Voynich segment on “Weird or What?” tonight…

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According to Stephen Christomalis (who actually features in it), US-based Voynich Manuscript devotees could consider tuning in to the Discovery Channel tonight (5th May 2010 8pm and 11pm) to see the VMs segment on “Weird or What?”,  a show which features a smorgasbord of semi-Forteana and rhetorical historical questions, though sadly sans William Shatner (for now):-

Were Ancient Pharaohs Cocaine party animals? Can sea lions sense disaster? A mysterious coded book that has never been cracked. A Mexican tribe who can run hundreds of miles per day – and no one knows how they do it!

So… that would be “(1) no, (2) no, (3) hello, (4) amphetamine quesadillas?” respectively, then. 🙂 However, I wouldn’t worry too much if you miss this “Cocaine Mummies” episode: for one, it’ll be repeated at 2pm on May 16th 2010 – and for two, Googling for it points you to a whole bunch of torrent trackers, so presumably it’ll be fairly easy for non-Americans to catch a glance.

I think that this will probably provide sufficient proof that the VMs has indeed become one of the lowest-hanging fruits on the historical mystery tree: I’ll just be interested to see what the VMs looks like from the programme’s researchers’ point of view. Will they regurgitate a slab of blandly unhelpful Wikipedia nonsense? Will they hype the VMs up into a Terence McKenna hoax conspiracy? Or will they spin their account towards Kennedy & Churchill’s glossolaliac madness? It doesn’t really matter, but it’s always fun to have a bit of a sweepstake going, don’t you think? 🙂

Savoy palaeography: was michiton originally nichil?

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Because of the lack of satisfactory evidence to work with, there are two basic Voynich research methodologies:

  1. concrete (which focus on those miserably few things we know about the VMs); and
  2. speculative (which try to determine which of the quadrillion possible explanations for the VMs are most inherently plausible).

In line with the first of the two, I’ve spent a long time hacking away at the VMs’ marginalia in a concrete attempt to work out from whence they came, so as to make the provenance leap a century or more backwards from 1600 to some point closer to the Voynich Manuscript’s actual origin. It’s been a hard slog, but I think I’ve now landed on the right doorstep: Savoy (specifically the post-1416 Duchy of Savoy).

When I saw this page (from Archives Départementales de la Côte-d’Or, B 6768, dated 1345), there’s just something about the handwriting that rings a bell for me. OK, it’s not by the same person (in fact, they’re probably close to a century apart) but look at its “nichil” with f116v’s “michiton”:-

nichil-michiton

Is this just some palaeographic coincidence? I really think not: in fact, I predict that if a multispectral infrared scan of f116v was carried out, you’d see (at just the right wavelength) the top part of the  “t” of “michiton” mysteriously morph into a looped “l”, as per the 1345 document. Basically, I’m pretty sure that “+ michiton” originally read “+ nichil” (or possibly “+ nichilum“), as the Ecclesiastical Latin “nichil” seems to pop up mainly in the context of late medieval French Latin texts, by monks allegedly influenced by the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni’s (1369-1444) practice of using “ch” for “h”. Perhaps an experienced Savoy palaeographer would be the right person to ask about this? I suspect that there’s much more we could tell…

Interestingly, here’s a map of Savoy in the 15th century: hmmm, not far from Milan at all. So, is that some kind of coincidence as well? 🙂

P.S.: I should add that it could indeed just as well be “michi” written in basically the same hand, except that I suspect that the “o” and the initial “m” of “michiton” were both emended by a later owner, and that this doesn’t help explain what is going on with the whole word.

“Actually, I’m writing a book on machines”…

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Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched ‘vertical’ books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the gynaecologist who preferred to decorate the hall through the letterbox, I’m not quite sure why…

Anyway, I’ve been working my way through Pamela O. Long’s epic (2004) book “Openness, Secrecy, Authority”, which is basically ‘the (vertical) history of secrecy pre-Enlightenment’. It covers pretty much all of the historical things I think every Voynich researcher ought to be acutely aware of – books of secrets, alchemy, patents, recipes, Hermeticism, Theophilus, Poimander, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, Philo, Guido da Vigevano, Fontana, Brunelleschi, Taccola, Kyeser,Valturio, Ghiberti, Filarete, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, Ficino, Agrippa, Paracelsus, etc. However, it’s proving to be a haltingly slow process, because every chapter or so I feel compelled to go away and check out what she’s saying to see if I believe her or not. Even though 50% of the time I actually disagree with her conclusions and interpretations, this is almost certainly because she has attempted to cover an extraordinary breadth of subject-matter within a single volume, as well as to give some kind of a socio-theoretic chapter-ending spin on the extraordinarily heterogenous set of things that fall within range of her chosen subject thread, both things that tend to work out badly for authors. 🙂

A full review will follow (because I haven’t yet finished it), but I thought I’d briefly mention it because it inspired the following brief note on books on machines of war. As I mentioned yesterday, Johann Adam Schall von Bell wrote one for the Ming Emperor; Roberto Valturio’s “De Re Militari” caused a stir when Sigismondo Malatesta tried to send a copy to Istanbul with his favourite court painter Matteo de’ Pasti; gay vegetarian pacifist Leonardo da Vinci famously tried to ingratiate himself with the Sforza Duke of Milan with his 1482 war machine sketches; Guido da Vigevano wrote one; Giovanni Fontana wrote one; Antonio Averlino sort-of-claimed to have written one (on engines); and so on.

What I learnt from Pamela O. Long’s books was also that Cornelius Agrippa “attempted to obtain patronage… by making reference to a treatise he planned to write on a engines of war” (p.162), while Alberti promised (in his De re aedificatoria, p.135 of the 1988 Rykwert edition) to “deal with war machines at greater length elsewhere, perhaps implying that he was planning to write a treatise on the subject” (p.125).

But… hold on a minute?! Even though the conventional starting point for this whole subject is one of archival rarity (i.e. that manuscript books of secrets are the exception rather than the rule), it seems that if you mine the subject matter enough you find that people back then didn’t qualify as a free-agent master architect / engineer looking for courtly patronage unless they could point to their own secret book of extraordinary machines to back up their claims. I suppose this is broadly the Quattrocento equivalent of the modern Cult Of The Business Plan, where startup founders could only get audiences with those 1990s princes (yes, Venture Capitalists) if they had a suitably weighty document & spreadsheet to back up their outrageously nonsensical business bet (i.e. a virally-marketed scalable global pet massage franchising scheme etc).

Historians often point to the Quattrocento as being the effective birth of intellectual property (yes, I know Venice issued various earlier patent-like documents, but it’s arguable whether these count): drawing a broad modern parallel, the notion of intellectual capital was sometimes caricatured in the late 1990s as being a way of making a bunch of PhDs losing money look like a good investment. In case you think I’m stretching language too far here, the Quattrocento has two constrasting examplars for these trends: Brunelleschi and Leonardo da Vinci. Brunelleschi started off (it’s highly likely) as a goldsmith with a close interest in clockmaking, and used his own personal practice to develop complex machine ideas – he was empirical/experiential/adaptive, preferring not to transfer his physical constructions onto paper because people would then copy them ad infinitum. Leonardo, by contrast, was constructing theoretical and speculative models for designs without significant regard to their practicalities: I would argue that he could only construct his designs on paper as that was where they belonged – he was theoretical/abstract/creative. In short, Brunelleschi is all about intellectual property while Leonardo is all about intellectual capital, and never the twain shall meet: perhaps his innate practicality is why Brunelleschi is held in higher esteem than Leonardo in Italy.

I think that even though intellectual capital (a demonstrable capacity for having bright ideas, usually theoretical) has a quite different rationale to intellectual property (a set of bright ideas someone believed they owned, usually pragmatic), both types of Quattrocento books of machines performed roughly the same kind of function even though the ideas in them were hardly ever used. Viewed from this angle, they are no more than “alchemical herbal”-style McGuffins that people constructed to try to gain credibility and/or patronage, by becoming an auctor/authority – AKA hire me “because I’m worth it”. Ultimately, I suspect that hyping up your secret book on machines was simply the early modern equivalent of the entrepreneural elevator pitch. 🙂

But now I’m mixing business school models with historical models, while straying dangerously close to the kind of theoretical stuff I was happy to lambast a mere six paragraphs back: probably a sign I ought to call a halt for the day. Make of it all what you will! 🙂

Thoughts on Johann Adam Schall von Bell…

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Fifteen hours in the air coming back from Taiwan (even if it was ultimately to the wrong airport) does lead you to click through all (and I really do mean all) the listings on China Airlines’ seatback audio/video on demand gizmo. And so it was that I listened to Eminem’s 2009 album Relapse (Bagpipes in Baghdad, etc), and watched not only Avatar (hi-tech pants, but all the better for not being in 3d), Shakespeare in Love (Gwyneth Paltrow gains a moustache, Shakespeare loses a muse, the end)… but also a rather splendid documentary on Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666).

[No, he didn’t write the VMs (nor the Rohonc Codex): but he was in Rome between 1611 and 1618, so there is an outside chance that he met Georg Baresch, who started at La Sapienza in 1605, Voynich trivia fans.]

It was the Jesuit mathematician and cartographer Matteo Ricci (1552-1610, so note that 11th May 2010 will mark the 400th anniversary of his death) who made the first real breakthrough into mainland China: as a result of his long-term efforts in understanding Chinese language, writing and culture, he became the first Westerner allowed into the Forbidden City (though he never actually met the Emperor). He co-compiled the first Westernized Chinese dictionary (around 1583-1588, though it got lost in the Jesuit archives until 1934) as well as the second one (1598, this time round with diacritical marks, but this one has yet to surface), and the first European-style map of the world in Chinese (in 1584, but only six copies of the 1602 printing survive). A pretty impressive set of cultural landmarks.

According to this interesting paper by Zhang Baichun:

“Ricci was the first to introduce European astronomical instruments to the Chinese. He made a copper celestial globe in Zhaoqing 肇 慶 (Guangdong) and explained astronomy to visitors in the 1580s. He also taught students in Shaozhou 韶 州 (Guangdong), Nanking, and Peking how to make a celestial globe, an astrolabe, a quadrant, and a sundial. In 1605, Ricci and Li Zhizao 李 之 藻 (1565-1630) wrote the Qiankun tiyi 乾 坤 體 義 (Cosmological epitome), describing the use of a copper armillary sphere to demonstrate the relation between the heavens and earth and to help calculate the coordinates of the celestial bodies (fig. 1). Two years later, Ricci and Li explained the astrolabe and its method of coordinate projection in another work, the Hungai tongxian tushuo 渾 蓋 通 憲 圖 說 (Explanation of the coordinates of the celestial sphere and vault). Prior to this, the demonstrational armillary sphere, the quadrant, and the astrolabe were unknown in China.”

Matteo Ricci tried to determine eclipses, but this was the limit of his abilities: and so noted that a future Jesuit approach to China should include missionaries who were able to construct accurate planetary calendars.

In many ways, calendar-making was a huge political problem in China: the practice had long been for a calendar to be set up at the start of a new dynasty, but this had the downside that over time its usefulness would slip and slide, causing faith in the Emperor (and indeed in the whole ruling class) to recede. For if the Emperor could not predict eclipses, what kind of control did he have over the universe? In fact, you could argue that this specifically Chinese calendrical drift was one of the key factors that helped drive the (vaguely Spengleresque) changes in dynasty.

This was essentially why Johann Terrenz Schreck (did he have a son called Shreck Two?), Giacomo Rho and Johann Adam Schall arrived in Macau in 1619. They came in ships laden with 7000 volumes containing a vast amount of up-to-the-minute Western scientific knowledge, plus numerous trendy and useful technical instruments (such as telescopes): yet the journey aboard their year-long, ummm, slow boat to China had been harrowing, and only six of the crew made it all the way.

The immediate problem they faced was that, after Matteo Ricci’s death in 1610, the Jesuits in Macau weren’t actually welcome on the mainland. However, after a few years this situation was (somewhat curiously) turned around by a war breaking out: Adam Schall compiled a book in Chinese on the latest European war machines (such as cannons) to advise the ruling Ming dynasty, and all of a sudden doors opened to the Jesuits once more.

Later (between 1631 and 1635), Adam Schall helped compile the 137-chapter “Chongzhen Calendar”, which applied the European learning the missionaries had brought with them to the problem of constructing a truly Chinese calendar. However, Emperor Chongzhen decided not to use it: the Ming Dynasty was in huge difficulties, and he judged that introducing it would have added more difficulties to the (already long) list. When the dynasty finally fell and the new Qing Dynasty began, Adam Schall bravely decided to stay on in Beijing – and (after some hair-raising troubles) became a close confidant of the newly installed Shunzhi Emperor. The calendar he had helped construct for the Ming Dynasty was finally introduced by the Qing Dynasty, and remained in use for hundreds of years afterwards.

[Of course, Adam Schall died fairly unhappy because he had failed to convert many people to Christianity, which ultimately had been the whole point of the expensive exercise. But let’s not dwell on that.]

* * * * * *

As far as assessing VMs “Chinese” theories goes, I learnt a great deal from all this. For one, Chinese astronomy of the day had long been based around dividing the equatorial sky in 365 and 1/4 divisions, and the Jesuits had difficulty transitioning over the instruments that were being made to use a somewhat less laborious 360 degree division: so I’m somewhat skeptical that the 30 x 12 = 360 nymphs/stars/labels of the VMs’ zodiac pages can have anything at all to do with Chinese astronomy pre-1640 or so.

I’m also now extremely skeptical about any Voynich Chinese language theory (and, yes, I was already pretty skeptical beforehand – after all, Jacques Guy had originally proposed the notion as a froggily linguistic canard). Socially and culturally, creating any kind of multi-letter Romanized transcription of Chinese or other similarly languages would be a major undertaking that would have attracted great attention. The idea that this could have been done on the quiet (and solely for the VMs) just seems flat-out wrong, particularly if you date the VMs to well before Matteo Ricci’s 1583-1588 first dictionary.

Furthermore, it was fascinating to read in Zhang Baichun’s article that even though (back in Europe) Johann Hevelius had telescopes, he used other equipment and naked-eye obervations in preference to them: citing Hepsold (1908), he notes that “In 1679, Hevelius and Halley had made comparative observations in Danzig. The results showed that the data obtained by Halley with the telescope were not more precise than those obtained by Hevelius with his own sights.” Telescopes, even by the mid 17th century, were still generally very poor quality.

Of course, you’re entirely free to make up your own mind on the origins of the VMs – but personally, I simply don’t see anything Chinese there whatsoever.

Review of “Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies”…

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With my book publisher hat on, I’d guess that the pitch for this book probably said: “Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!” And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But… is it any good?

Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I’ll put recreational code-breakers – the Sunday supplement sudoku crowd. On the second vertex, hardcore cipher history buffs – David Kahn groupies. On the last vertex, historical mystery / conspiracy fans – Templars, Masons, Turin Shroud, HBHG, Voynich Manuscript etc.

“Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies” sits firmly on the triangle’s first vertex, but I have to reaches out only fairly lamely (I think) to the other two vertices. Structurally, its innovation is to tell three stories where you need to solve a long sequence (100, 80, and 55 respectively) of individual cryptograms to find out what happened. Quite a few of the ciphers use well-known cipher alphabets, such as Malachim, Enochian, and various Masonic pigpens: there are also a few trendy puzzle ciphers (such as predictive texting ciphers formed just of numbers).

Compare this to its big competitor (Elonka Dunin’s “Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”) which sits on the same first vertex. Elonka’s book has quite a few more puzzles, is structured both thematically and by ascending difficulty, and sticks to plaintext: it also has a 40-page section on unsolved ciphers (the VMs, the Dorabella Cipher, Phaistos Disk, etc), but with no real pretense at trying to precis Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”.

For me, Cipher Mysteries sits on the opposite edge of the triangle (i.e. between hardcore cipher history and, errm, softcore cipher mysteries) to both of these, so I’m probably not the right person to judge which of the two puzzle books is better. Elonka’s book is easy to work your way through (but feels a bit more old-fashioned): while Sutherland & Koltko-Rivera’s book is lithe and up-to-the-minute (but feels less substantial, in almost every sense). OK, the first is more cryptologic, the second more puzzle-y: but ultimately they’re doing the same thing and talking to the same basic audience.

Really, I guess puzzle book buyers would do well to buy both and make up their own mind which of the two they prefer: but sadly I have to say that most Cipher Mysteries readers might prefer to buy neither. But you never know!

Rene’s voynich.nu relaunch…

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As should be pretty clear from my posts over the years, I’m a big fan of René Zandbergen: he’s one of the very few Voynich researchers that have managed to keep a consistently clear head over the years, and it is his generally even-handed approach that casts a pleasantly affable shadow over voynich.nu, the website he put together many years ago and still one of the few genuinely useful general-purpose Voynich research resources in Internetland. (Please don’t get me started on the uselessness of the Wikipedia page, I want to keep this under 1000 words).

And so in many ways the news that René has now taken back control of voynich.nu (he stopped updating it in 2004, and then handed it over to Dana Scott to look after for a few years) and begun an HTML makeover on it comes as a very pleasant surprise. It’s already looking much better, and no doubt it will carry on improving for a while yet.

I suppose the key question, though, boils down to this: really, what have we learnt about the VMs in the last six years? And how does the whole voynich.nu programme fit in with where we are now?

It’s important to remember that René’s website, for all its substance, is not some kind of “Encyclopaedia Voynichiana“, trying to compile every comment ever made on every feature, drawing, paragraph, line, word, letter. Rather, it concerns itself at least as much with the historiography of the VMs as with the VMs itself. For some people, that is a strength: yet for me, that remains its central weakness. The basic historiographic problem is that the VMs’ provenance shudders to an awkward halt circa 1608, even though it is (demonstrably, I believe) significantly older than this – in fact, if the recent radiocarbon dating is broadly reliable, the VMs probably predates its appearance at the Rudolfine court by more than 150 years. Which is a bit like trying to use Twitter to grasp the dynamics of Queen Victoria’s court.

What, then, should a 2010 voynich.nu look like? In many important ways, we’ve lost all the major archival battles: Marci pointed us to Kircher and Kircher pointed us to Baresch (and that was the end of that), while Rudolph II and WMV jointly got us to Sinapius (and that was the end of that). All of which formed a pleasant historical pear tree to climb, but ultimately one with no fruit, low-hanging or otherwise. We have all the pathology of a history, but none of the substance: for all the patient research fun trawling the archives can be, this approach has not helped us.

And from where I’m sitting, the minute we start defocussing to allow the tsunami of historical possibilities and dead-end theories to wash over us (Wikipedia, anyone?), we’ve basically lost the epistemological fight too. The annoying thing about the VMs is that even though it really is, as I once noted, like a million piece jigsaw, it would probably only take 20 or 30 carefully chosen observations about Voynichese to unlock its cipher. But which 20 or 30 would be the key? We’ll only know in retrospect, I guess. 🙂

Perhaps a revised voynich.nu circa 2010 should focus not on its (let’s face it, fairly damaged and unhelpful) historiography, but rather on what we’ve genuinely learnt about the VMs in and of itself: by which I mean things like…

  • the difference between Currier A and Currier B (and all the shades inbetween)
  • reconstructing the original page order
  • places where the cipher breaks down and/or is hacked (such as space insertion ciphers)
  • apparent copying errors
  • letter stroke construction and variations
  • document constructional details, gatherings vs quires
  • marginalia
  • internal layering
  • the various painters
  • handwriting differences and evolution

All of which is very “Voynich 2.0”, but there you go. Really, we do now know a great deal about the VMs that isn’t to do with Marci, Newbold, Brumbaugh, etc: in fact, we have plenty of reasons to be optimistic if we but allow ourselves to be!

Review: Michael Jacobson’s asemic books…

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A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I’ve been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I’ve been struggling to work out what I think about them… you’ll see what I mean in a moment.

You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini’s famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively little doubt that, beneath all its overevolved, madly-mutated faux-alien language tropes, Codex Seraphinianus does actually express some kind of coherent linguistic knot that might ultimately be untied, whereas Michael Jacobson’s “asemic” books claim to be actively meaningless. That is, while they play with the form of narrative and abstract expressive shape, they don’t actually say anything – any kind of meaning you take away from them is your problem (or, conversely, your gift).

Perhaps the right way to classify them, then, is as some kind of visual anti-poetry, a kind of Dada take on the postmodernist anti-meaning turn. Which is to say: if all texts are ultimately meaningless in themselves (and only incidentally form meaning in the reader’s mind), then why are you surprised that these books are too?

Alternatively, perhaps there is actually a hidden higher-level message, so that if you turn the pages upside down and squint your eyes in just the right way, what emerges is something along the lines of “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage“, etc. So, a good part of the fun is working out whether there’s a joke (and if there is, whether it’s on you).

Whatever your particular take happens to be, I think you can still enjoy them purely on their own visual merits: for all their (claimed) lack of meaning, Michael’s two books do jump with a refreshingly jazz-like joy:-

  1. Action Figures (which seems to have started life in an exercise book) is, I would say, the weaker of the pair: I get the impression of an early youth (mis)spent with a spray can, trying as a young man to give expression to the same basic urges, but channelling them within structural rules (such as minimizing shape repetition, consistency of line, etc). Neat, but Mayan street-whimsical rather than obviously challenging.
  2. The Giant’s Fence is, by comparison, a far more sophisticated objet d’art, even if it is apparently influenced by Max Ernst’s Maximiliana. Here, Jacobson seems to have developed a confidence with his medium that lets him play not only with the interior calligraphic form but also with the structural rules within which they live. Shapes, gaps, multi-line things gradually intrude into the overall text-like flow, their waxing and waning presences driven by a subtly astrological metronome, where the passage of time from page to page has a enjoyably slow, quasi-geological feel. All in all, a nicely done piece that hints that Jacobson has more to come.

You can download your own free copy of Action Figures from the Literate Machine website here, though you’ll have to pay a princely £2.99 to download your own Lulu-ized copy of The Giant’s Fence.

Personally, I see asemic writing (the overall category in which these books live) as sitting on quite a different table to cipher/language mysteries, so I’m not hugely sympathetic to the suggestion that (for example) the Codex Seraphinianus, the Phaistos Disc, or the Voynich Manuscript are themselves asemic. However, it is certainly true that people project all kinds of bizarre historical narratives onto these, to a degree to which asemic writers can only faintly aspire: perhaps such vicariously vivid visions ultimately form a family of warped interpretational artworks all their own, a kind of semantic complement to asemic writing. “Asemic reading”, perhaps?

Voynich theory roundup…

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Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there’s always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today’s mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc.

  1. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning grandmother) Dianne Tillotson has a theory that the VMs was written by one Leonard of Quim.
  2. Online Shakespearean theorist Franz Gnaedinger has raised Richard SantaColoma’s theory to dizzying new heights: he believes the VMs “was written and drawn by Francis Bacon in 1622, as a private sequel to the highly successful Nova Atlantis, written in a pseudo-Polynesian idiom allowing page-filling automatic writing, and drawn in a deliberate retro-style honoring Francis Bacon’s ancestor Roger Bacon. The text is gibberish but makes allusions.“
  3. Sergey K suggests (by email) a new chronology for the Voynich Manuscripts, based on some dates apparently marked in blue paint in the SW rosette: “1441 dates of the making of the Voynich MS. 1574  JOHN DEE has bought the Voynich MS. 1597 (in this place my monitor very dirty) August. The Year and month when Edward Kelley  has finished the painter (colouring) of the book and run out from the prison.“Ros1574
  4. Chy Po, who has been studying the VMs for many decades, believes that “The sketches are Red Herrings & have nothing to do with the text, however they tell a tale of their own cautioning people not to be misled“, while the text is in “a Secret almost extinct language, perhaps impossible to crack as it is a variation of a One Time Pad.” However, “the name of this language is known to very few who guard it jealously, but even is was made public it would be of no help without those exact pages of the Pad which obviously cannot exist still.  I have strong suspicions that it is a copy of an handwritten book called “v**z H******g’ very few copies of which exist to be passed on to the next worthy disciple, if no one is deemed to be worthy then that particular copy is destroyed.“

Here, the satirical is clearly (1) [Leonard of Quim is an Ankh-Morpork character], the April Foolery is (3) [thanks for that, Sergey], while (2) bravely outdoes his virtual mentor Rich SantaColoma by a whole order of magnitude. As for Chy Po, perhaps the answer to the VMs, when it eventually arrives, will indeed fit this kind of “concealed secret language” template, who knows? But as to whether the book in question is called “vuoz Habsburg” (or whatever), you’ll have to work out for yourself.

Really, who would be me? Some days, I have to admit that not even I would be me.

New d’Agapeyeff cipher site…

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Not much to say about Tiago Rodrigues’ new d’Agapeyeff cipher site, except that he summarises the existing cipher analyses pretty well and adds a few of his own thoughts (such as splitting the search space into two 7×14 blocks to try to make it significantly more manageable). Apart from wanting him to change his outbound links from the Voynich News blogger site to the Cipher Mysteries WordPress site, I’d say he’s done a good job of putting together a pretty good starting point. 🙂

(Incidentally, my three d’Agapeyeff pages are here, here, and here.)

Go Oilers…

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So there I was in my first awesome week working at the B: my room mate Lynina kept saying that I was so ‘Legally Blonde’, and I was like “but do I have a dog? No? Well, I don’t think so”. And then she just kept on about the East Coast / West Coast thing, and I’m like “so now I’m Tupac? Well, duh.” But working in the cube is just so cool that it, like, transcends all that stuff in an totally I.M.Pei way. And when I say that, Lynina just rolls her eyes and I say “what? what?” and she lifts up her Renaissance News and Notes so I can’t see her face and we both laugh until we cry and then we both have to do our makeup again.

Actually, I always do well at interviews because, you know, I bought those totally serious-looking frames (even though I don’t need glasses at all, don’t tell anyone) and I think really hard of that guy who said “never make the interviewer laugh, but never let them forget you either” so I frown and try to conjure up the most like wild high cultural stuff I can until their head is spinning. Works for me, anyhow.

So anyway, I’m like four days (nearly a whole week, if you’re counting) into the job, and I’ve done the induction and the cleaning and the coffee round, and it’s my turn on the desk, and there’s a buzz from the guard upstairs and only The Maddest Mad Guy Ever turns up. You know, the one at the top left of the Do Not Let These People See The VMs montage pinned to the drawer that holds the snakes and the magnifiers, ringed in like red felt pen and stuff. But I’m new there and I don’t know this yet, so I’m like “Sure you can see MS 408, sir. Do you have a particular research question you’re trying to answer?”

At this point I notice he’s shaking, and I’m thinking he’s got some kind of palsy but actually it’s because he can’t believe he might actually be able to get to see the manuscript, what with it being digitized so that the curators can Just Say No To Mad Guys Like Him. So I say, you know, making light conversation, Sir, what kind of Oil is your hat made of? And he stops dead, looks at me as though I’ve just torched his favourite pet, and replies “what?”

So I say, when I was inducted here they told me that people who ask for MS 408 often wear some kind of rare oil-based hat, all the while I’m looking at his cap which, like, just happens to be for the Edmonton Oilers hockey team. He says  “there’s nothing under the cap” in this totally intense way, and I’m thinking of Forbes Smiley and say can I check your cap, sir, and he says what exactly are you looking for and I say it’s this really rare oil, Tynph Oil or something, that we mustn’t let near our manuscripts.

And so he half-lifts up a corner of his cap and there’s just this balding head thing underneath (pretty gross, he must have been like fifty or something), and I’m thinking about people cutting out maps with concealed blades and someone said that there was this weird map-like fold-out page in MS 408, so I say can I see inside your cap?

He’s shaking even worse now and lifts up his head and there’s this flash of crinkly metallic light under there and I’m thinking it’s a blade, it’s a blade, omigod it’s a blade, so I reach down into the drawer for a miniature LED flashlight to look closer at it but when I turn back he’s gone – disappeared, running up the stairs. And that’s when I notice his red-ringed face on the top left of the whole Do Not Let These People page and I feel really stupid, for the first time since like 3rd grade or something, when I got my own name wrong in a test. OK, so I was just a kid and my mom had remarried, and I felt under pressure to carry on maxing my grades: but all the same.

Like, I can’t believe I actually nearly completely let a blogger handle MS 408? So how totally bad is that?