Life of Alan

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(tags: Think_Tanks)

Despite his 33 years, Valdis Novikovs still radiates teenage energy and a hunger for adventure. Latvia is a small country (population: 2.2 million), and like a lot of young people who felt suffocated and needed to get out, Novikovs left for England in 2005. He worked as a sous-chef at the Hard Rock Cafe in Birmingham and shared a studio apartment with a Polish roommate. When he went back to Latvia two years later, he barely recognized his own country. The moderately ticking postcommunist economy he'd left behind had turned into a booming engine, propelling rapid changes almost everywhere he looked.

"I come back and everyone around me is buying and selling properties," Novikovs says. "People have two luxury cars. They are traveling all over the world. I'm laboring overtime like a fool in England, but I can't do any of that." Sitting in his apartment in Riga, Novikovs speaks animatedly: "I felt like something gigantic was happening in Latvia, and the train was leaving without me!"

(tags: Latvia)

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher — a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now. The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society — a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities — and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them. In this message, Mr. Patterson set out to show the president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence what he deemed to be a nearly flawless cipher. "The art of secret writing," or writing in cipher, has "engaged the attention both of the states-man & philosopher for many ages," Mr. Patterson wrote.

(tags: American_History)

(tags: Intelligence)