Admini wrote:

Masons aren't really a secret group, just a group with secrets. Or so they ell me.

OneTrikPony wrote:

OK. now you're just making stuff up! That's not fair. LOL

OneTrikPony wrote:

:( We're still gonna have a secret handshake, Right?

Iv wrote:

My logo is the silhouette of a meditating human encircled by a wall of fire. On the chest of the human is an opened eye.

Iv wrote:

I don't think it is mentionned anywhere but it seemed logical for me to provide all sentinels with Firewall cryptographic keys. Meaning that when they receive these messages, they know only a sentinel can have generated it and only a Firewall member can read it.

Psyfer wrote:

I thought it was the funny little flower thingy at the end of the'in-game' sidebar messages in the corebook.....

nick012000 wrote:

I don't think it's an asterisk; asterisks have six arms, and that symbol only has five. I think it might be some sort of five-petalled flower. It also shows up behind the authentication symbols in the sidebars, so I think it might well be their logo.

TheWanderingJewels wrote:

a possible phrase: quisnam vigilo "Who Watches"

TheWanderingJewels wrote:

While true: TITANS would have access to Latin from uploads and who knows what the little creeps let behind to obsrve and learn. I picked the above phrase as not quiet so obvious. But for the record in rough latin: Illic cannot exsisto alius Cado = There cannot be another Fall

TheWanderingJewels wrote:

I thought that might work a bit better. I was also going for the secret society style catch phrase that is indistinct until you are inducted and made to understand what it means

TheWanderingJewels wrote:

A fair point. But considering that the TITANS absorbed all worldly databases before they did the big fade, I can only assume they have translation software for Latin somewhere

Arenamontanus wrote:

Good Latin mottos tend to be rather compressed. My Latin is extremely rusty, but I think a more proper motto would be "Cadem alius nolemus " - we do not want/we refuse another fall (Yes, it is close to "Fall: do not want!" :-) ). Another version would be a gerundive construction: "Cadem alius non permittendi" (I'm a bit uncertain whether it should be in the accusative case - as I said, my skills are rusty). As for Latin, it is a very dead language even today: there are no native speakers (and most scientists today do not know it, sadly). But dead languages have their followers, and I doubt knowledge of Latin would have been lost in the Fall (too many out-of-copyright textbooks around). In fact, with hyperlinguistics it is not too unlikely that many would have learned it just as a hobby. As a secret language it doesn't work, but for an inspirational old-fashioned motto reminding about our duties, it works. Arenamontanus de Collum Caeruleus

standard_gravity wrote:

So Firewall sends a team to Earth to figure out if their motto really makes sense (after having been made to think otherwise in a satirical note with suspected Project Ozma origins). Adventure hook right there. ;)

Arenamontanus wrote:

Hahahaha! Sorry, but this is extremely unlikely. While natural scientists these days do not learn Latin, there is plenty of it around from the old days - think about the binomial system of species names. Humanist scholars - classicists, linguists, historians of all kinds - do use it *actively* in their research, and there are plenty of online databases containing primary texts, as well as widely forked text databases. It would only take that one Fall survivor happened to have a copy of Project Gutenberg on their iphone++ and an enormous amount of source material would have survived. And if there were a linguist among the survivors, they are likely to have carried with them an enormous text corpus if they were anything like the linguists I know. While I can believe enormous losses of data in the Fall I have a hard time imagining widely distributed knowledge such as Latin to be lost. Maybe a good Fall data loss model would be that 99% of all copies of everything disappeared. That means that there is a 99% chance that a single document disappeared. If there were ten copies, there is a 90% chance that all have been lost. If there were a hundred copies, 36% chance. A thousand, just 0.0043% chance! As a good rule of thumb then, if you can get more than a thousand hits on something on google or in libraries worldwide, then it has definitely survived. (In practice, even many single hits actually exist in multiple datacenters) A dead language is not an incomprehensible language. Sanskrit, old church slavonic, avestan and ge'ez are still used for religious purposes (and consequently have plenty of material of the type that somebody might deliberately try to save in a disaster) and can be understood. We have pretty good ideas of sumerian cuneiform and hieroglyphics. Proto-Indo-European is really extinct, but has been partially reconstructed (and some people even think they can find traces of the hypothetic Proto-Nostratic that preceded it). Reconstructing languages from limited corpora is hard (Linear A & B, anyone?), but a language like Latin is extremely close to current languages. Even if we had lost it, an interested post-Fall linguist would have been able to reconstruct it rapidly. Of course, having some linguists crow that they have saved tagalog or klingon doesn't mean anybody speaks them.

Arenamontanus wrote:

"We were so busy escaping the fire we didn't remember to save the clothes we were wearing". Physical knick knacks are hard to save, but informational ones are easy. An egocast is at least on the order of many terabytes in size, and it seems unlikely that people can't bring with them many gigabytes of their informational possessions. As well as their skills: you can always make skillsofts out of people's languages. There are a few thousand people who can *speak* latin today, so we should expect (given my earlier probability estimate) that several of them survived. The number of latin *readers* at the very least is on the order of hundreds of thousands, likely many more. Hence the likelihood of all of them having bad luck in the Fall is essentially zero. The law of large numbers makes this an almost guaranteed thing. Given the development in EP orbital data centres seem entirely plausible, which means that there were likely many off-site backups of many databases. A site like Wikipedia (which, by the way, has 10,000 articles written in the language) needs several server clusters, especially to keep interplanetary lags down. Note that this does not mean I am claiming that nothing was lost; on the contrary, you only know when some piece of information is crucial when you suddenly can't find it. The three people who knew the root password for the Wikipedia server got eaten by the TITANs. Nobody had paid for an orbital copy of Project Perseus, so all source material is now from Project Gutenberg. A convention of Sanskrit experts was going on in Chicago when it got nuked; no surviving linguist is an expert on the language. The egocast content filters removed all of Catullus' poems.

Arenamontanus wrote:

I think that is true. There are at least some uses for Latin, but if you learn Dalmatian or Kumbainggar you have nobody to talk to and not much to read. A lot of pre-Fall information is simply stored away and not used. Even knowing it is there may disappear if there are no obvious uses for it. If there is no traditional agriculture anywhere, then those skills and knowledge will tend to decay. Numismatics might survive due to hobbyists (but have very few real coins left), but a philosophical school that was out of fashion during the fall is completely dead.

Arenamontanus wrote:

And research in the humanities - if you are doing anything related to pre-modern history or literature you better know Latin. And it is used in religious proclamations some billion people take seriously. Latin expressions also play a pretty common role in law, linguistics, practically all academic fields (except perhaps computer science...) A Roman would say we are not speaking Latin, and he would be right. But we are *using* Latin and it is definitely not forgotten.

Arenamontanus wrote:

Floresiensis is the genitive form of the latinization of Flores, meaning "of Flores". It is just as Latin as the slime-mold beetle Agathidium rumsfeldi. And plenty of newly discovered species are pure Latin: Opisthostoma vermiculum, Chromis abyssus, Tahina spectablilis, Hippocampus satomiae... When it comes to HIV, virus nomenclature works differently (and messily) compared to cellular organism nomenclature. HIV is a Group VI (ssRNA-RT) virus in the retroviridae family, genus lentivirus. It can't get away from the Latin either. In the long run I think biologists will simply classify species using something derived from their genome, likely some form of fingerprint code. But I doubt anybody would use '#59743700013' to denote a house cat or '#0273183883' for Agathidium rumsfeldi in normal conversation or text beyond pointing out which species the discussion is about. When you breed beetles based on genomes found in online databases you won't call your shimmering creature '#0272226301-B', you will call it Lampropepla extropia.