A brief history of generated texts…

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Having just weakened your will to live by exposing you to the word heteroscedasticity 🙂 , I thought I’d now throw some more paraffin onto your wordy fires. Is the Voynich Manuscript…

…an “ergodic text”?

According to Espen Aarseth [as discussed on the Grand Text Auto website], ergodic literature is where “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”… yup, I think we’ve all read a fair few books like that.

Personally, I think this would mean that the Voynich Manuscript – which has had its bifolios shuffled several times during its lifetime – has ended up as “unintentionally ergodic literature”, because nobody knows how to properly traverse its pages, let alone read its text. What’s worse is that I’m reasonably sure that nobody even knows how to parse its letters, increasing its, errrm, ergodicity yet further. The Voynich is, quite literally, hard work to read. 🙂

All the same, one nice thing about authors in the kind of cybertext-y tradition Aarseth belongs to is that they do a good job of collecting a whole load of bizarre textual oddities to muse upon. Not novels without the letter ‘E’ or where every sentence is a question *sigh*, but stories with intentionally shufflable pages, or even Ayn Rand’s play where the audience votes for the ending they want… you know, mad stuff like that.

…or an “aleatoric text”?

What is relevant to us is that this stuff overlaps strongly with stochastic (randomly generated) or aleatoric texts, where there is an element of chance in the way that they are written (the Latin word “alea” means “dice”). As is fairly well known, plenty of people have posited the notion that the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘Voynichese’ text was entirely generated using some kind of cleverly randomising process. Most notably, Gordon Rugg suggests a tricksy arrangement with multiple Cardan grille-like tables of Voynichese word parts to achieve such a miracle. If they’re right, the VMs would be – horror of horrors – an aleatoric hoax (or, more precisely, a stochastic simulacrum of a ergodic text).

Given that this is a much-repeated claim, I thought I really ought to dip my toes in the early history of generated texts. Incidentally, there’s a parallel literature on the (mainly modern) tradition of aleatoric music (John Cage, Charles Ives, even Marcel Duchamp), which claims as a parent the 15th century “catholicon” genre, which was a universal musical genre which could be played in any mode or scale. However, I don’t personally see the catholicon as having any real randomness as opposed to just potential multimodality: linking it to John Cage seems a fairly spurious idea. 🙁

…or a “generated text”?

But as for generated texts, that’s a different story. A glimpse at your email inbox or even a typical websearch should quickly reveal that the world is now awash with such glibly generated texts. Increasingly, the Internet is populated more with plausible-looking generated text than real text. But when in history did all this awfulness actually begin? Might the big secret of the Voynich Manuscript be that its author was been the world’s first spammer?

Of course, the all-pervading layer of spam that threatens to drown us all is built atop computational linguistics, where computer programmers find ways of sequencing text that appears moderately sensible. In fact, the first documented computationally stochastic text came about in 1959 when Theo Lutz programmed a Zuse Z22 computer to mash up fragments from Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” in a grammatically plausible way.

…or a “permutational text”?

Naturally, we’re looking for something much earlier here: and thanks to determined researchers such as Florian Cramer, you can find plenty of stuff on “permutational texts”, texts that typically allow the reader or performer to swap things around arbitrarily. If you want to try some of these out for yourself, there’s an excellent selection on the Permutationen site.

But there’s a problem with this: these texts are all about permuting words, playing with meaning, synonymity, antonymity, association, conceptual linkages, linguistic simulation: whereas Voynich hoax theorists are looking for non-meaning, obscurity, grammatical simulation – all of which are elements occupying a completely different scale, a far tighter granularity.

…or a “combinatoric text”?

Even Raymond Llull‘s combinatorics (which I mentioned recently) were avowedly combinations of concepts, not letters: the paper machine he described in his “Ars Magna et Ultima” was comprised of multiple concentric word disks, using logical combination as a tool to try to reach ultimate truth.

However, the fascinating thing about this is that it has been claimed (and here’s a link to a particularly nice presentation) that:-

It is believed that Llull’s inspiration for the Ars magna came from observing a device called a zairja, which was used by medieval Arab astrologers to calculate ideas by mechanical means. It used the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet to signify 28 categories of philosophic thought. By combining number values associated with the letters and categories, new paths of insight and thought were created.

If you’re now suddenly filled with an urge to find out about zairjas, here’s the Wikipedia page on them: further, David Link says in a fascinating article that “Taking into account the moment in time of the enquiry, [a zairja] generated a rhymed answer to any question posed”.

However, the (very) short version of all this is that Llull seems to have taken the zairja’s circular diagrams and done his own thing with them, very much as Leon Battista Alberti did with Llull’s in turn. But all in all, that’s quite a different tradition from what we’re talking about here.

…or none of the above?

Though I’ve searched and searched, I simply haven’t found anything in the history of any of these literatures conceptually similar to the way hoax theorists claim the Voynich “must have” been constructed. Is there some kind of link there to be found? Right now, I really don’t think there is, sorry! But please let me know if you think I’m wrong! 😉

Heteroscedasticity and ciphers…

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Heteroscedasticity – now there’s a word you don’t see very often (thanks to Rosco Paterson for kindly plonking it in my path). Which is a pity, because it’s a particularly useful concept that might help us crack several longstanding cipher mysteries.

The idea behind it is not too far from the old joke about the statistician with his feet in the oven and his head in the fridge, who – on average – felt very comfortable. A set of numbers is heteroscedastic if it simultaneously contains different (‘hetero-’) subgroups such that (for example) their average value falls between the groups. As a result, looking to that average for enlightenment as to the nature of those two separate subgroups is probably not going to do you much good.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that a lot of statistical properties implicitly rely on the data to be analyzed not having this property. That is, for data with multiple modes or states, the consequent heteroscedasticity is likely to mess up your statistical reasoning. Though you’ll still get plausible-looking results, there’s a high chance they’ll be of no practical use. So for cipher systems in general, any hint of multimodality should be a heteroscedastic alarm bell, a warning that your statistical toolbox may be as much use as a wet fish for tightening a bolt.

Plenty of Voynich Manuscript (‘VMs’) researchers will be sagely nodding their heads at this point, because they know all too well that the plethora of statistical analyses performed so far on it has failed to yield much of consequence. Could this be because its ‘Voynichese’ text heteroscedastically ‘hops’ between states? Cipher Mysteries regulars will know I’ve long suspected there’s some kind of state machine at play, but I’ve yet to see any full-on analysis of the VMs with this in mind.

Historically, the first proper ciphering state machine was Alberti’s 1465 cipher disk. He placed one alphabet on a stator (a static disk) and another on a rotor (a rotating disk), rotating the latter according to some system pre-agreed between encipherer and decipherer, e.g. rotating it after every couple of words, or after every vowel, etc.

Even if you don’t happen to buy in to my Averlino hypothesis (but don’t worry if you don’t, it’s not mandatory here), 1465 isn’t hugely far from the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum radiocarbon dating. It could well be that state machine cryptography was in the air: perhaps Alberti was building on an earlier, more experimental cipher he had heard of, but with an overtly Florentine, Brunelleschian clockwork gadget twist.

As an aside, there are plenty of intellectual historians who have suggested that the roots of Alberti’s cipher disk lie (for example) in Ramon Llull’s circular diagrams and conceptual machines: in a way, one might argue that all Alberti did was collide Llull’s stuff with the more hands-on Quattrocento Florentine machine-building tradition, and say “Ta-da!” 🙂

All the same, we do know that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher is not an Albertian polyalphabetic cipher: but if it is multimodal, how should we look for evidence of it?

A few years ago when my friend Glen Claston was laboriously making his own transcription of the VMs, he loosely noticed that certain groups of symbols and even words seemed to phase in and out, as if there was a higher-level structure underlying its text. Was he glimpsing raw heteroscedasticity, arising from some kind of state machine clustering? For now this is just his cryptological instinct, not a rigorous proof: and it is entirely true he may have been influenced by the structure of Leonell Strong’s claimed decryption (which introduced a new cipher alphabet every few lines). Despite all that, I’m happy to take his observation at face value: and that Voynichese may well be built around a higher-level internal state structure that readily confounds our statistical cryptanalyses.

So, the big question here is whether it is possible to design tests to explicitly detect multimodality ‘blind’. The problem is that even though this is done a lot in econometrics (there was even a Nobel Prize for Economics awarded for work to do with heteroscedasticity), economic time series are surely quite a different kettle of monkeys to ciphertexts. Perhaps there’s a whole cryptanalytical literature on detecting heteroscedasticity, please leave a comment here if you happen to know of this!

I don’t know what the answer to all this is: it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, without really being able to resolve to my own satisfaction. Make of it what you will!

At the same time, there’s also a spooky echo with the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher here. I recently wrote some code to test for the presence of homophone cycles in Z340, and from the results I got I strongly suspect that its top half employs quite a different cipher to the bottom – the homophone cycles my code suggested for the two halves were extremely different.

Hence it could well be that most statistical analyses of Z340 done to date have failed to produce useful results because of the confoundingly heteroscedastic shadow cast by merging (for example) two distinct halves into a single ciphertext. How could we definitively test whether Z340 is formed of two halves? Something else to think about! 🙂

The Queen goes crypto…

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In all my years of high-velocity web-browsing, I’ll honestly admit I’d never stumbled across www.royal.gov.uk, “The official website of the The British Monarchy. At first, I found it all a little bit eery, somewhat like finding mafia.it (which incidentally has some rather nice ASCII art in the HTML source).

The reason I was there was that a few days ago, I’d stumbled across a Slashdot news story I’d missed:Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge from July 2011. This described how the Queen had released The Agent X Code Book Challenge, “aimed at getting children [specifically aged 13-16] interested in cryptography”. It was produced to accompany the Queen’s opening of a memorial at Bletchley Park, which was covered well in an I Programmer web news-story.

Naturally, I decided to download this Code Challenge from the Monarchy’s website to try out on my 7 year old son: though he needed a little bit of help to get going, he quickly got the hang of it, and actually quite enjoyed it.

There are issues, of course. For one, the “Agent X” of the title is more of a 1950s conceit than a 2011 street name, arguably leaving that side of the whole presentation a little bit too stiff-collared for contemporary yoof. Similarly, the message itself does read as if it had been transcribed from a gramophone recording, which also doesn’t really help. Finally, there isn’t actually any cryptography as such, but rather just using a very WWII-like phrase table and letter table to decipher a series of messages (and even there, the phrase “Bletchley Park” appears three times, twice with exactly the same letters).

In short, I suspect it’s more likely to stimulate interest in WW II history than in cryptography per se: so if GCHQ had some kind of school-age outreach in mind with this, I think they’ll end up quite disappointed.

All the same, it was all worth it simply for one comment on Slashdot. Amidst all the normal “be sure to drink your Ovaltine” snarkiness and noise you’d expect to find there, Nicko van Someren (whose brother Alex I happen to know well) simply commented this:

I had the pleasure of meeting HRH the Duke of Edinburgh at an event once and, upon hearing that I worked in cryptography, he told me about his time working signals in the British navy during the second world war. He said he had always been fascinated by the operation of the British TypeX equipment that he used back then. I don’t suppose that he did any code breaking but he certainly was using codes well before the Cypherpunks came along.

So while my son happily put down the Agent X code book to go back learning how to draw manga and/or playing that week’s Wii game and/or whatever else he was so busily into that day, the picture I got from the whole thing was one of Prince Philip not just playing at crypto (like so many of the Slashdot trolls), but actually using it in the field. That’s real cipher history for you.

HLHL DCDC DMDM HWHW KHKH AQAQ HMHM!

Review of Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” (Tamam Shud) book…

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Though I’ve blogged about the Tamam Shud / Taman Shud case before, it’s still very far from closed. The man found on South Australia’s Somerton Beach in December 1948 remains unidentified, the nature of his death continues to be unresolved, his relationship with the nurse “Jestyn” is still not fully locked down, while as for the curious note tucked into his pocket…

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

…it’s as mysterious as ever.

Arguably the best starting point for people intrigued by this whole story is to watch a 1978 documentary on the subject from Australia’s ABC channel. Handily, it has been posted in three 10-minute sections on YouTube: 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3. Because so much of the police evidence has been destroyed over the years, the great thing about this film is that you get to actually see things in The Unknown Man’s suitcase (right at the start of part 2), which I for one found particularly interesting.

What I suspect you’d really want to leaf through next would be a dossier on the case, carefully laid out by a former policeman who had been assigned to it, and who went to some lengths to be factual, not judgmental. If my guess is even remotely close, then I’d say you simply have to get yourself a copy of G. M. Feltus’ (2010) book “The Unknown Man: A suspicious death at Somerton Beach“.

Yes, Gerry Feltus was indeed a policeman assigned between 2002 and 2004 (when he retired) to the Somerton Man cold case: and I think he does an admirable job of bringing together both the numerous strands of (often painfully thin) evidence and the various claims and theories as to the dead man’s identity.

It’s entirely true that his lengthy roll call of dud theories in the middle of the book can get very slightly wearing: but he’s clearly trying to give armchair mystery solvers everything they could reasonably need to get under the skin of this peculiar case, and so arguably couldn’t present it in any other way. Recommended!

Of course, there’s an extensive Wikipedia page for you to go through too (frankly, I’d recommend pouring yourself a nice glass of lightly-oaked Australian Chardonnay and watching the ABC documentary before you do anything so completist), though it’s not really a patch on Gerry’s 200+-page book.

Incidentally, there’s a lot of recent speculation that the Unknown Man may well have been the father of Jestyn’s son (there’s now even talk of exhuming bodies and performing DNA tests). Though my own belief is that this is – for entirely separate reasons – most likely true, I also think that this is missing the point. The right first step would be to do much more to explore the Somerton’s Man’s life before his death: thanks to Gerry Feltus, I think we can tell a great deal about him, and make some well-educated hunches.

In a few days’ time, I’ll post about what I think the odd cipher message contains, as well as my thoughts on the Unknown Man’s life, his travels in Australia after the Second World War, and his premature death (yes, I’m quite sure he was poisoned). But that’s by the by: for now all that’s important is that I think anyone with an interest in this enduring cipher mystery should buy themselves a copy of Gerry’s book from his Australian website and try to make up their own mind!

Copiale Cipher update…

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Today’s New York Times has a short article by John Markoff on the Copiale Cipher, the oculist secret society initiatory document recently cracked by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer. I discussed it in reasonable depth on this blog a few days ago, click there if you want to know more.

I do suspect that there must be hundreds of uncracked ciphers like the Copiale Cipher (though typically much smaller) languishing in <cliche>dusty European archives</cliche>, so it would be excellent to give people a chance to crack them (not just Kevin Knight & his student cadre 🙂 ).

So, archivists of the world, email me scans of your uncracked ciphers, let’s see what cipher mysteries we can crack together!

PS: before I forget, The Curse of the Voynich should finally be back on sale next week, so when it’s in I’ll email a reminder to those people who have asked to buy a copy. At £9.95, it’s far cheaper than the £32.79, £171.98, and £270.46 quoted on Amazon Marketplace! =:-o

Brad Meltzer and the Beale Papers…

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Cipher Mysteries readers in the US may well have watched Brad Meltzer’s recent “Decoded” episode on the Declaration of Independence. Though you might well think that the description listed below doesn’t sound particularly promising…

The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of American Democracy. Could it contain hidden messages from our nation’s forefathers intended to be discovered years later? Buddy, Mac and Scott travel across America to try and uncover the mysteries behind our nation’s most prized document.

…it turns out that this episode was in fact largely about the Beale Papers, which (in my opinion, at least) is a proper cipher mystery. I’ve blogged about these a fair few times, such as here: summing up, I conclude that the statistical improbability of the Gillogly strings strongly implies that these are real ciphers (not hoaxes); that they were enciphered using a two-stage combo of codebook and monoalphabetic substitution; and that the Gillogly strings are in fact no more than the keyphrase somehow falling through the system as a set of ABCDE…-style indices.

And just for all those armchair treasure hunters out there eager to crack B1 and B3 for themselves, my predictions are (a) that the B1 key string will turn out to be painfully close to “THOMASJEFFERSONBEALE”, and (b) that though B1 (and probably B3) also used the Declaration of Independence, it had its own slightly different set of counting mistakes as compared to B2. As normal, 15% of the bounty should cover my fee, thanks. 🙂

All of which means that when the Beale Papers finally do get cracked, Jim Gillogly will probably kick himself into the next state for missing what, to a supersmart codebreaker such as him, should be utterly obvious. Unless it’s him that ultimately gets to crack it? We shall see!

Anyway, the nice thing about Brad Meltzer’s show is that it has hugely stimulated interest in the Beale Papers, even creating its own mini-traffic-spike in Google Trends. I’m guessing the linking that’s going on is happening in treasure hunter mailing lists, but to be honest there’s not a lot out there worth reading on the subject. People are finally realising that stories linking the Beale Papers to (for example) famous pirate / privateer Jean Lafitte [Jean Laffite] are probably outright fakes. As with the Voynich Manuscript, all the properly good evidence is embedded right in the text itself: it’s everything else surrounding it that is the hoax!

This week’s Zodiac Killer cipher thoughts…

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One of the nice things about the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher is that we have a previous solved cipher by the same encipherer (i.e. the Z408 cipher), which appears to exhibit many of the same properties as the Z340. Hence, if we could forensically reconstruct how Z408 was constructed (i.e. its cryptographic methodology), we might also gain valuable insights into how the later Z340 was constructed.

One interesting feature of the (solved) Z408 is that even though it is a homophonic substitution cipher (which is to say that several different shapes are used for various plaintext letters), the shape selection is often far from random. In fact, in quite a few instances Z408 shapes appear in a strict cycle, which has led to some recent attempts to crack Z340 by trying (unsuccessfully) to infer homophone cycles.

Curiously, one of the shapes (filled triangle) appears to encipher both A and S: and if you extract all these out, a homophone-cycle-like ASASASAS sequence appears. This intrigued me, so I decided to look at it a little closer: might this somehow be a second layer of cycling?

The answer (I’m now pretty sure) turns out to be no, though it’s still interesting in its own right. Basically, the Zodiac seems to have got confused between dotted triangle (for S) and filled triangle (for A), which caused his cycles to break down. He also miscopied an F-shape as an E-shape: perhaps his working draft wasn’t quite as neat as his final copy, and/or written in felt tip, causing letter shapes to soak into the paper and become slightly less distinct.

If we correct these mistakes and reconstruct what he seems to have intended, we see that he was following a fairly strict cycle most of the time, though getting less ordered towards the end (perhaps from enciphering nausea?):-

A: length-4 homophone cycle = (1) F – (2) dotted square – (3) K – (4) dotted triangle
–> 12341234123413234124211
—-> 16 decisions out of 22 follow the cycle pattern

S: length-4 homophone cycle = (1) 6 – (2) S – (3) reversed L – (4) filled triangle
–> 1241234123412341231412
—-> 18 decisions out of 21 follow the cycle pattern

L is interesting because though that seems to start out as a length-2 homophone cycle [diagonal square – B], the diagonal square then seems to morph into a filled square and then back again to a diagonal square. Hence there’s no obvious sign of an actual length-3 homophone cycle as such, only a miscopied length-2 cycle (which then breaks down halfway through, with four diagonal squares in a row).

Yet even though the Zodiac loves words containing LL (kill, thrill, will, all, etc), he only actually seems to be using a length-2 homophone cycle for L (if slightly miscopied). That is, he is probably using a generalized model of English letter frequency distribution rather than a particular model of his own English letter frequency distribution.

The odd thing is that if you go through Dave Oranchak’s list of Z408 homophone sequences, you’ll see that it doesn’t quite match the traditional “ETAOINSHRDLU” frequency ordering (I count L as length-2):
* Length-7: E
* Length-4: TAOINS
* Length-3: R
* Length-2: LHFD

Was there an American amateur cryptography book of the 1950s or 1960s that espoused this frequency distribution?

Oops, that was a nice conference I just missed… :-(

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The NSA’s 2011 Cryptologic History Symposium (held in Johns Hopkins) ran yesterday and today, and had plenty of names long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless recognize in a flash:-

* Dr. Jim Reeds, Institute for Defense Analyses: “Editing the ‘General Report on TUNNY’”
* Dr. Benedek Lang, Budapest University of Technology and Economics: “Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography”
* Elonka Dunin, Independent Scholar: “Kryptos–The Decades-Old Enigma at Langley”

(Personally, I’d also love to have heard this presentation:-
* Erin Higgins, Department of Defense: “Humanism, Magic, and Cryptology in the Renaissance”)

However, arguably the big cipher mystery story of the conference was the fact that Panel session 4B, moderated by David C. Cooley from the NSA/CSS Center for Cryptologic History, was devoted to “Investigating the Voynich Manuscript” and with two Voynich speakers well-known from recent talks and results (respectively):-
* Klaus Schmeh, Independent Scholar: “New Research on the Voynich Manuscript”
* Dr. Greg Hodgins, University of Arizona: “Radiocarbon Dating and the Voynich Manuscript”

Could I perhaps tempt any attendee to email me a short description of the conference that I can put up here as a guest post? Cheers!

German cipher mystery found and solved!

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Here’s a nice story that should bring heart to researchers struggling with uncracked homophonic ciphers (e.g. Zodiac Killer Ciphers, Beale Papers, etc). Kevin Knight, who Voynich Manuscript researchers may remember from various posts here, has now co-authored a 2011 paper with Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer from Uppsala University on how they cracked a hitherto unknown (to me, at least) 105-page ciphertext dated 1866 they call the Copiale Cipher.

Slightly unhelpfully, the authors refer only to the manuscript as having come “from the East Berlin Academy”: in fact, as far back as 1992/1993 the East Berlin Academy of Arts and the West Berlin Academy were merged into a single Academy of Arts, Berlin (i.e. the Akademie der Künste). I searched the Akademie’s archives to see if I could find the source but only managed to find one plausible-sounding hit:-

Record group: Döhl – Reinhard-Döhl-Archiv
Classification group: 6.1. Fremde Manuskripte
Lauf. Nummer: 3625
Dat. => Findbuch: o.O., o.D.
Titel: [ohne Verfasser]: die sentenzen verschlüsselter deutbarkeit […]

Perhaps someone with better German and more persistence than me will find the actual manuscript reference.

Anyway, Knight/Megyesi/Schaefer give a nice account of how they went about analysing the neatly-written ciphertext, the various hypotheses they came up with along the way, and how they finally managed to decrypt it (though admittedly they initially only transcribed 16 pages), apart from eight mysterious logograms (i.e. an eight-entry nomenclator “for (doubly secret) people and organizations”). Here’s their translation of the first few lines, which make it quite clear what kind of a book it is:-

First lawbook
of the [1] e [2]
Secret part.
First section
Secret teachings for apprentices.
First title.
Initiation rite.
If the safety of the [3] is guaranteed, and the [3] is
opened by the chief [4], by putting on his hat, the
candidate is fetched from another room by the
younger doorman and by the hand is led in and to the
table of the chief [4], who asks him:
First, if he desires to become [1].
Secondly, if he submits to the rules of the [2] and
without rebelliousness suffer through the time of
apprenticeship.
Thirdly, be silent about the [5] of the [2] and
furthermore be willing to offer himself to volunteer
in the most committed way.
The candidate answers yes.

The interesting thing about the date is that it predates the 1887 founding of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by 20 years or so: and many (if not most?) regular Cipher Mysteries readers will recall that that was founded with a (quite different) mysterious cipher document allegedly referring to a certain “Fraulein Anna Sprengler” mentioned in the enciphered text. By way of comparison, Aleister Crowley’s favourite Ordo Templi Orientis was founded only in 1895 or thereabouts.

Hence the really big question about this enciphered document is whether there is any connection (perhaps even Anna Sprengler) between it and the Golden Dawn Ciphers. The answer may well lie in the 89 pages as yet untranscribed by K/M/S… hopefully we shall see!

Update: since writing this, I found that K/M/S have put up a detailed web-page including scans, transcriptions, and English translations of the whole 105 pages. Codicologically, they say it is “beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks [and] can be dated back to 1760-1780.”

They also note that they think it is a document of an “18th century secret society, namely the “oculist order”. A parallel manuscript is located at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel.” Which of course rules Fraulein Sprengler out. 🙂

To be honest, the part in the ceremony described where they pluck a hair from the eyebrow of the initiate reminds me not a little of the Simpsons’ Stonecutters episode (“Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star? We do! We do!”), but perhaps let’s not dwell on that too much… 🙂

Apologies for three missing posts!

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A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I’m very sorry to say that you’ve missed out on three recent updates to the site.

They were (in chronological order):
(1) Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp… – discusses an upcoming lecture at Cambridge University on various Slavic mystery documents and John Stojko’s Voynich theory.
(2) Voynich fruitiness back in season… – discusses two recent fruity Voynich theories that popped up on the Internet, one linking the VMs with Jewish pharmaceutical conspiracies, the other with the coelacanth (yes, really!).
(3) Decent 2010 paper on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers – discusses a paper by two Norwegian academics searching for homophone cycles in the uncracked Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher.

Feel free to click through and have a look at them, they were all good posts, well worth a read. Enjoy! 🙂