corollary

Entry #162

Listening to:

Mozart, Mass in C minor, K427. This is sometimes known as Mozart's Great Mass. It's incomplete, but not as much as the Requiem. It's full of beautiful choral music, and I imagine it must be amazing to sing. (Or perhaps it's difficult; I really don't know.)

Just read:

Leo Marks, Between silk and cyanide. I really liked this. It's a memoir of the author's time as code specialist for the Special Operations Executive during World War II. This is thus a different "scene" from the famous activities carried out at Bletchley Park (where Alan Turing worked). Inasmuch as anyone is allowed to know about what went on there, Bletchley Park was concerned with cracking the enemy's codes (famously, Enigma). On the other hand, Marks's job was to design codes for use by the special agents that were dropped into occupied Europe to carry out the war against Germany by less conventional means.

The book relates how Marks got his job and found that SOE were using a code with very poor security. Over the course of his years there, he gradually managed to improve the codes that agents used, and also instituted training to better allow the staff in London to try and decrypt messages that had become scrambled somehow.

There's lots of drama in this story. Needless to say, much of this comes from the fact that there's a war on, and the Germans are capturing agents, turning them and all the rest. But in addition to all this, there are all sorts of institutional struggles to contend with. For example, the SOE was not part of what is now known as MI6 (referred to here simply as C). In Marks's telling, C was often out to discredit SOE's activities, and the SOE had to "fight its corner" just to continue to receive resources. Even within SOE, Marks's has to deal with lots of superiors who don't see things quite as he does.

A substantial number of the reviewers at amazon.com, thought that Marks's writing style was very offputting. I wasn't bothered by it. He's a little precious at times, but this is a minor aspect of the book that didn't stop me from enjoying it a great deal.

Now reading:

David Berlinski, A tour of the calculus. The author's style is really putting me off this one though.

I was afflicted with Disappearing Tuesday syndrome yesterday.