Underground Utility Colour Codes Explained
Underground utility colour codes are used to differentiate and identify underground utilities to protect it from damage during excavation. There are different types of utilities and in order to tell them apart coloured lines, flags or sometimes both are used. They help mark the location and indicate the type of utility that is buried underground.
I had no idea! (via Tony Finch)(tags: utilities power underground excavation digging repair urban)
Meet the Irish master codebreaker you never heard of
In 1943, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious communication codes was broken by a mild-mannered librarian and family man from Abbeyfeale in west Limerick, Richard Hayes. His day job was director of the National Library of Ireland, but during the Emergency, he secretly led a covert team of cryptanalysts, working feverishly on the infamous “Görtz Cipher” – a fiendish Nazi code that had stumped many of the greatest code-breaking minds at Bletchley Park, the centre of British wartime cryptography. Astonishingly, the feat was accomplished not in one of the huts at Bletchley Park, but in a now derelict building colloquially known as “The Red House” on Montpellier Hill in Dublin. If this wasn’t an amazing enough feat, Hayes also broke a complex microdot enciphering system which had baffled the American OSS, as well an enciphering system used by the dreaded Sicherheitsdienst (or SD), the intelligence section of the SS. The breaking of the latter code was instrumental in the Allied victory at the Battle of the Bulge. Few individuals can be said to have altered the course of the second World War on their own, but Hayes was one such individual – and he did it not with a gun, but with a detailed knowledge of the complex algorithms and mathematical permutations involved in the art of cryptography.
(via Colm)(tags: via:colmmacc crypto codes hermann-gortz wwii dublin ireland richard-hayes cryptanalysis)