Podcaster “thevampiresamurai” has just posted up part 1 of “The Incrutable Dr Woo Manchu”, his audio story linking Sherlock Holmes, the Voynich Manuscript, Roger Bacon, Khmer shorthand, and a murdered Chinese laundryman, all being investigated by dogged cigarette-smoking private eye Carson Albion.
Stay tuned for the next episode, if you like tales of the supernatural and the unexplained. 😉
In “The Lost Symbol”, Dan Brown takes his “symbologist” non-hero Robert Langdon on a high-speed twelve-hour tour around Washington. Broadly speaking, it’s like riding pillion on a jetbike driven by a demented architectural historian screaming conspiratorial travelogue descriptions into your ears via a radio-mike. But you probably guessed that already. 🙂
In fact, because you all thought your other questions exactly at the same time (which allegedly multiplies their power exponentially, asserts the book), here are the answers to them:-
The big reversal of expectations here is that, for a change, the Masons are not “The Conspiracy Behind All The Bad Stuff”. Actually, they’re the patsy good-guys, guarding some kind of mysterious symbolic treasure trove they don’t really understand, while All The Bad Stuff spirals out of control around them. In fact, because Dan Brown spends most of the novel stressing how darn nice the Masons are, and how they espouse a kind of universally-benign syncretist meta-religion (like apron-wearing Rastafari, De Trut’ In All Trut’s), his whole project comes over like a colossally misjudged Masonic recruiting handbook. Join us, we’re ancient and have obscure dippy rituals, but we Do Good Works, so that’s OK. Oh, and the Shriners are a joke, got that?
“So what’s your problem with that, Nick?”, I hear you saying. Well… even though Robert Langdon is notionally a “symbologist” (a made-up term that broadly matches iconographer / iconologist, if you don’t examine it too closely), he is still basically an academic historian, right? Hence, what I just don’t get from start to finish is how you can square his being a proper historian with his supposed near-obsessive interest in the kind of hallucinogenic pseudo-history clap-trap that Masonic historians have spent centuries punting out. For every one genuine story in the canon, there are a hundred fake ones: which is a lousy hit rate to be dealing with, even for a symbologist.
It’s true that the inconvenient truth behind the history of History is that it did start out as an exercise in adapting or falsifying marginal evidence to support otherwise untenable ideological claims… apologetics, by any other name. And it is also true that the various Washington monuments are indeed filled with a kind of cheerfully jaunty Man-As-Technological-God secular myth-making – mythopoiesis (if that’s not too scary a word). But as for Langdon buying in to any of it? Doesn’t work for me, sorry.
Actually, I think Langdon’s key attribute (his eidetic memory) is a ‘tell’ for what Brown uses him for – an historical memory machine, a robotic repository able to dredge up every wonky numerological / etymological / mythological fantasy ever devised, while remaining indifferent to all of them. Langdon doesn’t need to feel love, or loyalty, or lust: his mind is a blank canvas, doodled upon by X thousand years of cultural graffiti artists. Even though at one point Brown has a brief chuckle at the Wiki-esque shallow learning of modern students, Langdon himself functions as nothing more complex than a disbelieving walking Wikipedia of the occult and marginal… an erudite ‘conspirapedia’ to help fatten up the page count by a couple of hundred pages or so.
As for what Brown does with all those references… Cipher Mysteries readers should know by now that any time you see (say) John Dee, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and (my personal favourite anti-subject) the Rosicrucians come up, you’re normally in the presence of someone fairly credulous – and sadly Brown (who namechecks these and dozens of other similar figures) never gives the impression of being alert enough to stay wise to the historical perils these present. Ghastly.
But what of “The Lost Symbol”‘s cryptography? Well… there’s a little bit of Masonic pigpen (though the fact that simple pigpens can be rotated seems to have been overlooked); the final “substitution” cipher is actually more steganographic than cryptographic; yet there’s some nice stuff on magic squares (no, not magic circles). And that’s about it. All the same, though fairly skimpy, this actually fills me with a deep sense of relief – relief that Brown didn’t try to be too clever-clever with the historical crypto side of things, for which (I’m sorry to say) he clearly doesn’t have much of a feel. Yes, the Dorabella Cipher, the Voynich Manuscript, and even the Kryptos sculpture get flagged: but these are not the main deal.
For me, the worst part of the whole book by a mile is the lack of any functional intimacy or closeness between any of the characters – even though I do appreciate that a lot of technical craft has gone into its plotting and overall construction, 500 pages is a long way to drive without any emotional attachments or transformation to help the reader along. This prolonged drabness caps even The Da Vinci Code’s sustained emotional superficiality: unfortunately… given how bad a film that first book got turned into, I truly shudder at the thought of how bad a film “The Lost Symbol” promises to be. Having done a fair bit of screenwriting myself, I can say that some story problems just can’t be fixed without major, major surgery… and this would seem to have plenty.
As promised (though a little later than planned), here’s the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy!
[11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are
[11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy
[11:56:27] NP: 🙂
[11:56:35] vc: We are.
[11:56:35] NP: I think that’s on f113r
[11:56:40] vc: …
[11:56:45] NP: 🙂
[11:56:55] NP: So… how has it all gone?
[11:57:12] NP: Tell me what you now think about the VMs that you didn’t before?
[11:57:27] vc: It should be simple.
[11:57:36] vc: The solution should be simple.
[11:57:41] NP: but…
[11:58:07] vc: But …
[11:58:33] vc: The verbose cipher still permits us a lot of possibilities.
[11:58:52] NP: Verbose cipher only gets you halfway there
[11:59:03] NP: But that’s still halfway more than anything else
[11:59:28] vc: We could synthesize a coding which is capable to produce the same statistical properties as the MS
[11:59:48] NP: Yup, that was (basically) Gordon Rugg’s 2004 paper
[11:59:58] vc: simple enough to do manually of course
[12:00:31] NP: The problem is one of duplicating all the local structural rules
[12:00:40] vc: Gordon’s generating gibberish by encoding gibberish
[12:01:06] NP: Basically
[12:01:25] vc: Yes, we suspect that the text contains real information in a natural language.
[12:01:30] vc: We tried this.
[12:02:06] NP: Rugg’s work requires a clever (pseudo-random) daemon to drive his grille thing… but he never specified how someone 500 years ago could generate random numbers (or even conceive of them)
[12:02:07] vc: We tried to encode for example the vulgata with our method
[12:02:10] NP: ok
[12:02:23] NP: into A or B?
[12:02:24] vc: throw dices I guess?
[12:02:26] vc: lol
[12:02:37] NP: only gives you 1-6 random
[12:02:48] vc: 3 dices
[12:02:52] vc: ect
[12:02:52] NP: two dice give you a probability curve
[12:02:56] NP: not flat
[12:03:02] vc: hmm
[12:03:06] vc: roulette wheel
[12:03:11] NP: Anachronistic
[12:03:19] vc: Ok. We use no random.
[12:03:23] NP: 🙂
[12:03:25] vc: our encoder is deterministic
[12:03:33] NP: Good!
[12:03:35] vc: that’s the point
[12:04:28] vc: We suspect that the “user” added some randomness in some of the aspects of the encoding, but this is not overwhelming
[12:04:49] NP: That’s right
[12:05:21] vc: We also picked out the A and B languages
[12:05:23] NP: Though some aspects (like space insertion into ororor-type strings) were more tactical and visual than random
[12:05:27] NP: Good!
[12:05:33] vc: with different methods
[12:05:52] vc: so we basically verified a lot of past results
[12:06:17] NP: Do you have a synthetic A paragraph you can cut and paste here?
[12:06:17] vc: After that, we decided to concentrate on the first 20 pages
[12:06:22] NP: Good!
[12:07:17] vc: for example, A languages uses ey or y at the end of the words, while B language uses edy instead
[12:07:51] vc: Synthetic sample… ok, just a minute
[12:08:29] NP: ey/y vs edy – Mark Perakh pointed this out too, and suggested that it meant B was less contracted than A. It also forms the core of Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Biological Paradox”
[12:09:25] vc: Our results are largely independent – the guys didn’t know the past results
[12:09:54] NP: That’s ok. 🙂
[12:10:41] vc: nu stom huhoicpeey strifihuicom ristngngpeet pept suhors periet pescet sticpescom ichoey pt om icpeript
[12:11:17] NP: I hope that’s not EVA
[12:11:41] vc: Y, of course not
[12:12:08] vc: not close, but the whole thing started here when some of us tried out a method which produced some non-trivial statistics very similar to VMS
[12:12:43] NP: I’m certainly getting a partially-verbose vibe off this
[12:12:52] vc: the original:
[12:13:17] vc: haec sunt verba que locutus est
[12:13:18] vc: Moses
[12:13:40] NP: Ummm… that’s pretty verbose, then. 🙂
[12:14:04] vc: Again, a deterministic, static automaton.
[12:14:15] NP: Fair enough!
[12:15:09] NP: Sorry for asking a lecturer-style question, 🙂 but how has doing that affected how you look at Voynichese?
[12:16:03] vc: Sec
[12:16:49] vc: discussing 🙂
[12:17:38] vc: it’s a coded natural language text. We suspect that the language is Italian – from measured results.
[12:18:00] vc: That’s why we are very curious about your news!
[12:18:21] NP: Let’s finish your news first!
[12:18:38] vc: ok. Was that an answer for your question?
[12:19:02] NP: Pretty much – would you like to write it up informally to publish on the blog?
[12:19:55] NP: 1000 words should cover it 🙂
[12:21:18] NP: (you don’t need to write it now!)
[12:21:25] vc: We admit that we would like to work on our theory and method a bit before publishing it, because one of the important statistical feature doesn’t match
[12:21:31] vc: yet
[12:21:35] NP: 🙂
[12:21:52] NP: ok
[12:22:06] NP: that’s good
[12:22:23] NP: what else have you been thinking about and discussing during the week?
[12:22:35] NP: VMs-wise, that is 🙂
[12:22:42] vc: 🙂
[12:22:54] vc: haha, you got the point…
[12:23:02] NP: 🙂
[12:23:56] vc: We toyed with the idea that the astrological diagrams are so poorly rendered that they aren’t astrological diagrams. They are coder tools.
[12:24:10] NP: cipher wheels?
[12:24:22] vc: Kind of. Yes.
[12:24:35] NP: (that’s been suggested many times, though never with any rigour)
[12:24:36] vc: we also tried to identify some of the star names.
[12:24:47] NP: No chance at all
[12:25:01] NP: That is a cliff with a huge pile of broken ships beneath it
[12:25:21] NP: sadly
[12:25:27] vc: been there, done that, yes
[12:25:30] NP: 🙂
[12:26:22] vc: We also observed that the takeshi transcription becomes less reliable when the text is rotated or tilted.
[12:26:36] vc: The other places – it is quite good.
[12:26:45] NP: Yes, that’s a fair enough comment
[12:27:08] NP: A complete transcription has been done, but it hasn’t been released – very frustrating
[12:27:25] NP: (by the EVMT people, Gabriel Landini mainly)
[12:27:17] vc: Also we are not contented with some of the EVA transcription’s choices of the alphabet
[12:27:34] NP: the “sh” really sucks
[12:27:39] vc: YES
[12:27:45] NP: 🙁
[12:28:53] NP: Glen Claston’s transcription added stuff in, many people use that instead purely for its better “sh” handling
[12:29:26] vc: hmm, ok
[12:29:53] NP: In a lot of ways, though, who’s to say? A single ambiguous letter shouldn’t really be enough to destroy an entire dcipherment attack
[12:30:04] NP: given that it’s not a pure polyalpha
[12:30:37] vc: of course
[12:30:54] NP: But analyses still don’t seem to get particularly close
[12:31:03] NP: Oh well
[12:31:23] vc: Analyses of whom
[12:31:24] vc: 🙂
[12:31:25] vc: ?
[12:31:29] vc: 😉
[12:31:35] NP: not yours, of course 😉
[12:32:32] NP: is that your week summarized, then?
[12:32:53] vc: Yes.
[12:33:16] NP: has it been fun? worthwhile? frustrating? dull?
[12:33:32] vc: All of them.
[12:33:34] NP: and would you do another next summer?
[12:33:57] vc: No need of it. Maybe with the rohonc codex
[12:34:00] vc: lol, of course
[12:34:13] NP: 🙂
[12:35:06] NP: I’m really pleased for you all – it sounds like you have managed to get a fairly clearheaded view of the VMs out of the whole process, and have had a bit of fun as well
[12:35:51] NP: Most VMs researchers get very tied up to a particular theory or evidence or way of looking at it – you have to keep a broader perspective to make progress here
[12:35:53] vc: let’s say two bits
[12:36:14] NP: “two bits of fun” 🙂
[12:36:21] NP: good
[I then went into a long digression about the “Antonio of Florence”, about which I’ve already posted far too much to the blog… so –SNIP–]
[12:51:50] vc: ooo wait a sec…
[12:52:16] vc: Can we ask Philip Neal to post some some pages of a reference book he uses?
[12:52:42] vc: sorry about the redundancy
[12:53:02] NP: He’s a medieval Latin scholar by training, what kind of thing would you want?
[12:53:39] vc: about the alchemical herbals. Can we manage it later?
[12:53:45] vc: Please go on
[12:53:51] NP: Well.. that’s about it
[12:54:10] NP: Obviously I typed faster than I thought 🙂
[13:00:11] vc: What do you know? How much people is working on a voynich-deciphering automaton based on markov thingies and such?
[13:00:37] vc: So basically with the same hypotheses like ours?
[13:00:57] NP: The problem with markov models is that they will choke on verbose ciphers, where letters are polyvalent
[13:01:08] NP: Nobody in the literature seems to have picked this up
[13:01:24] vc: bad for them
[13:01:50] NP: Unless you pre-tokenize the stream, Markov model finders will just get very confused
[13:02:03] NP: and give you a linguist-friendly CVCV-style model
[13:02:11] NP: that is cryptographically wrong
[13:03:04] NP: perhaps “multi-functional” rather than “polyvalent”, I’m not sure :O
[13:04:23] NP: So, I’m not convinced that anyone who has applied Markov model-style analysis to the VMs has yet got anywhere
[13:04:29] NP: Which is a shame
[13:05:04] NP: But there you go
[13:05:25] vc: We hope.
[13:05:47] NP: 🙂
[13:06:24] NP: Right – I’ve got to go now (sadly)
[13:06:48] NP: I hope I’ve been a positive influence on your week and not too dogmatic
[13:07:09] vc: Why, of course
[13:07:16] NP: And that I’ve helped steer you in generally positive / constructive directions
[13:07:30] vc: Yes, indeed.
[13:07:35] NP: (Because there are plenty of blind alleys to explore)
[13:07:41] NP: (and to avoid)
[13:07:52] vc: VBI…
[13:07:52] vc: 🙂
[13:08:07] NP: Plenty of that to step in, yes
[13:08:14] NP: 🙂
[13:08:24] NP: And I don’t mean puddles
[13:09:42] vc: Well, thank you again for the ideas and the lots of information 🙂
[13:11:18] vc: Unfortunately semester starts in weeks, so we can’t keep working on this project
[13:12:04] vc: but as soon as we earn some results, we will definitely contact you
[13:12:15] NP: Excellent, looking forward to that
[13:12:54] NP: Well, it was very nice to meet you all – please feel free to subscribe to Cipher Mysteries by email or RSS (it’s free) so you can keep up with all the latest happenings.
[13:13:23] vc: ok 🙂
[13:13:57] NP: Best wishes, and see you all for the Rohonc week next summer 🙂
[13:14:04] NP: !!!!!
[13:14:11] vc: lol 🙂
[13:14:21] vc: that’s right! 😉
[13:15:16] NP: Excellent – gotta fly, ciao!
[13:15:36] vc: Best!
[13:15:37] vc: bye
A blog post dated yesterday (26th September 2009) contains a discussion with German fantasy author Susanne Gerdom. Curiously, she says:
Die “Voynich-Verschwörung” spielt nun leider in Prag, und das ist inzwischen bei Fantasyautoren beinahe so en vogue wie Vampire und Elben.
I was so surprised at what the first half appeared to be saying that I asked Philip Neal: very kindly (and quickly), he pinged back his translation:-
The “Voynich Conspiracy” is now on show in Prague – unfortunately – and in the mean time it is nearly as modish with fantasy authors as vampires and elves.
So… it would seem that “Voynich-Verschwörung” is a reference to some kind of play / show / exhibition running in Prague. But if so, I’ve never heard of it; and (as you’ve probably worked out by now) I’m perpetually listening out for anything like that. Has anybody any idea what this is referring to? Please leave a comment if you happen to find out!
A Voynich Manuscript-themed episode of Franco-Belgian comic book The Adventures Of Jhen has just (September 2009) come out. Entitled “La Sêrênissime“, this takes the eponymic late-medieval hero Jhen from Milan in 1432 on to Venice: unsurprisingly, he is “en quête d’un certaine livre“, as it says here.
The comic has a nice ligne claire style, and evokes both Venice from the air and St Mark’s Basilica, which (considering that’s what I think is at the centre of the nine-rosette page) is either great research or a splendid coincidence. I’ve only seen a few sample pages from Jean Pleyers’ website (click on the [Actualities] button on the left of his screen to get to the samples) so far, but it does look like quite a nice thing to buy if you’re looking to expand your collection of Voynichiana. I’m sure Dennis will be pleased! 🙂
Well, Kevin Knight gave his Voynich lecture (it’s the one I mentioned a few days ago), and an attendee (Jeffrey Shallit) has been kind enough to post a high-speed précis of what Kevin Knight said onto his “Recursivity” blog. Of course, since you already know the basics, I can strip that down even further. 🙂
As I mentioned before, Kevin Knight’s approach is based around using expectation maximization to try to algorithmically categorize the letters in the alphabet into one of two clusters – basically, vowels and consonants. However, despite the looming vowel-like presence of ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, and ‘o’ (that so convinces linguists), this approach fails to produce “anything particularly meaningful” for Voynichese.
His more recent research has tried the same trick but with words instead of letters. According to Jeffrey Shallitt’s post:-
When you do so, you get two clusters: the words in the “herbal”, “astrological”, and “pharmacological” sections predominantly fall into one cluster, and the words in the “biological” and “cosmological” sections predominantly fall into another.
However, Knight’s attempts to further subdivide these two clusters failed to produce any (linguistically) helpful clusters.
I think that while this is manifestly unhelpful to linguistic VMs theories, it may yet prove to be codicologically very productive. My position is that Voynichese evolved over time, and that the VMs itself was composed in a number of writing phases: it may well be that the clusters that are emerging are clusters in time, not in content. Could it be that this kind of cluster analysis could be used to reconstruct the developmental arc of Voynichese?
I hope that Kevin Knight decides to make his clustering results available, so that they may be assessed in the context of quite different (non-linguistic) ways of looking at it…
Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂
Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂
And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!
OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!
Are you a male Caucasian, 51-60, living near upstate NY, and interested in a non-speaking, “wizard-esk” (I guess “-esque”) acting role in a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-related film to be filmed 15th-25th October 2009?
Well… Phill Allison, a directing major at the NYC school of visual arts, is holding “auditions / meetings” in Valatie on 8th-11th October 2009 for this role, so feel free to step forward: his short film (for his thesis) is called “The Voynich Manuscript Project”, and is “the story of two brothers who live with their father in a strange reality on the cusp of religious transformation“, and who “discover a mysterious manuscript in the woods“.
Hmmm… male, Caucasian, 51-60, doesn’t speak much, interested in a mysterious manuscript, perpetually on the cusp of finding something amazing / enlightenment… sounds like a pretty good e-fit for plenty of the Voynich researchers out there. Or have I just given the punchline away? :-p
Apparently, Chapter 41 of “The Lost Symbol” namechecks a handful of cipher mysteries, which probably explains the Dorabella Cipher search query spike I noticed over the last few days. So, a minor mystery solved (for a change), I’d guess:-
“…after [Langdon’s] experiences in Rome and Paris, he’d received a steady flow of requests asking for his help deciphering some of history’s great unsolved codes—the Phaistos Disk, the Dorabella Cipher, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.”
Of course, only a cryptological schmuck taking Elonka’s famous list of unsolved codes & ciphers at face value would put Dorabella right up there with the VMs – so that must have been added by the copy-editors, right?
PS: here’s a recent blog entry on a proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher.
It’s been a good while coming, but here it (finally) is: my page arguing for an earliest date for the VMs of 1440 (if Florence) or 1450 (if not).
Though it may not at first seem much of a conclusion, this is an argument based not on possibilities but on placing an artefact within an overall history of drawing technique – an argument about what the Voynich Manuscript actually is, and in which visual traditions we can place its drawings – a poster child for “Voynich Research 2.0”, in other words.
