Every year since 1981, more than once a year, and almost always on May 1, the [Arizona Daily] Wildcat has published a cryptic ‘advertisement’ from an unnamed source. These messages typically contain images, mathematical diagrams and formulae, quotations (literary, philosophical, religious, and commonly in the original language) and other fragments of text…
Bryan D. Hance, the former webmaster for the ADW, became so fascinated with the mystery that he set up a web site dedicated to it, scanning all the advertisments and indexing their contents as far as possible. A busy and erudite little scene has grown up around the site, unpacking the ingredients and speculating wildly.
As someone says in the comments at Variations, the possible solutions to the mystery aren’t nearly as interesting as the mountains of stuff we stand to learn from attempting to decipher it. A-and before we even get as far as trying to unravel this particular mystery, there’s a whole bunch of promising links in the blogroll…
(via languagehat.com)