Biases/my history: I went to a good public high school after indifferent public elementary and junior high schools. I attended an Ivy League college. My life would have been different if I had gone to academically challenging schools as a youth. I don't know if it would have been better or worse; things have worked out pretty well.

You come off as very smart and self-aware. Still, I think you underrate the risk of ending up as an other-person at the public high school; friends may not be as easy as you expect. Retreating to a public high school may also require explanation to college recruiters.

I also think your conclusion that you would study better with more friends may be a self-persuading effort that there are scholastic reasons to switch. But there don't have to be scholastic reasons: Being unhappy for two more years in your teens is a big deal, and if you are satisfied that your happiness will increase substantially by switching, you should switch. Long view is nice, but part of that view should be that two years of a low-friend existence sounds no fun, and the losses of switching are likely to be minimal.

Finally, commuting is a life-killer. Adults very commonly underrate the loss of quality of life for commuting (I commute 10 minutes each way; I have had jobs with one-hour commutes.) I'd suggest it's even more valuable time lost for a teenager.

Finally finally, I'm confident you'll get this right for you. Take a look at these responses, talk it out, then rock on. Be good, stay well.

Offsets 10, 8, 25, 6, 6, 14, 21, 11, 12, 13, 11, 12, 15, 21, 1, 7 (that's a key length of 16) yield the following decrypted plaintext: "failurearrivedquicklyatgjmshandsastheirprogramdefeatedmedepressinglyquicklyimustconcedethepointiwasoverconfidentandunderinformedandgjmfreakingwins".

The actual process involved manual intervention, though I think a smarter program could have done it automatically. It went like this:

• Consider key lengths up to 20.
• Instead of picking the single "best" shift at each offset within the key, consider all shifts that come within 1 unit of best. (Meaning a factor of e in estimated probability.)
• Display all the decryptions resulting from these options, unless there are more than 300 in which case display 50 random ones.

This produced a big long list of candidates. None of them was right, but some of them looked more credible than others. Keylength 16 seemed to let us do the best, so I focused on that and picked one of the better-looking candidates, which looked like this:

failhrecorkveefu
ickllatigmuhaoss
asthrirrooiranse
featrdmgaerrethi
nglyduiehlaimvht
concrdeveeroioii
wasoierelnhidfct
anduadetfnhorntd
andgwmftbaminhli
ns

which has lots of plausible bits in it. It looks like it should maybe start with "failure", a plausible enough word in this context, so I tweaked the fifth offset (yes! lots of other things got better too), and continued tweaking one by one as likely words and word-fragments jumped out at me. After a few tweaks I had the decryption above.

A program clever enough to do this by itself would need to have some inkling about digraphs or trigraphs or something, and then it would need some kind of iterative search procedure rather than just picking best offsets independently for each letter. Not terribly difficult, but it seemed easier to do something simpler-minded.

[Edited to add: I think the sequence of giveaway words for the tweaks was: "failure", "quickly" #2, "overconfident", done.]

I finally did get round to taking a look at this, and it isn't yielding to the usual methods. In fact, it's sufficiently unyielding that I am wondering whether it's really the result of Vigenere-ciphering something that resembles ordinary English text with a key of reasonable length. I find the following:

• The text is 146 characters long. I would expect that, with "ordinary" plaintext, to be enough to identify a key of at most about 7 characters without too much pain. I actually tried lengths up to 10.
• For no key length k does the distribution of { (a-b) mod 26 : a,b are characters at the same position mod k } much resemble the distribution of differences mod 26 of randomly chosen letters with typical English letter frequencies.
• For no key length k does the result of the following procedure produce something that looks as if most of the shifts are correct:
  • For each offset, count letter frequencies, and choose a shift that maximizes the sum of log(typical_prob) where typical_prob are those typical English letter frequencies again.

JRMayne, if you happen to be reading this and happen to have either a record or a memory of the message and how you encrypted it: can you confirm that (1) this really is the output of a Vigenere cipher, (2) the plaintext isn't (statistically) outrageously unlike ordinary English, and (3) the key length is at most, let's say, 10?

(If the key is much longer than that, there isn't enough information for these simple methods to work with. Perhaps, e.g., doing a more expensive search and looking at digraph frequencies might be worth considering, but I'm too lazy.)

I don't know whether you're being playful, defeatist, or misreading me. :-)

My point is that it is possible to come close to having his level of compassion: that the difference is apparently to a surprisingly large degree more environmental than genetic.

Are you claiming that communicating this point is hopeless?

Vigeneres are potentially crackable, but they are very hard.

Unless your text is very short or your key very long, they are much easier than you apparently think. I have written programs that do a pretty good job of it.

(As MrMind says, if your key is as long as your text then this is a one-time pad, which indeed is uncrackable provided you have a reliable channel for sharing the one-time pad and don't make operational mistakes like reusing the key. But that's not a very common situation.)

Let's make sure we're talking about cryptographic hashing functions.

Let's say I make a prediction that Barack Obama is a werewolf. I don't want anyone to know I've made this prediction, because otherwise the Secret Werewolf Police will come and eat me, but I do want to lord it over everyone after the fact.

I take the string "Barack Obama is a werewolf" and I put it through a hashing function, (for purposes of this example, the hashing function MD5). This produces the output 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec. The original string about Barack Obama is not recoverable from this output, because MD5 is a lossy function, but anyone else putting that string through the MD5 hashing function will get the same output. The hash output is like a fingerprint for the original string.

So if I put 37ecb0a3164e6422bedc0f8db82e45ec in a public place a year before Barack Obama transforms into a werewolf on live television, after the fact I can give people the original string and they can verify it for themselves against the hash output.

I use a Chrome plugin for most tasks that involve basic encoding of text values. (If I'm honest, I mostly use it for rot13, and more exotic uses aren't that common). There are also online hash generators for different hashing functions. Some popular hashing functions for this purpose are MD5 and SHA1.

Does this answer your question?

That's interesting! I got the same answer but I visualized it differently. (Imagine, for each possible subpattern, i.e. "plus shape" or "dots", considering which items it appears in. In each case the answer is four, forming a rectangle. Two of the rectangles should extend into the ninth item, the one we're looking for.)

Nitpick: Asimov was a member of Mensa on and off, but was highly critical of it, and didn't like Mensans. He was an honorary vice president, not president (according Asimov, anyway.) And he wasn't very happy about it.

Relevantly to this: "Furthermore, I became aware that Mensans, however high their paper IQ might be, were likely to be as irrational as anyone else." (See the book "I.Asimov," pp.379-382.) The vigor of Asimov's distaste for Mensa as a club permeates this essay/chapter.

Nitpick it is, but Asimov deserves a better fate than having a two-sentence bio associate him with Mensa.

When debating with people, you should only make one inferential step per debate. Leave the next step for tomorrow, when the person has already accepted the former step (and probably believes it was actually their idea).

my opinions are uniquely valuable and important to share with others

They are valuable and important to you. Not to the others, yet.

I do think I'm smarter, more moderate, and more creative than most.

You may be right, but this is irrelevant here. People don't automatically accept smarter people's beliefs (and that's probably a good thing).

Yesterday I posted a Michigan meetup.

My location is set to Michigan.

The "Nearest Meetups" column on the right-hand side suggests Atlanta and Houston, but not Michigan.

Is this a known bug?