Talk:The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Summary

Well, this seems a bit more like the summary of a book for younger children. I honestly think it should be written a tad more formal, kind of like the script for a movie but with more detail. You know what I mean? Any comments on it are welcome.

Why does this entry have so many questions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.7.157.69 (talk) 02:58, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree - while it is well written, it is not encylopedic in tone. But you can always edit. 208.102.38.231 (talk) 01:28, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Unbelievable Plot Hole?

• At the end of the story Slany escapes the noose-despite the fact that he threatens Elsie; that he was armed; that Elsie Husband was defending himself against a armed burgler; and that he was was a housebreaker!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.53.145.198 (talk) 14:18, August 28, 2007 (UTC)

• First of all, Slaney (the culprit) wasn't there to steal property, which rules out that he was a burglar. Second, It's true that he was a potential kidnapper, but obviously that doesn't deserve the death penalty he was first sentenced to. And third, remember the story? Watson himself said that Hilton Cubitt (the victim) fired first, and the culprit fired one fraction of a second later, which makes Hilton Cubitt the aggressor, THAT is a mitigating circumstance —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jaimesamurai 16:28, August 12, 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.94.201.34 (talk)
• There's not even kind of close to enough for someone to break a substitution code with just a few short phrases like that. Unless you were given at least two letters, or had a few pages of writing you couldn't possibly break the code with even a small degree of certainty. Think about it. Its not mathematically possible.
• In the actual full story, there are several ciphered messages sent, at least one the length of a paragraph, and not all of them are drawn out for the reader. While it's true that some of it is guesswork, this is still London in the late 1800s; there's a limit to how truly advanced a cipher can be that is able to be remembered and written by people not using machines. Also in the story, Holmes tells Watson: "I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writing, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyse one hundred and sixty separate ciphers." I think it's ok to suspend disbelief about the cracked cipher.189.182.138.158 (talk) 04:02, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
• Also why wouldn't the cop see that Elsie couldn't have killed her husband by the angle of the shots? If he was shot from the window through the heart it would be obvious by the entry and exist wounds that the bullet did not come from her. So he wouldn't need Holmes to tell him that there was a third person. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.148.192 (talk) 02:13, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
• We enjoy the modern age and our ability to see entry and exit wounds diagrammed out on CSI, but crime fighting in London at the time pretty much had to depend on luck. There wasn't the same wealth of information we have now about trajectory, spatter, powder residue, etc. It is mentioned in the story that there was no exit wound for either victim -there's a bullet in the husband, one in the windowsill noticed by Holmes, and another in the wife's head, though the story suggests hers may be removed later. With no exit wound, it's hard to prove angle of entry; he may have been moving when he was shot, his body may have spun as he fell, any number of things. Also, I doubt anyone was even looking for that kind of information at the scene, except Holmes himself. It never occurred to the police on scene that there even could have been a third person, so they weren't looking for one. Thus we see the dangers of deciding what happened before you have looked at everything; but that's what made the character of Holmes so delightful, that he noticed things and suspended final judgment.189.182.138.158 (talk) 04:02, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

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"still London in the late 1800s; there's a limit to how truly advanced a cipher can be that is able to be remembered and written by people not using machines"

Riiight... because they didn't have that highly-advanced pencil-and-paper technology that would allow them to write something down. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.9.50.240 (talk) 13:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

' Unless you were given at least two letters, or had a few pages of writing you couldn't possibly break the code with even a small degree of certainty. Think about it. Its not mathematically possible"

Well, maybe you couldn't. But please do cite the math you're using to arrive at your conclusion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.9.50.240 (talk) 13:13, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Come now, it's a simple substitution cipher. Even an amateur doesn't need "a few pages" of text to decrypt such a cipher. Holmes himself describes in detail how he arrived at the solution, and while he makes perhaps one or two lucky guesses, it's not unreasonable that he solved it. I have a puzzle book "The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms" (2007) containing hundreds of simple substitution ciphers for amateurs; in the first 25 ciphers in the "easy" section I see five with less than 60 characters each. Holmes had 39 characters and several clues as to the plaintext. Mnudelman (talk) 21:50, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Substitution cipher

So what is the "dancing men" substitution cipher? Which figure substitutes for which letter? | Loadmaster (talk) 22:29, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd write it here if there were "dancing men" figures here. So far, I've got nothing but E, N, R and V. Well, let's hope somebody takes action, or you can send a request to Unicode... :-D --121.7.203.206 (talk) 08:01, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Why not just crop some images from the Wikisource for the text? --220.255.7.157 (talk) 08:16, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

You may be interested in these links:

Substitution Cipher (select Image: Dancing Men)

Dancingmen font explained (with font download)

John Campbell (talk) 09:10, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

TV adaptation

I was hoping this article would tell me a bit about the TV adaptation with Jeremy Brett. 86.186.147.5 (talk) 16:22, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Question

I can't find the link mentioned at: "On page 10101 in XKCD volume 0, a code is written with dancing stick figures." As of today, January 31, 2012, the website only goes to page 1010. http://xkcd.com/1010/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.162.140.54 (talk) 18:29, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Presumably, looking at the phrasing, there is printed collection where the page numbers are in binary, which would make that page 21.121.75.153.246 (talk) 22:11, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Batman: Gotham by Gaslight

Should it be mentioned that Bruce uses a similar cypher in the movie? The movie alludes quite a bit to Holmes, after all. Omeganian (talk) 10:50, 3 February 2018 (UTC)