Post by Hez on Jun 10, 2015 15:49:27 GMT -5
Lesson 0205: Body Language, Revisited
We had a few guests to this lecture. Hopefully they enjoyed themselves! Now I've said again and again that I never intended for this school to involve any work or critical thinking OOC, but as the weeks go on it seems I'm making a liar of myself. With our small group of attendees, we developed a small working dictionary capable of communicating the most basic of messages. For an improvised exercise, it turned out pretty well.
I also once said I'd keep the encryptions off the website. I'm now considering making a key for registered users. This will be discussed among my officers, and if we go through with it, I'll update this lesson with an active link to the appropriate page.
As I explained a few weeks ago, this semester differs from our inaugural set of lectures in that these lessons are designed to build on each other, as opposed to a set of standalone lectures. That’s not to say that our first semester was without valuable information, however, and as such this particular lesson combined one of our earlier lectures with our running theme. In essence, tonight’s exercise was a combination of lessons 106 and 203.
Last semester we taught our cadets how to make due with selective information, by reading body language and using context clues. A few weeks ago we taught them how to manually encrypt messages for written or small-band transmission. This week we worked on developing the building blocks of a language. Our medium? You guessed it. Physical gestures.
You might wonder what the practical application of such a visual language might be. Well, as we discussed in lesson 203, you may at times need to communicate a message under emergency circumstances. Seeing as how the Coruscanti Cipher is a written language and it’s generally bad form to vocalize your secret message, this can most certainly be a viable alternative. And while perhaps standing around madly flapping your arms at each other may cause a scene blatantly at another person can draw attention, if performed with subtlety it can prove invaluable.
In class this evening we established a rudimentary dictionary that included how to initiate contact, send a simple message, and a form of punctuation or two. I’m considering entering a codex for this and our other forms of encrypted transmission here in our database. Obviously this presents a bit of a security risk—if we do decide to go down such a path I’ll need to make some major adjustments to our slicing countermeasures.
Last semester we taught our cadets how to make due with selective information, by reading body language and using context clues. A few weeks ago we taught them how to manually encrypt messages for written or small-band transmission. This week we worked on developing the building blocks of a language. Our medium? You guessed it. Physical gestures.
You might wonder what the practical application of such a visual language might be. Well, as we discussed in lesson 203, you may at times need to communicate a message under emergency circumstances. Seeing as how the Coruscanti Cipher is a written language and it’s generally bad form to vocalize your secret message, this can most certainly be a viable alternative. And while perhaps standing around madly flapping your arms at each other may cause a scene blatantly at another person can draw attention, if performed with subtlety it can prove invaluable.
In class this evening we established a rudimentary dictionary that included how to initiate contact, send a simple message, and a form of punctuation or two. I’m considering entering a codex for this and our other forms of encrypted transmission here in our database. Obviously this presents a bit of a security risk—if we do decide to go down such a path I’ll need to make some major adjustments to our slicing countermeasures.
We had a few guests to this lecture. Hopefully they enjoyed themselves! Now I've said again and again that I never intended for this school to involve any work or critical thinking OOC, but as the weeks go on it seems I'm making a liar of myself. With our small group of attendees, we developed a small working dictionary capable of communicating the most basic of messages. For an improvised exercise, it turned out pretty well.
I also once said I'd keep the encryptions off the website. I'm now considering making a key for registered users. This will be discussed among my officers, and if we go through with it, I'll update this lesson with an active link to the appropriate page.