two. Sure.

Right. Which, of course, is so cynical. That's so clever. But, yeah. Yes, Blue Harvest. If you're on a cruise ship and you hear an announcement over the PA of Code Oscar, what does that signify? Mm, Karen.

Overboard? Yeah. Oh, okay. Code Oscar is a person overboard. Oh, for Oscar? Oh, for Oscar. Yeah. And like a lot of these kind of codes in a public place.

Like, you know, you want to sort of hide the meaning so people don't go panicking. Right, right. Versions of what popular software were often given city code names while under development, including Chicago, Daytona, Memphis, and Whistler. I think this is Windows. It is. It is, indeed. The Windows OS, yes, by Microsoft, of course.

Oh. Oh, Microsoft Windows. In 2010, Italian researchers announced that there are minisual letters and symbols hidden in the eyes of a person depicted in what famous work of art. Karen. The Mona Lisa. It is indeed, the Mona Lisa. Get out of here. I had no idea.

Like, right in the eyes. It's like some people are like, oh, it's a L or kind of disputed, like, what exactly the symbols are. Man, too bad Dan Brown didn't hear about that. It is. It's like real-life Dan Brown stuff. Totally. No, in her right eye are the letters, believed to be the letters LV, which possibly his initials. Louis Vuitton, of course.

Can't be sure. He didn't leave a guide. In her left eye, it's either the letters C, E, it might be a B. You know, it is a 500-year-old painting, and they are very, very, very tiny letters. You can't, you can only see them under magnificent. There might also be some numbers in the bridge behind her, either the number 72, maybe some letters. But here's the cool part. This is total damn brown stuff. A member of Italy's National Committee for Cultural Heritage basically stumbled across like a 50-year-old book in an antique shop describing hidden symbols in the eyes of the Mona Lisa. And they're like, well, we got to check this out.

And sure enough, they, you know, it's unclear how like this knowledge was kind of lost and then rediscovered but they are there. No one knows exactly what the coded meaning is. Do you think this could just be a coincidence or no? It would be one heck of a coincidence to describe. Sorry, not a coincidence, but like accident of the paintbrush. Oh, no. Like art historians and experts, like they've looked at it and said, no, this is intentional. It's not just random brushstrokes, yeah. Specifically, or as specifically as you can get. Uh, what does a code blue mean at most hospitals? Not just something bad is happening.

Karen. Uh, no power. Interesting. Uh, code blue, it's, it's usually a cardiac arrest. Oh. Uh, respiratory arrest. It's patient in distress, but for this particular reason. Oh, I thought you meant like the venue, like the whole hospital.

Got it. There are a lot of very venue specific codes like that, too. You're right. You're right. If you're in a hospital and you hear. paging Dr. Firestone to the third floor. That is most likely a code for there's a fire on the third floor.

Oh, okay. So it's a doctor that you've never heard of. And there's a lot of these sort of these hidden doctor Right, because they don't want to freak people out. Right, right, right. What if your last name is Firestone? Yeah, well, I've read them... Paging's Dr. Poopstein to the fifth floor.

Oh, no reason, no reason. I'm Dr. Poopstein. Oh. Charles Poopstein. It was pronounced Pup, Pupstein. Pupstein. Pupstain. Pupstain.

Pupstain. All right, we will close out here with one. Trying to poop is, in this episode, it's pretty fast. We really need to put these stats up online. Yeah. We'll close out here with a video game question. I hear there is some video game knowledge at this table. A little bit.

What? is the claim to fame of Gradius a Nintendo video game introduced in 1986 Chris Kohler It is the first video game to feature the legendary Konami code

Up, up, down, down, left right, left right, BA, start. Yes, start. And I knew it's the Contra code, which I guess a lot of people call it. 30 men's. That's right, the 30 men in contra, which we would frequently use.

Yeah, yeah. What happens in Gradius when you do this? It powers up your ship. You pause the game and enter it in, and when you unpause, you will have all of the powers. Oh. And, of course, it has been featured in many, many video games. And people put it in as an Easter egg in their websites sometimes. Sure, sure.

I think, like, even the Google Doodle maybe has used it before. Programmer Kazuhisa Hashimoto, who programmed the home version of Gradius, basically said, yeah, it's a really hard game. And he's, he didn't, he never played it. He never played it that much. He's like, I needed to have a way to jump around in the game and get to the end. How did it get out? People will discover things. That's true.

No matter how good you think you've hidden something. Yeah. All right. Well, well done. And I'll even give you the bonus point for actually knowing the Konami code. Not that I would expect you not to know it. So how many points do I have? One.

Oh. The bonus point is one. Just the one. Just that one. Yeah, those are for fun. All right. Good job, guys. Nice. So there was a rumor I heard that James Brown, legendary, what was he, Godfather of Soul?

Yes. He, obviously, when you see a lot of his live performances or, you know, videos of his performances, he's always with a band. He's not only the main entertainer, but he's also really the band leader for his James Brown band. A lot of people are aware that he was kind of notorious for being a very, very strict band leader. If he noticed that someone is slacking off, he will find them, he will yell at them. And that's why there was a lot of clashing with some of the band members. And when you watch James Brown perform, he does a lot of choreography. He's singing.

He does a lot of call and response. And the rumor I heard was that parts of his choreography are codes to his band, to signal to his band, what to do. Increase the volume, decrease the volume, or play it faster or bring it down. I tried looking for this. But nothing, nothing I can really hold on to. But what I did find was a lot of these previous band members would confess that parts of his choreography, he would turn his back and maybe he's doing a little jig and he will point to the person saying, see me after class during the performance. Putting people on notice. Yeah.

So it's not exactly, you know, his choreography is like a secret code for the music or for instructions for music. But really it's to tell you if you're in trouble. It's like, I see what you didn't do there. Yeah. So, yeah, that's really interesting. So this kind of inspired me to look for different codes or meanings in music. We've done, like, kind of hidden meanings. We've done back masking.

I'm more interested in the coding aspect of it. So we had this a trivia once. And the question, I believe, was something like, in Morse code, what letter is being represented in the first couple notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? Oh, right. It was dot, dot, dot, dot, dash. Yeah, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, uh. Right. So, of course, I forget what letter that is.

I just know, we, we know that it wasn't S or O, because we knew SOS. I think that was as far as we got. And it's one of the, I mean, three dots and a dash is one of the later letters. I mean, it's one of the more obscure letters. One of the lesser known letters. Yeah, one of the, only specialist, uh, no one of the lesser used letter, one of the most infrequent letters. It is somehow connected to the fact that it's Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Is it V?

It is V. Okay. V. V5. Huh. And so when the answer was read out, we're like, oh, wow, what a coincidence. And I'm a dummy. I'm saying they're like, you know, what are the chances of that?

Turns out Samuel Morse picked it for V because of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Huh. That's cool. So you can hear it. Yeah. Yep, Samuel Morse established But-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-Sands for V. He was a fan.

He was a fan. And then he's like, man, what am I going to do for the other 25 letters now? He's like, this is going to be a lot harder after V. Oh, that's really cool. And then one last little coding music tidbit. I did not know this. Johnny Cash worked as a decoder. Oh.

The nursery. I did not know that. That's awesome. In the Signal Corps or whatever they called it? He joined the Air Force in 1950. He was serving in the United States Air Force Security Service Unit in Germany. And so he spent a lot of his time in the service intercepting Russian Army Morse co-transmissions. He actually said himself, I had such a talent for that particular line of work and such a good left ear that in Landsberg, I was the ace.

And then he then said, I copied the first. news of Stalin's death. Wow. I don't know. It takes a whole team. I don't know if you can say, oh, it's that one person. He copied it. It's a good story, though.

It is a good story. It is a good story. And a lot of Johnny Cash historians stated that even though he was probably, you know, really, really good at his job, it was kind of a grind because he had to sit in place, closed indoors. Couldn't really talk to a lot of people outside of his unit because they're working on intelligence stuff. He can't really talk about his work.

with outside people, and I think that might have, you know, turned him off. You know, after a couple years, he left. But yeah, he was, I guess, you know, instrumental in some of the code intercepting stuff. Who knew? Giant Cash. So there you go. Some cool music code tidbits for you guys. This is Jen and Jenny from Ancient History Fan Girl.

And we're here to tell you about Jenny's scorching historical romantasy based on Alarica of the Biscogh's enemy of my dreams. Amanda Boucher, best-selling author of The Kingmaker Chronicle, says, quote, This book has everything, high-stakes action, grit, ferocity, and blazing passion. Julia and Alaric are colliding storms against a backdrop of the brutal dangers of ancient Rome. They'll do anything to carve their peace out of this treacherous world and not just survive, but rule. Enemy of my dreams is available wherever books are sold. So, Colin, if I were to come over to your house,

house, and you asked me if I wanted to eat anything, and I said, yes, I'll have Adam and Eve on a raft, and for lunch, two bloodhounds on an island, you would probably call the police. And with good reasons, it's four in the morning. What are you doing here? Yeah, this would be the least of your worries. But then I would explain to the cops that I was simply using diner lingo. American diner jargon, the diner code. The diner code.

The diner code. The diner coat. Yeah. The diner. And that what I actually, when I said, I wanted Adam and Eve on a raft, I actually wanted two poached eggs on toast. Okay. I could guess the toast. The toast like as a raft.

Yeah. And two bloodhounds on an island. Two bloodhounds. Sausages? Oh. It's Franks and beans. Beans and weanies. So yes, we can all, we all know, you know, we've all had experiences being in diners and hearing diner lingo.

Have you? I haven't. I never have. I don't think I ever have. It's like, it's something from movies and comic works and... No, it's very much real, but the experience of going to a diner... A real diner. Isn't really something that we get anymore.

Fast food kind of replaced the diner experience. It seems like something from a bygone era. Indeed. Diners now are kind of throwback things. And there's a lot of reasons why this diner slang language evolved and emerged and why you used to hear this. Let's imagine the diner. It's probably a pre-fabricated restaurant that was sold to someone that looks like the dining car on a train, right? As in the diner. Kind of like dropped into place. Yeah, as if we're just sort of dropped right in there into your city. Say, it's a small,

inexpensive place to go and eat. And there's probably, you know, a few tables. There's a big, long counter. And the counter faces the kitchen and the waitresses right behind the counter. Right. So it's not like. like what would have been a traditional sort of restaurant at the time where the server would take your order and then disappear wherever the kitchen is, which was totally, you know, hidden from you and then come back out. No, you, everybody was packed into a small location, right? Everybody's talking. Everybody's chatting. And as soon as you give your order to the waitress, she just turns around, maybe he doesn't even turn around and yells to the short order cook what she wants him to make. from the book, Classic Diner's of Connecticut.

Oh, wow. That's really specific. So specific. Not just classic diners. By Chris Kohler. Diner lingo was definitely around in the late 1800s in the second half. That's earlier than I would have guessed. Of the 19th century.

Yeah. I associated with Greece, you know, like in the 50s like sock hops. Oh, yeah. Well, it was most, exactly. It was most popular between the 1920s and 1970s where, you know, diner mania swept America. and this is what this book says, and I quote. Diner lingo was never intended for use in speeding up the order-to-table process.

Rather, it was a spontaneously developed mnemonic means of making orders easier to hear and remember above the conversational din of the busy diner. So the mnemonic device aspect, lots of very similar dishes being made in this diner with a small number of ingredients. It's really loud. Everybody's really near each other And people are, what are people constantly saying in the diner? Oh, I'll have this. Oh, I'll have that. I'll have this.

I'll have that. If you're the short-order cook, I mean, you're literally, you're just taking, you're hearing everything that's going on out there, right? How do you know what to make? Well, you only make it if the waitress tells it to you in diner lingo. That's what you're, you're not listening for the word hamburger. Right. Or eggs or whatever.

Or eggs or anything like that. Right. So often. That makes so much sense. Yep. And the diner lingo for similar dishes might be very different. It's like a fried egg that you flip over versus a fried egg that you don't flip over. It's like that's flop too over easy versus sunny side up.

And yes, those are believed to be to, you know, diner lingo slang that have now entered into common parlance. And then the other thing that the book says is it also provided patrons and employees with a free form of entertainment. Because they tried to be fun and silly and ridiculous, you know, with the biblical reference. and the sort of risque things. And then also sort of self-deprecating restaurant humor, you know, a well-done burger is a hockey puck. You know, rare is bloody. Garlic is Italian perfume or just breath, you know, add breath. My favorite is for if somebody orders hash, little tiny chopped up pieces of potato and, you know, maybe

corned beef or, you know, vegetables that are all in a hash, you know, they will call back, sweep the kitchen or clean out the sink. Or my favorite, somebody orders hash and the waitress calls back to the cook. The gentleman will take a chance. Oh, that is funny. It's just, it is funny to just order something and have them yell back something that sounds horrible. I mean, as you might imagine, some of these phrases were very kind of common. I mean, there was no controlling legal authority here.

So they kind of just spread by word of mouth around the country. Now, also imagine that these people have been working in this diner for a long time, right? So, I mean, if you go to a diner today, it's probably staffed by teenagers. You know, working their first job in high school, then they're going to leave. You know, it's not like there's people who are working there just forever and ever and ever. So they don't really have time to make up all this funny stuff. Also, I don't know. I feel like...

You have now an itemized receipt and like a system now. You don't need all this, exactly. Yeah, there is no calling it back, right? Now, there are probably places in the United States that still use diner lingo, but again, it's more of a throwback. If you go on the internet and read lists of diner lingo with community contributions, Just be aware that, like, some of that stuff may have been used in the past. Some of it, it's hard to tell what was used in the past and what somebody just sort of made up, you know, recently. So be careful.

But here are my favorites that I came across, which I think are, I'm pretty sure that these are real. Authentic. Yeah. Authentic, old school. And then, and then after we do this, now that we've talked a little bit about diner lingo, I will have a quiz. Oh, man. With ones that I've picked out that I think are getable. Okay.

But so here's just a few more. Jack, Jack is spelled G-A-C. It is an, it's an acronym. Can you figure out what that might be? Very common dish, G-A-C. Something in greens, guacamole. It's a grilled American cheese. Oh.

Jack, Benny, is a grilled cheese with bacon. This is this, I really like. A honeymoon salad is lettuce alone. Like, just lettuce? Because, like, I'm on my honeymoon, lettuce alone, or let us be. Lettuce alone is the honeymoon salad. And then also, this kept coming up, and I really, if anybody has any more information, please let me know. A lot of people contributed that they called buttered toast, a hojack.

That's H-O-J-A-C-K. I mean, I could not figure out why this would be the case. Apparently the word ho-jack, like there's a certain train line in New York that has the nickname the ho-jack line. and then there's a lot of folk etymologies for like maybe why did that come along like apparently the phrase ho jack might have come from like hello jack as in like hey buddy you know hi mac you know ho jack maybe it has to do with the fact that everybody who comes in and gets breakfast gets buttered toast so it's it's much of a ho jack style it's everybody yeah right but ho jack for buttered toast no i never heard that one neither anyhow now here is your diner lingo quiz all right let's figure this out together okay Okay, all right. Whistleberries. Whistleberries. Whistleberries.

Oh, like baked beans, maybe? It is baked beans, the musical fruit. Wow. If I said, give me one Atlanta special. I need the Atlanta special. Atlanta special. Coca-Cola? It is a Coca-Cola.

That's right. Adams Ale. Adams. Adams, Ails. That is the biblical Adam. A-L-E? A-L-E. Apples.

Also referred to as city juice or dog soup. If I wanted an Adam's ale or a city juice or a dog soup. Bloody Mary. I was going to say like apple juice, but I don't think so. Assuming he didn't have a bullet to make apple juice with. Water. Water. City juice.

Or dog soup. Got it. And of course, if I ask. And if I said Adam's ale hold the hail? No ice. No ice in that water. Oh, that rhymes. Yes.

If I asked for First Lady, First Lady with a side of frog sticks. First lady with a side of frog sticks. That certainly is. That certainly is. First lady. First lady. Now this, okay, this does not refer to a president's first lady, but to the first lady in some tales. Eve.

Yeah. Eve with a side of. Uh, it refers to the ostensible way in which Eve was created. Oh, ribs with a side of fries? Ribs with a side of fries. Wow. First lady with frog sticks. Burn the British.

Some of these are offensive. I've heard that one. That's an English muffin, right? That's a toasted English muffin. Sorry, okay. Burn the British, toasted English muffin. Yep. If I wanted a dry stack.

Pancakes, no butter. Pancakes with nothing on them, exactly. Yep. This is a beverage, a beverage. Hot blonde with sand. Hot blonde. A hot blonde with sand. Okay, so sand just be sugar.

Sand is sugar. So a hot blonde with sand. Lemonade. No, hot blonde. Oh, coffee with cream and sugar. Coffee with cream and sugar. Got it. As opposed to a cup of mud.

It lights and lights it and puts sand into it. Yep. And finally, if I told you to squeeze one. Lemonade, orange juice. Orange juice. Okay. Yep. Yep.

Yep. That's interesting. I always, it always again, I'm like, this doesn't save any time. Where does this slang come from? But you're right. It makes so much more sense that it's to stand out. Oh, God. Yes. Yep. Well, it's like a, and I'll talk about this a little bit later, but it's like the NATO alphabet, like all the call signs, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. You know, saying A, A, B, and C, when you say B, it sounds like C. It sounds like D. So it's something just to differentiate. Right. Over a scratchy radio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you guys know what a Boston cooler is? Is this like your purple cow? Yeah, it is. You guys don't laugh at me. Purple Cow is a real thing. So, ice cream with ginger ale. Yes.

Oh, okay. That's a Boston cooler. And Purple Cow is, of course, grape soda and ice cream. Ice cream. He's all making a face. Ice and rice. Ice and rice is ice cream on rice pudding. Whoa.

Do those mix? Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, the funny thing is so many of these things, it's like, oh, what is this? this mean? And it's like a dish that you would never eat and nobody ever eats anymore. It's like, oh, okay. Shaken Jesse. What? Shaken Jesse? Yeah. Oh, that's like the, uh, the Guinness milkshake, right? Yeah, it's like Guinness and ice cream. Huh. Usually chocolate ice cream, shaking Jesse. Usually delicious. All right, we're going to take a quick break and, uh, Colin,

I have commissioned you to make a quiz all about education and learning. I believe it's graduation season. So you made a graduation quiz in honor of our sponsor, Linda.com. Of course, it is May and a lot of people are graduating or finishing up their school. You know, it's also summer vacation. So you might also have a lot of free time. So why not check out Linda.com and maybe learn some cool skills for your hobby or for your job that's coming up. So sock it to us, Colin. All right. I've got a graduation day quiz here for you guys. And I do need to give a little bit of credit where it's due. Uh, I have heaven. I've heavily cribbed some of these questions from a quiz that my wife put together for a graduation party.

It's always cute when someone does my work for me. No, you guys are married, so it's half yours. In the state of California. Community quiz property. So here we go. After students become graduates, they will often refer to their school as their alma mater. Indeed. So please tell me, what does alma mater mean in Latin?

It means, boy, yo, yo, yo, y'ing. I think it means my dear mother. It's in that family, yeah. Yeah, yeah, nourishing mother. Nourishing mother. Nourishing mother. Yeah, okay, right, right. What a weird thing to call an institution.

Like, I understand conceptually, but, you know, it nourish you. I got the metaphor. She's a little creepy. Yeah, it is. It's a little Norman Batesy. Hmm. Hmm. We'll stick with the really traditional stuff here.

What is the name of the traditional square cap, often worn by students at graduation? I didn't know the name. You're not looking for graduation cap. I'm not looking for graduation cap. It has a very specific traditional name, the little tassily thing on it. Oh, it's not the little tassily hat? Yeah, I will not accept little tassily hat. Dang.

It's named after a tool used by... Brick layers. I used to know this. If this prompts any, Chris. Trowel. It is called a mortar board. Mortarboard. That's right.

Why? So named after the little square, kind of like a palette that brick layers would use to hold the mortar on. Okay. While they're applying. Not like once someone ran out of hats. Carry bricks on their head. Yeah, exactly.

Yes. And his name was Bob Harvard. And now you know the rest of the story. The first Ph.D. was awarded in 1150 in what European city? Oh. Karen. I'd say Italy? Oh, city.

Oh, city. Rome. Nope, not Rome. It was, Chris. Paris. Paris. Paris, France. Yeah, there only are a couple of cities at that time.

Yeah, that's the way back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An honorary doctorate of amphibious letters was awarded to whom by Southampton College in 1996. Amphibious letters? An honorary doctorate of amphibious letters. Chris. Kermit the Frog? It was Kermit the Frog.

Yeah. Yes. Did he have to show up and accept it? Oh, yeah. I think you've got to show up and, you know, give the address. Oh, my God. That's cute. So as we sit here recording, we are just mere blocks from the campus of University of California, Berkeley.

You can actually see the bell tower from the front of my house. So I have a question here for you about a fictional UC Berkeley alum. Fictional? Yes. What fictional alumnus of UC Berkeley holds a master's degree in criminology and law on a hit television show? This is a... Chris, huh? This is a character.

perhaps seen more often... Oh, go ahead. Is it Olivia Benson? It's not Olivia Benson. This is a character you see shooting people more than you see this person in a classroom, Chris. Is it Jack Bauer? It is Agent Jack Bauer. This blew my mind.

Yes, Karen, we are fellow alums with Agent Jack Bauer. Wow. What did he, quote, study? It was supposedly a master's in criminology and law. that there is actually no such degree awarded from Berkeley in that. Wow. I think my most famous fictional alum is, in fact, Elaine Benis from Seinfeld. Oh.

That's tough? Yeah. Just during one episode, it was just this tossed off joke of she was like, you want to talk about hardship? I went to Tufts. It was my safety school. Yeah. So that's it.

But you have a... Pee T. Yeah, right. You want to get a PT bar? Well, he's real, Gary. No, I know. I'm saying. He's real person.

All right. Last question. The first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science was, A, a math teacher, B, a nun, or C, a telephone switchboard operator. Chris. A nun. She was, indeed a nun. Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, born in Ohio in 1914, was the first woman.

to earn a Ph.D. in computer science in 1965. Wow. From University of Wisconsin at Madison. Yes, not only the first woman, also the first American to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. So she was generally an all-around badass. Yes. That is awesome. Yep. Well, good quiz.

Yeah. Thank you. For those of you who have graduated this past week, uh, congratulations. Congratulations. Book Club on Monday. Jim on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday.

Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. The creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers

comes the Minute Earth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had, but once you hear the answer, you'll want to share it with everyone you know. Why do rivers curve? Why did the T-Rex have such tiny arms? And why do so many more kids need glasses now than they used to? Spoiler alert, it isn't screen time. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation,

jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. Subscribe to Minute Earth wherever you like to listen. You're listening to Good Job Brain. Smooth puzzles, smart trivia. Good job, brain. So, of course, we get this in trivia a lot. The NATO alphabet. Yes.

Or call signs. Lots of different names because there are a lot of different groups. Groups, government groups, utilize this set of alphabeticals sign. Yeah. And like I said earlier, a lot of the reasons why, when they're talking about letters over a crappy radio, when you say M, do you mean N? Even like, sometimes when on the phone, credit card companies or what? And they're just like, okay, so let me read that back to you. It's Charlie, Bravo, Delta.

It's like they will use, though, because it's like, it really does work. It helps differentiate the letters you're talking about. But, you know, this is, this comes up very frequently in trivia. It does. We have to name what is the NATO alphabet for G. Right. Because, like, a lot of people, I don't know, I was going to say everybody, but a lot of people know, like, Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, maybe you know Delta.

Echo, Fox Trot. It starts to get a little bit hazy there. Whiskey tango. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

So what was interesting to me is, like, well, how did they determine what words to use? Is it just like some, some dude in a room be like, well, I'm going to come up with 26 of them. They're English words, but they're used internationally. And so they have to account for different pronunciations or comprehension. So the final choice of the code words of the letters of the alphabet were made after thousands of comprehension tests from 31 different countries. And this is to try to see which words are good for which letters. And it blows my mind that for Z, the last letter, I always thought, oh, zebra, because that's such a common turn.

Everybody knows Zulu, isn't it? It's Zulu. And I was like, why do they choose Zulu instead of zebra? It's easier to hear Zulu than it is to hear zebra. If you wrote the alphabet, it would all just be animals. Yeah, Ardvark. From Ardvark to zebra. Yeah, beaver.

And so forth. Yeah. Yeah. Camel. Yeah. Dogs. Elephant. Oh, X would be hard. Yeah.

Zenomorph. Yeah. Oh, it's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good enough. So we're probably more familiar with the alphabet. Did you guys know there are special code words for the digits? Sure.

Like, Niner. That's where Niner comes from, isn't it? Okay. So Niner is FAA, which is American. There is a set of digits or words for digits that is from the International Telecommunication Union. FAA is American. Okay. So this is worldwide.

And also used by the IEMO, which is the Air National Maritime Organization. and there's a whole set of words for numbers. Lay it on us. Which is weird to think about it that way. So a lot of these numbers add more sounds to it, so it sounds more unique. Also, it sounds more cosmopolitan in a way. So, for example, zero is nada zero. Ah.

N-A-Z-R-A-N-A-A-N-A-D-A. And one is Una-1. So it's kind of almost Esperanto-ish. Yeah, it's like a mix of a bunch of languages. Two is Biso 2. Terra 3, Cartay 4, Panta 5, pentagram, pant 5. Soxie 6, sete 7, octo 8, and then 9 is a Nova 9. So it kind of reinforces the root of the word.

It does. It's a combination of kind of Latin and Germanic. And another tidbit, do you guys know why? My May Day when like a plane is going down, they say May Day, May Day. Yes. Help me in French. Yeah. May Day. Yeah.

Instead of, and they adopted that because help is such a short word. And it's hard to hear. So they adopted May Day, help me from French and just distinctive. And it really doesn't matter what it means, as long as people know what you're mean when you're saying. Right, right, right. So I love all stories around cryptography. That's why, like when you were telling me all the stories about. your puzzling adventures yesterday. I was like, oh, that sounds so cool. Do you like hearing the

stories and reading about it or do you like to do it? You know, I like reading about it, I think, more than actually doing it. It's just a good little detective story. It's how do you go about getting to this information? That's what's interesting to me. Cryptography is really, really, really old. I mean, ancient times have been going on. I mean, as you can imagine, like, as long as we've had important messages, you want to have a way of hiding different people, especially if you're a government or a military leader. One of the most simple ways of putting text into a cipher is called a

Caesar shift cipher because Julius Caesar was known to use this a lot and it's really kind of the most basic way of encoding information you kind of just shift your letters forward so A would become D

B would become E and so on and so forth and that's fine if you want to do simple encoding but you know if you know how many spaces the letters are being shifted you can figure it out so then people you know you can make it more complex

by instead of doing a shift you jumble it So an A might be an X, a B might be an L, there's no pattern to it. And you figure that out by looking at the frequency of letters and the alphabet, so I mean the letter that appears the most, well, it's probably E. There's a saying I came across, which said that in some ways, weak encryption is worse than no encryption. And the reasoning is that if you've got weak encryption and someone breaks it and you don't know that it's broken, you're going to go on continue using it and they're reading your messages, which in some ways you're not going to be as careful as if it wasn't encrypted at all. Right. If there was no encryption, you'd be more circumspect than what you said. Exactly. Exactly. You know, code breaking got more and more and more elaborate as code writing got more and more elaborate.

In the years after World War I in particular, there were a lot of advancements in mechanizing cryptography. One of my favorite, you know, real-life stories is the story of the Enigma machine. You guys may have heard about this. This is the encryption and decryption device that the Germans very famously used in the run-up and during World War II and that the British were racing to sort of figure out how it worked. In particular, I got a lot of my information from a book called The Code Book by author Simon Singh. A high concept. Karen's laughing. But yes, it's a book about code breaking and code making. And the enigma in particular. And the thing with the enigma is that it was really good, really advanced machine for encrypting. At its most simplest way

of putting it, just think about it as it was doing a lot of shifting and a lot of substitution of keys for the original text. So you may not use the same key twice. You may not need, and you know, which makes it really hard to decipher the text. Right, unless you have two machines that are coded to the same key. It was invented by a German named Arthur Sherbius. And as you guys may remember from history class, the Germans didn't do too well in World War I. And, you know, as it turns out, one of the reasons that they didn't do so well has to do with

issues with their encryption and decryption. So Sherbius invented the first enigma in 1918. and he really had hopes to sell it to corporations, to business, you know, hydro company secrets from other companies, as well as to the government. You know, it seemed to him like a no-brainer, like, oh, well, obviously people are going to want this device. The problem was it was really expensive. I mean, it was, you know, it should be. Yeah, it should be. Yeah.

Today's prices, it was up to, you know, 30 grand for a single machine. And if you were a large corporation or you'd need to deploy multiple of them. Oh, I see. I see. So companies kind of balked at it. But then he's like, all right, surely. the government and the military will be interested in this. You know, we're, you know, we just came out of a war that we didn't do too well in. We have a lot of enemies maybe in the world.

So he went to the government and they weren't interested. The German military was like, nah, we don't, we don't have a need for this. They largely had an attitude like, oh, you know, our encryption is fine. What they didn't realize is that they were being broken. So remember, as I said, you know, sometimes weak encryption is worse than no encryption. But what's even worse than weak encryption is broken encryption that you don't know is broken. And it turns out that the Germans had actually fallen to at least two massively damaging incidents during World War I that they didn't find out about for years and years afterward. They didn't realize it happened until Winston Churchill published The World Crisis in 1923, where he basically talked about

breaking a lot of the codes. And he revealed a story where in 1914, a German ship wrecked in the Baltic, and they recovered the body of a drowned German officer. The Russians recovered this. And he had code books on him. Oh. And the Russians immediately are like, well, this is really valuable. So they contacted the British and said, hey, you know, we think you guys might be really interested in basically a list of the codes that the Germans are using to encrypt their messages. So this was 1914. The Germans didn't find out until 1923 that the British had broken this code years and years prior. Right. Reading everything. Right. So in no short order, They freaked out.

And by 1925, Mr. Sherbius was mass-producing enigmas for the German government. The machine that he was pitching them. The machine that was pitching, they realized, oh, my God, we've been, we've been too confident this whole time. We need to really step up our encryption game. So over the next 20 years, into World War II, the Germans bought more than 30,000 enigma machines. And the machine got more and more advanced over the years. And so moving into World War II, the British very famously in the offices they had set up at Bletchley Park, where we're working really to crack the enigma. Some of the earliest work in computer science was directly a result of trying to break the enigma code.

Eventually, they were able to piece together partly through sloppy key reuseal. And they were able to take advantage, basically, of a little bit of sloppy reuse of keys and just raw, genius computing power. the likes of Alan Turing and many, many other smart people really working on this problem. And they were able to crack the Enigma code. It looks like a fairly innocuous little device. It kind of looks a little bit like a steampunk typewriter, maybe. I was thinking of a toaster. Codes come out from the toast slots.

You would enter using keys like on a typewriter, and it would encode the text, basically. There's a series of wheels and gears as you typed it. Oh, in real time. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I thought it's you slip a paper and it poops it out. I don't know, like technical terms here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. And that is our code episode. I was thinking of like maybe embedding a code in this episode, but I don't. But no. Yeah. If you take the second letter of every word, every time you hear this sound. It spells out poop.

Cover it into numbers. Yeah. And then into flag codes. Right. So there you go. Thank you for. joining me. Thank you guys listeners for listening in. Hope you learned a lot of stuff about

the Nigma Code Diner Lingo and the NATO alphabet and more. You can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, good jobbrain.com. And thanks to our sponsor, Linda.com.

And we'll see you guys next week. Bye. What does Sputnik have to do with student loans? How did a set of trembling hands end the Soviet Union? How did inflation kill moon bases? And how did a former president decide to run for a second non-consecutive term? These are among the topics we deal with on the My History Can Beat Up Your Politics Podcast. We tell stories of history that relate to today's news events.

Give a listen. My history can feed up your politics wherever you get podcasts.