A Different Script Is Not a Code To Crack – Greek Edition

There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming a lens through which things become overly mysterious. The Guardian writes (archive link) about a new Stephen Hawking biography, in which for the first time also the diaries of his father, and letters and journals from his mother were available as source. The article contains an image of his father’s diary entries for early January 1963. The image caption reads: "Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked." Secret code? Ooh, mysterious and intriguing! And the biographer cracked it! Roll over, Bletchley Park! Let’s see if I can ‘crack’…