Just to let you know that the normal summer “news drought” appears to have arrived a little early this year – apart from a couple of shiny new Voynich theories working their way through the pipeline and some long overdue book reviews to write up (most notably Christopher Harris’ novel “Mappamundi”), there’s really nothing much happening.
So… please don’t be unduly alarmed if your daily Cipher Mystery fix fails to arrive – it’s the world’s fault, not mine. 🙂
Writing a WordPress blog should be easy – but it genuinely takes about ten or so plugins to start actually doing things in a SEO-sensible way. A basic list I’d recommend would look like:-
…though I have to admit I have a further 17 plugins currently active (far too many to list).
For a programming junkie technophile such as myself, the temptation to start twiddling with PHP source code is hard to resist. The dinky little ‘Edit‘ button beside each plugin seems to magnetically pull my mouse pointer towards it, particularly strongly for those ones which haven’t been updated in over a year and don’t quite do what I originally hoped they would.
What’s more, Wordpress ‘themes’ (backgrounds) are more often driven by eye-candiness than SEO-friendliness – dwindlingly few of them have a variable-width three-column layout, which I think is the absolute minimum standard. Though I’ve already twiddled Sajith M.’s “Zen In Grey” theme a thousand times (to use CSS sprites, new graphics, etc etc), I’m still not 100% happy with it: and I probably never will be. But maybe that’s how it works.
Right now, I’m in the middle of coding up a load of small changes to the infrastructure, such as removing the post-category links on list-pages, and the whole new drop-down “[Page 1]” page-selection boxes on multi-page lists (such as on the Cipher Mysteries front-page). This was driven by the shock of finding out that I had ended up with over 130 links on the front page (Google allegedly penalizes pages with more than 100 links), and so needed stripping back.
Incidentally, I don’t really understand why Cipher Mysteries dropped from 10th in Google (in searches for “Voynich”) to about 130th a while back: though it has now clawed its way back to about 20th, the whole thing remains a bit of a mystery to me. Google Blogsearch also temporarily dropped my blog like a hot stone a few weeks ago: this seems to have been triggered by my “cryptography vs -ology vs -analysis” post, which presumably triggered some kind of dictionary-based spam test, purely on the title. Oh well!
Enough of the Internet minutiae – time to crawl back under my rock! 🙂
One hugely influential piece of modern writing is Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“:the central metaphor contrasts huge, monolithic, closed-source software developments (i.e. “the Cathedral”) with agile, distributed, open-source software developments (i.e. “the Bazaar”).
Raymond’s metaphor is just a metaphor: but all the same, there are plenty of none-too-subtle quasi-religious overtones at play here, which tend to colour the whole argument in favour of the Bazaar (which is his point, basically).
In the spirit of Raymond’s Bazaar, I’ve been wondering for a while whether I could (effectively) open-source my history research. Because I’m not a tenured academic, I don’t need a steady stream of refereed papers to justify my position to a departmental head: my interest in (for example) the Voynich Manuscript is more or less entirely about scratching an historical itch. And so “going open source” is something that is actually feasible, even if the precise (technological) details of quite how to achieve this are as yet unclear.
What I have in mind would be broadly in the same vein as the Voynich “challenges” page I put up a few years ago, only 10x times more focused. This would take the form of an ever-evolving page of open research challenges, each with references to (and summaries of) any relevant papers and books, and with (here it gets a bit vague) contact details for other researchers looking at the same problem and/or some kind of online forum for discussing each challenge.
Essentially, Eric Raymond’s central claim is that if you raise a daring enough flag, people will follow it: and as I think there are compelling arguments for tackling each of the research challenges I have in mind, this seems like a good fit. However, I find Raymond’s “Bazaar” troubling, as it seems to me to be based on a kind of free-market wheeler-dealer economics model, whereby each of the entities functions independently… as if competitive market trading will always provide an optimal solution to any problem. Applying this kind of superficial economics cant to software development (or even to historical research) is largely nonsensical: it’s just a metaphor, there is no “market” per se to regulate. Besides, as the key problems in large-scale software development are mainly to do with collaboration rather than competition, there’s good reason to think that the Bazaar is a flawed metaphor.
In the real world, I suspect that the actual model opposing The Cathedral is (sadly) far too often instead The Pub Quiz Team – a near-random group of people hoping to work as a team, but only occasionally gelling in anything approaching a purposeful way. And I say this having last night been on a Berrylands pub quiz team that came last by a mile – unsurprisingly, I don’t like pub quizzes much.
Applying this idea to the main Voynich mailing list, what has unfortunately happened over the last five years is that it has somehow turned from something surprisingly close to Eric Raymond’s idealized Bazaar (lots of individual researchers doing their thing within an overall research programme, trading ideas rather than punches) to a bickering pub quiz team, which can’t even agree its team name, let alone the answers to any of the questions.
In just about every important way, then, the VMs mailing list (in its present form) encapsulates more or less all of the things I would like to avoid in an open-source collaborative history project. As with most enterprises, knowing what to avoid is a reasonable starting point, but bear with me while I try to work out those pesky details…
Here’s a link to an unknown (and as-yet-unpublished) Voynich “literary mystery” for late 2009: Adam Hammonds posted a brief description of his Voynich / Tepenecz book “Impossible Objects” on his blog. But… Adam who?, I hear you ask.
A little Google-fu reveals that he lives in Brooklyn, and has been posting to the ‘Absolute Write’ writers forums since September 2008. He apparently has a fiancée and likes Thai food; he likes Premier League football (and so is probably English, or else he’d call it “sah-crrr“) and in the last few days has been taken on by William Clark Associates (literary agents). Hooray! *clink*
Yet these days, being a first time novelist is no fun: now that PCs are so ubiquitous and cheap, you only have (say) a billion-ish other people competing with you to the death. Advances are frugal, royalties are more pared to the bone than ever before (don’t hold your breath for that cheque-y to arrive), while few fiction writers have made a cent from e-publishing. In the face of the ongoing collapse of traditional publishing, the whole notion of actually making money from being a writer seems to me to be both wonderfully mad and horribly outdated. I want to applaud and to cry at the same time: I don’t believe there’s any rational middle ground left between the two extrema.
Hmmm… I think I’ll get back in my box, now. Sorry!
2009 begins, and – at long last – Cipher Mysteries has lurched back up to PageRank 3 (“PR3”), which is the height it had reached back when it was still with Blogger.
But because of all the super-duper WordPress plugins (like Tim Trott’s Folding Categories plugin, etc), visitors are now finding more of what they’re interested in here, and then staying on the blog for nearly twice as long as they used to – and all the major browsers are able to index the site far more comprehensively than they used to. Twice as many visitors per day reading twice as many pages is good news all round, I’d say. 🙂
One intriguing thing is that nearly 50% of recent Cipher Mysteries visitors use Firefox 1.x as their browser: so, what’s so wrong with FireFox 2.x or FireFox 3.x, then?
All the same, even though WordPress is such a better platform than Blogger, there are still many, many things I’d like/plan/hope to fix: for example…
…and so forth. These kinds of things could halve the loading time for the blog: but maybe I’m just kidding myself that they would make a difference, perhaps it’s fast enough already.
Anyway… a Happy New Year to you all! 🙂
A few weeks back, I posted about perhaps meeting up in London to dole out a few of my towering pile of Voynich- and cipher-related books over a pint or two. Well, here’s a date, time and place for it: 6.30pm, 5th January 2009, at the Cittie of York pub on Chancery Lane.
Anybody who wants to turn up, let me know beforehand what you’d like to borrow from my library, or any other book I’ve reviewed or mentioned here along the way, and I’ll bring it along for you. Philip Neal is after my copy of Mary D’Imperio’s “Elegant Enigma”, while Marke Fincher is after my copy of James Morrison’s “The Astrolabe”: but there’s plenty of others on the shelves.
See you there! 😉
Just so you know, replacing vowels by their next letter in the alphabet is known as “the magical cipher”: though Caterina Sforza used it in a few of her recipes in the 15th century, it was centuries old even then. This kind of cipher is used not so much for secrecy, but instead for ritual and wonder. All of which is simply a thin cryptographic pretext for me to say: K hppf ypx hbve b mbgkcbl Chrkstmbs! 🙂
First off, a huge thank you to all the subscribers and the more than 2,000 visitors to Cipher Mysteries. Adding in the roughly 8,100 visitors to my old Voynich News site, traffic has now broken through the 10,000 visitor mark – next stop 100,000.
This is despite the new site’s PageRank still floundering at a lowly PR2: search engine makes up only 20% of hits. Despite a brief period when it was 90th or so for Google searches for “Voynich”, it has since sunk back down to around 110+ (bah!). If I was paranoid, I would ask (having just moved from Blogger) “is it coz I is WordPress?” – but, more realistically, it’s probably because I haven’t fully engaged with the world of tweaks and pain associated with what is now known as “PageRank Sculpting”. If you use WordPress, there’s a good guide to PageRank Sculpting here.
This is a side of blogging nobody tells you about: while anyone can put up a blog in minutes, it can take months to engineer it to the point that search engines will link to it. Oh well!
When I migrated this blog from Blogger to WordPress, all the accumulated Google PageRank “goodwill” got lost too: and so even though Cipher Mysteries has exactly the same text as Voynich News (but better categorized etc), it has a rather meagre PR2 (“PageRank 2”) rather than PR3. And so all the Google search-engine traffic to the blog disappeared overnight.
However, things might now be on the mend, and PR3 might just be within reach again. Google Blogsearch now rates Cipher Mysteries as the #1 blog for “Voynich” (which is a pretty good start), and rates it highly enough for a pre-list mention for “cipher”. And if you Google the web for “voynich”, Cipher Mysteries now pops up at #97 – pretty awful, agreed, but not bad considering that it was at #350 not so very long ago. 😮
The point here for all Googlers is that PageRank is a non-semantic algorithm that relies on the wisdom of the crowd of web content writers, and their supposed eagerness to link to authoritative content. Yet there’s a flaw: bloggers are not encyclopedists, but more like jackdaws with ADD, passing on links to that-which-sparkles 20x more than to that-which-is-of-use.
Moreover, sidebar lists of links (i.e. repeated across multiple pages with the same text) to external sites tend to yield practically zero weight in Google’s schema.
Put it together this way, and it should be brutally apparent that our perception of what is to be found with Google has become largely conditioned not by authority but rather by fashion. Google’s reliance on PageRank has therefore become a curiously double-edged sword, one singularly unable to help us cut through the swathe of semantic dross out there (such as, I don’t know, the 50+ million pages on “Paris Hilton”).
In short, I think the web may now be at the point where PageRank hinders Google’s ability to be useful – “the end of Google 1.0”, you might say. Not that a MegaCorp like that would stay still: perhaps it will split into two to cover the two very different types of searches – say, “Google Surface” (for superficial, faddy, fashionista searches, biased towards YouTube and blogs) and “Google Content” (for semantic searching, valuing original content over copied content).
To a certain degree, you can see this at play already: the more words you include in a search string, the more Google veers away from the PageRank-dominated Google Surface sphere towards the semantic-based Google Content zone. As it stands, Google functions as an uneasy alchemical marriage of these two: but I’m increasingly finding myself dissatisfied by its search results, and I can’t be alone in this.
Really, I’m not anti-Google at all (just imagine a world where we only had a Microsoft-branded search engine): but I do wonder whether we’re now close to (or even past!) the time for Google to reinvent its core search algorithms.
In many ways, I have to concede that “The Shakespeare Secret” by J. L. Carrell is a fun little novelistic riff on all things Shakespearean: a series of people die in recreations of famous First Folio fatalities, while the main character (who is chasing after a lost play called “Cardenio”) recoils from each gory death while girding herself for the next clue in the scavenger hunt.
Structurally, it’s built around a vaguely Oxfordian-Stratfordian axis (i.e. whether Shakespeare really was himself or not), with a bit of Delia Bacon thrown in for fun. There are all the obligatory twists and turns at the end (where various players reverse their roles): and it wouldn’t be a proper Shakespearean pastiche-y thing without a bit of cross-dressing along the way, so that happens too. Basically, all the right boxes get ticked in a broadly trashy-secrets-novel-that-you-can-pretend-is-a-bit-posh kind of way.
But there’s a problem.
For me, there’s just something about it which brings so many other novels I’ve reviewed here immediately to mind. For example, its underground finale echoes both Max McCoy’s “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone” and Michael Cordy’s “The Source” (with a bit of Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum thrown in for good measure), while the book’s whole scavenger hunt motif has a parochial American angle to it (not unlike Lev Grossman’s “Codex”, which I’ll be reviewing soon).
Really, to me it’s as if these books are all reprising a single High Victorian cipher Ur-romp: but not even in a syncretic “Hero of a Thousand Faces” / Joseph Campbell way. Put them all together, and it feels as though you can perhaps begin to redraw the vague outlines of ye olde booke from whence they all flowed: and it goes something like this…
The main character begins the book in a kind of liminal state, floating between academe and pragmatism (but committed to neither). Yet he/she is quickly presented with a challenge arising from his/her personal life, which compels him/her to use apply both his/her mad research skillz and practical nous to a mysterious enciphered / obscured object. After an almost-interminable scavenger hunt across a number of locations (snooty rare book and manuscript libraries, draughty museums, improbably fantastic or rich archives, and odd church basements), chased by unconvincing (and frankly two-dimensional) protagonists who seem to have escaped from a penny dreadful, the main character realises the awful truth about both the codex / book and the agenda(s) of the people who have steered / guided / manipulated him/her to find it. However, despite being finally found in some underground location (with an unconvincing fight sequence whereby the truly evil character dies), for some mysterious reason the codex ultimately slips through the main character’s grasp, and (to nobody’s great surprise) a new optimistic chapter of his/her life finally opens up, with all that murky nonsense placed safely behind.
I’m not a historian of the novel, so I really wouldn’t know where to begin digging to find a (early Victorian? or slightly older?) prototypical cipher romp, where this basic template first appeared. It’s superficially tempting to see things like the liminality of the main character as a modern conceit: but actually, it all feels far older to me. Perhaps someone will recognize it and add a comment…