Friends, fam, listeners, I must ask you, on what other podcast are you going to go from

quantum cryptography one week to biblical prophecy the next? What other podcast? You can't get content like this favorite thing that I do all week. So if you're new here, welcome. On Fridays, we talk about translation. We don't always wear pink on Wednesdays,

but we always talk about translation on Fridays and that's the words, words, words, series.

I take your questions at Rejoyce Evermore. Substack.com and sometimes they lead me into fun and

kooky places. Today I have an excellent question about last week's episode on encryption.

So last week I did a whole episode about encryption and codes and I said that they are different from

translation in an important and interesting way. Translation takes the underlying meaning of the text and gives it a new outward form, gives it a new surface level of words and sounds and syllables.

Incryption takes the surface level as it already is,

doesn't change it at all, and just scrambles it

or reroutes it into a new pattern that has an identifiable, usually mathematical connection

to the original surface.

So you haven't done anything beneath the surface of the

the meaning of the words, but you've done something

very complicated to the surface,

so that the surface will become unrecognizable

and illegible to anybody except somebody

that knows how to undo the code and the whole

project is to find the most complicated way of scrambling the letters, the

routes of transmission that can be unscrambled by somebody who has the key to the code, but

can't be unscrambled by somebody that doesn't.

And I talked about this at the level of ciphers from the 1600s all the way down to today in quantum cryptography and using photons and their indeterminacy to build an unbreakable code key.

But I stressed that there's an important difference here between translation and encoding, which is the encoding only scrambles the surface and unscrambles the surface.

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