1. I didn't find anything overall about the guest speaker's material to be difficult. The only difficult thing I can imagine was not being able to view more of her slides and not being able to hear her commentary.
2. The most interesting part of the presentation was learning about the various things that can be considered codes or ciphers. Many of the things presented I have had prior experience with. It wasn't until the presentation that I considered them to be codes or ciphers. For example, the "unusual names" used in the Doctrine and Covenants. I have known about those for a while (a lifetime). It does make sense, though, to consider those to be a cipher of sorts. They achieve the same purpose and they fit under the "Code Words" category of cryptosystems, similar to using code words for various operations of the U.S. Military. Also, the Deseret Alphabet is another system I'm familiar with but have never considered it to be an authentic cryptosystem. This is somewhat ironic when I consider that my friends and used to use it to communicate when I was younger.
Another thing I noted upon further reflection of the presentation was the fact that most, if not all of the codes she presented came AFTER the time of Joseph Smith. Specifically, they seemed to appear right around the time of Brigham Young. I would like to learn more about the historical context of the various ciphers mentioned. The number of enemies of the Church were the same at both times. My immediate reaction would be to guess that the Saints at the time of Brigham Young need to communicate over longer distances by trusting those maybe not friendly to the Church to a more extent than was needed in the earlier days of the Church.
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