Talk:Orville Ward Owen

Virginia Fellows' dates
According to Virginia Fellows' dates are 1914-2005. Jackiespeel (talk) 10:53, 29 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Not RS, but it may well be correct and the 1910-2006 dates given were uncited. We don't need her dates, so I've deleted them. Paul B (talk) 13:36, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

VF is of insufficient notability for WP (but may be appropriate for specialist wikis).

How useful would the cipher wheel actually be for exploring substitution ciphers?

As for the theory - 'If it sounds too fiddly/impractical to carry through, it probably is too fiddly/impractical' (and given the plays were 'working documents in multiple forms', spotting-the-letters is going to produce more variants than a politician's campaign promises). Jackiespeel (talk) 14:04, 4 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I suppose it would be useful for aligning texts. To be honest, I am far from clear how his cipher is supposed to have worked. As I understand he identified special words and then looked for passages that contained the word. Nearby words and phrases were then combined into a message. Paul B (talk) 18:17, 5 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Now much more quickly done by computers - and there are various obvious problems with the system (set phrases; homonyms; using 'words and phrases of the same intent'; multi-lingual crossovers; standardised forms etc). Jackiespeel (talk) 21:29, 10 April 2013 (UTC)