And an odd time she’d cook him up blooms of fisk
Computers have increased our ability to make anything signify anything in ways that Friedman could not have predicted. A Google search for steganography reveals a whole world of digital tools and communities that combine traditional cryptography with cutting-edge computation—and its applications are both more innocent and more sinister than anything produced by the Baconians. Unused bytes and pixels in files can contain huge amounts of invisible information, and by using basic programs and simply changing the settings in a display, a tree can become a cat, a cat can tell us to blow up a bridge, and an oil painting of a whaling expedition can carry the entire text of Moby Dick.14 The codes of the computer age contain more a’s and b’s than were dreamt of in Bacon’s philosophy.
photo { Mark Heithoff }
