After a summer break full of dull-as-ditchwater technical woes, I’ve finally managed to restart my rusty old “Voynich News” blog (on Blogger) as the shiny new “Cipher Mysteries” blog (on WordPress). Although I’m most of the way through migrating the 200-ish old posts over *sigh*, what you’re reading now should (fingers crossed) be the first new post.
Incidentally, I’ve got a busy week coming up, with my big telescope article finally coming out in History Today – there’s plenty of media interest in it going on behind the scenes, so should be “interesting times”. I also have six book reviews on their way here (including Adam Mosley’s “Bearing the Heavens” and Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers”), as well as a whole heap of meaty historical cipher stuff to cover: but please bear with me while I get this new site straight – getting it all ship-shape again will take a few days…
In the meantime, you might enjoy the funny picture I put up on the Cipher Mysteries ‘about’ page… Enjoy! 🙂
The voynich flowers and faces etc could be binary faces 0 legs 1 open hand 1 closed hand 0 flower heads 0 stems 1 etc, I did not write the manuscript just given little hints that may work out lol.
chris.w
I have noticed that on some paintings that if you put the in paint then save as monocrome the reverse image then fill with white then reverse image you seem to get a star system?
chris.w
Steve Ekwall (in)famously claimed that the zodiac nymphs’ posed limbs encodes binary information: and (quite surprisingly) this does actually make a lot of sense. However, I’m not sure reducing Voynichese (or indeed the plants) to a Baconesque biliteral cipher would work – for a start, the VMs seems to predate Bacon by more than a century. 😉
Image processing can often yield unexpected artefacts. These can, for example, arise from the JPEG compression typically used: the kind you describe here sound more like “quantization noise”, which is a sort of intermittent static buzz that is most noticeable when you try to image enhance large flat areas. i.e. if you go hunting bears in the dark, don’t think that every glint is a bear’s eye. 🙂