Turns Out The Aryan Brotherhood Are Scientists Too When people think of scientists, they don't often picture neo-Nazis or whatever exactly the Aryan brotherhood is today. Because neo-Nazis are often bald and moody and disdainful of people they feel are inferior ... Uh oh.  Well, not all scientists are bald. Never mind that for now. We're usually not inclined to make the Aryan brotherhood honorary scientists because of that whole setting-people-on-fire thing they do but science is nothing if not objective so we have to give them credit where it's earned. What did they do to earn such lofty status? Well, they got scientifically old-school by breaking out cryptography from the time of Shakespeare.   A few things still hold up from those days; Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon's binary alphabet, and the world's first super-hottie, Queen Elizabeth I: Now there's a queen scientists can get behind. Anyway, these Aryan's didn't make honorary scientist status by putting on a Shakespeare play or dressing up like Cate Blanchett, they did it by using cryptography. Some of you may not know what cryptography is ... or the binary system. Science will give you the 60-second explanation. Instead of using 10 numbers before it goes to the next column, a binary system uses two. Mentally to imagine 695 you keep dividing by 10, right? You have 6 in the hundreds column, 9 in the tens column and 5 in the ones column. In binary instead of 10s you use 2. It ends up being a long number ( 001101100011100100110101 ) because using 10s chews up a lot more numerical real estate but it's quite useful if you have something that can only go On or Off ( like your computer ). So what Sir Francis Bacon invented was a binary 'alphabet' ... it consisted of 5 binary 'characters'( A and B rather than 0 and 1, but it's the same thing ) to represent each letter and the 'key' you would use to decipher the code was determined by the font he used. It was quite lovely:   So these guys used this cryptography to ... well, basically to plan the murder of other inmates, which isn't that great, but we're not too happy with what Al Gore does with science either so sometimes you just have to let things go. Invisible ink, cryptography.  Ahhhh, it takes me back to those halcyon days in the schoolyard.  I know that hot girl Mary was really writing me love notes and not just handing me blank pieces of paper.   I just haven't figured out the code yet.