I can’t tell you how excited we are, and will post links to the broadcast/podcast as soon as they are available.

You can visit their site here: Midnight Buffet

http://www.willworkforrobots.com/the-colbert-saga/

Click Here for Full Article

The knack of cracking a secret code — the stuff of Cold War intrigue, DaVinci and Harry Potter — has once again become a fascination.

This fall, a mysterious message from World War II turned up on a carrier-pigeon skeleton found in a chimney in the south of England. Experts around the world have been trying to crack it.

Then in November, a coded letter from Napoleon, threatening to blow up the Kremlin, grabbed headlines when it was sold for almost $250,000.

For Paul Sloggett, a newly retired Toronto statistics professor, this new code rage sparked an idea of unlocking a new wave of code hounds.

Sloggett, who has been fascinated by puzzles since he ordered his first decoder ring off the back of a Marvel comic, has created a two-hour crash course for school kids on ciphers and codes. The course includes a history of military codes, the math involved in breaking a code, and the role codes still play in daily life, from passwords to pin numbers.

Already two schools in his Scarborough neighborhood have booked him to come in and teach Grade 5 and 6 students about some of the more famous types of encryption, from Morse code, to the Nazis’ Enigma machine, which defied decoders, to Japan’s Purple Code, which carried word of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“When you combine a love of history with a love for puzzles, you get the study of codes and code-breaking and it ties in to all sorts of parts of the curriculum,” said Sloggett, who retired last summer from Seneca College, where he taught property assessment — a somewhat different code.

He is offering his code lessons free, as a way to “give back to the community” in his retirement.

“Codes cover all sorts of parts of the curriculum: a little bit of statistics, which is math, as well as history and numerology and linguistics,” said Sloggett, who has designed breezy, hands-on lessons to be presented over two one-hour sessions. “Cryptology is a field of study at some universities.”

Students will make their own “Caesar Cipher”: a wheel that substitutes for each letter another symbol. The system was originally designed to keep Julius Caesar’s messages from being understood by enemies.

“The second day, they’ll use their Caesar Ciphers to transmit coded messages to each other,” he said. They will try to crack other kinds of codes, with names like “pigpen” and “rail fence,” and use the tricks they learn about spotting patterns to crack the clues in a mystery game Sloggett will write about their class.

And they will watch Sloggett’s favourite film clip about Ralphie, a boy in the early 1940s, who cracks a coded message delivered to young fans of the Little Orphan Annie radio show from sponsor Ovaltine.

In this tender moment from the movie A Christmas Story, the earnest young sleuth races to figure out a message he is sure has national importance — only to discover it’s a commercial pitch: “Be sure to Drink Your Ovaltine.”

From this point on, any SECRET DECODER RING will be packed in in our attractive new packaging (yes, we are working on boxes for the Translator series as well, but it will be after the new year)

We will continue to use only USPS first class shipping, so plan on any packages to take 4-5 business days to arrive after your order is placed (10-15 days for international). To arrive by the 24th in USA, order by the end of the day of December 18th (orders on the 19th or early on the 20th MAY make it too).

Please contact us with any questions!

We'll get some video up as soon as we can.
Thank you Disney!!!

-Seth

UncleRobot.com

Also, look for their custom Uncle Robot Decoder Ring coming soon!!!

We have finished a set of new rings, and will be adding them to our line up as soon as we can. Now available:

Futhark Rune Ring for our Translator Series. We call it Hobbit Translator to make it easier to find.

You may recall the map shown in the beginning of  The Hobbit. Ever wonder what Thror’s clue said?  Well, now you can find out!

If you ever needed to translate Hobbit, it’s now easier than ever. Well, maybe not as easy as some of those computer programs, but this is way cooler.

Wow, the very first one has been sold already. It is heading to Berwick, Victoria AUSTRALIA. Thank you!!!

PS and our second one is heading to the Russian Federation!!

Yes, there are a LOT of exclamation points in this post… because we mean it!!!