Miscellaneous Data

This is my data attic, where I keep things I cannot fit elsewhere.

Reeds-Shepp paths

A program used in doing the research for the 1990 paper `Optimal paths for a car what goes both forwards and backwards' by myself and L.A. Shepp. I think this program implements our formulae properly: use it at your own risk.

Vulgate Bible Word Frequency Counts

The Bible Foundation has an ftp/gopher site with the vulgate Latin Bible text available for public study. I counted all the words (counting differently inflected forms as different words), and arranged the counts alphabetically and by decreasing order of frequency. I also worked out the tabulation of frequency of frequencies, showing that the single most common word, et, occurs 54012 times and that 23080 words (such as gazarumque, honorificabamus, and tutamentum) occur just once apiece.

Late 1920's U.S. State Department Code Book

I typed in (but did not carefully proofread) one page from the decoding section of the 1929 U. S. Department of State D-1 code book. The book itself is in the National Cryptologic Museum. Once upon a time this was a tip-top secret.

Features to note: The code was designed to be superenciphered. There are very few long phrases. There is liberal provision of spelling groups. Some of the plain text entries are ominous when seen in the light of the next 20 years of history, with code groups like NEPON = ``Detention camps,'' etc. The vocabulary seems designed to cover a much wider range of topics than found in tactical military codes. The code groups seem to all obey a CVCVC constraint; there seems to be an upper limit of 36,000 possible entries; the groups do not obey a mutilation table constraint.

Bentley words

Nerdy to the max, I typed in all the 5-letter code words used in the 1906 Bentley's Complete Phrase Code, taking pains to correct errors. Let me know if you find any! There are 29,299 words in the main vocabulary of the book, and 2,164 in the fill-in-the-blanks ``Supplement.''