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You have to love NPR--who else would offer such overly intellectual analysis (a cryptologist!) of this story:::
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"The governor's spokesman says coincidence, but not everyone is so sure. And to help us decide, we're turning now to Professor Robert Lewand of Goucher College in Baltimore. He specializes in cryptology.
Professor ROBERT LEWAND (Mathematics and Computer Science, Goucher College): Thank you very much, Melissa.
BLOCK: And we asked you to calculate the odds of this happening accidentally. What did you find out?
Prof. LEWAND: Taking into account the frequencies of the letters that appear in this particular message, I compute that the odds of this happening by accident would be about 5.5 in one trillion.
BLOCK: I see. So this line from the governor's office that this was pure coincidence, sounds like you're not buying it.
Prof. LEWAND: Well, I think somebody in the governor's office was just having a little fun. It would be very, very, very unlikely that that would happen by chance.
BLOCK: And just to get a sense of the words that we're spelling out, what seems to be this encoded message here, one of them is unnecessary.
Prof. LEWAND: Yeah, that occurs twice.
BLOCK: Kicks, kicks the can, the K in kicks.
Prof. LEWAND: That, I think, really gives it away because there are relatively few words in the English language that begin with the letter K. And that seems to me that they really had to search for that one.
BLOCK: Yeah. He didn't just say that the legislature just punked it, or the legislature just...
Prof. LEWAND: That's right or passed...
BLOCK: Yeah, kicks the can.
Prof. LEWAND: And yeah.
BLOCK: So you think that's kind of the smoking gun in the letter.
Prof. LEWAND: I would guess so. You know, I'm not one to condemn people, but I would guess that they looked pretty hard for that word.
BLOCK: Well, Professor Lewand, thanks for decoding this for us and calculating the odds.
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