Scottish puzzlemaster wanted…

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A couple of days ago, an entrepreneurial Scot put out a call on Gumtree for…

“…a Scottish historian, cryptographer or world class crossword puzzle solver. If you can do the Times Crossword in less than 10 minutes I want to speak to you. If Charles Babbage interests you, if you hang out at Rosslyn Chapel. Know who Fibonacci was or if you have heard of the Voynich manuscript, I would like to speak to you.”

Actually, it turns out that what Jamie Renton is hoping to find is a puzzle setter rather than a puzzle solver, i.e. someone combining, ummm, ellipticity with historicity in a broadly Kit-Williams-meets-Dan-Brown kind of vein. Feel free to email him here if this might interest you, as I’m sure Jamie will be happy to tell you more about what he’s setting up.

“Alien” cipher language…?

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Ever heard of Palo Alto CARET Labs? Nope, neither had anyone else until “Isaac” posted about his experiences at “PACL” in the mid-1980s as part of a team trying to turn “extraterrestrial technology” taken from “crash sites” into consumer goodies (such as a personal anti-gravity machine, apparently) for our sated materialist society.

So far, so mainstream UFO subculture: but what moves Isaac’s story into the A-list of recent UFO narratives is the set of lovingly-constructed images accompanying it. Some of these show machines (like a junkyard engine with neatly stencilled-on white lettering), while others are extracts from technical report “PACL Q4-86” (though why smuggle out a redacted version?) showing abstract representations of octal software / hardware with wonderfully obfuscated descriptions (e.g. “Isolated view of a three-node AB-type semaphore cascade, extending from an exterior vertex of an octal junction”).

isaac-caret-diagram

There’s a ton of online discussion of Isaac’s images, nowadays mostly centring on whether Adobe Illustrator or Adobe AutoCAD was used to create his pretty diagrams (I’d say Adobe Illustrator, with lots of text and element reuse to make it seem like more than it actually is).

Though I’m not a ufologist (“Men In Black” is about as close as I get), what I like here is his funky alien alphabet – equal parts Star Fleet and Japanese (Kana). For all Isaac’s talk that this expresses a ‘non-compiled alien symbolic programming language’ (yeah, riiiight), it closely resembles a European monoalphabetic cipher in the following basic ways:-

  • There seems to be an explicit numbering system
  • There seem to be a Romance-language-size character set
  • There seems to be a sharp language-like distribution to the symbols

Hence, I predict that the UFO hoaxer created a simple A-Z/0-9 alien font in Adobe Illustrator and just typed a load of technical-looking nonsense along lots of curved paths. For example, here are some of the number-like text fragments from various pages:-

isaac-caret-numbers

To my eyes, this gives the impression of someone cut-and-pasting nonsense numbers – I’d predict that the shapes either side of the repeated string on the left are ‘(‘ and ‘)’ respectively (they reappear in matched pairs elsewhere in the diagrams), that the left pair of strings each reads “(5604)”, and that the other two strings encipher ’12’ and ‘160’. Note that I’m guessing those leading digits are 1’s, on the basis that Benford’s Law probably also holds true on alien worlds. 🙂

If you’re interested in trying to crack this for yourself, feel free to download pages 119, 120, 121, 122, and 123 from Isaac’s Fortune City pages, and see how far you can get. Good luck! 🙂

Something Awful, Voynich Scallop riff…

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What can I say? If you want to be completely literal about it (like XKCD fans), it’s a brand new theory about Voynichese being scallop language (with the top two lines of f15v translating as “I think you should stop browsing forums and get back to work“). Otherwise, you might want to riff on how the final space insertion cipher stage is particularly clear here, and how annoying it is that the second line (with its four consecutive “or” verbose pairs) is absent from the Takahashi EVA transcription. Or to discuss how the first letter of the second line should be transcribed (it’s not at all obvious). Or even how best to cook scallops. You choose. 🙂

voynich-scallop

“Voynich Conspiracy” now running in Prague…?

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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!

“Voynich Manuscript Project” short film…

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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

“Fringe” Glyph Cipher broken…

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Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez was belatedly watching the first season of “Fringe”, and recalled a discussion by Erica Sadun of all the hidden “Easter eggs” embedded in the edit. What caught his eys in particular was a “glyph code”, a distinctive pattern of shapes that popped up just before the commercial breaks. Could he break it?

Well… Julian just happened to recall a piece of code published by David Eppstein at UC Irvine for smashing your way into any monoalphabetic substitution code given a probability-weighted wordlist. And when he tried it out on the Fringe glyphs, it yielded their secrets almost at once (despite several errors in the ciphertext fragments – it’s just like the Renaissance all over again, eh?)

OK, I still prefer the Adrenalini Brothers’ cipher. But this one is nice too, in a kind of demented pigpen kind of way. 🙂

Some more Voynich-inspired artworks…

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According to Pittsburgh-based Chilean artist Alberto Almarza’s blog profile, he “meticulously blurs the boundaries between consensus and potential reality, creating a bridge between the realm of matter and that of inner vision.” All of which rather reminds me of the Jim Morrison quote: “There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors“.

Anyhoo, given Almarza’s interests and self-proclaimed liminality, it was starkly inevitable that he would one day pick up on the Voynich Manuscript (as indeed he just has). Even so, I think it’s fair to say that the form of his preliminary sketches (“Voynichus Conifralias”) seems far closer to the draughtsmanlike excesses of the Codex Seraphinianus (though without its whimsical distorted rationality thing, admittedly).

Luigi Serafini’s beautiful objet d’art strikes me as an infinite postmodern jest, an internally evolved architecture of a private language, with too many arbitrary degrees of separation for us to tease out any of the tortuous tweening stages. And what of its striking parallels with the Voynich Manuscript? Having probably grown in similar ways, I say, both ended up broadly as unreadable as each other.

Incidentally, recapitulation theory famously tried to claim that ontogeny [how an individual develops] recapitulates phylogeny [how species developed]. Though this is scientifically incorrect, its internal confusion might help points to the confusion within Voynich Manuscript research – do people look for a macro-level / species-level phylogenetic explanation when they should be looking for a micro-level / individual-level ontogenetic explanation?

Almarza certainly has excellent technique: but to grow his own Voynich Manuscript or Codex Serafinianus, I suspect he would need not a seed, but a weed – something almost with its own will to live that develops almost by itself, despite extensive authorial rational pruning. Surely what is most remarkable about both these texts is not their mad structure, but their lack of construction marks, hmmm?

Voynich rendered art

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Here’s a nice piece of 3D art where the model’s face and corset are real, but everything else is rendered. The artist (‘jfrancis‘ from Los Angeles) has also included (in the post immediately following) a description of how he achieved the effect (with PhotoShop and Maxwell). For maximum Cipher Mystery brownie points, he also included some nonsense Voynichese (such as the EVA “Klobal” at top left and bottom right, though I doubt it means anything) around the edges (what do you mean, “I’m the only person looking at the edges”?)

apnea_knives_sfw_v02_200x300

Having said that, his ciphertext is only Voynichese-like (or “Ruggish”, to use the technical term): “b” is a very rare letter, and he hasn’t quite – even though he does use “or” a lot – got its internal word structure nailed (uppercase doesn’t help). Perhaps he ought to play Voynich Scrabble? =:-o

Don’t say I don’t try to broaden your mind. 🙂

PS: here’s some more Voynich writing used in an “enigmatic instrument” you might also like!

“Voynich Volume 1” in BookLand…

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Something new just pinged on Cipher Mysteries’ bank of cultural radar screens: “Voynich Volume 1” by Hiromi Taihei (a manga artist who has previously published works in the young adult / science fiction genres) is due for release on 20 January 2009 – let me know if you see a copy.

Back in 2005, Elmar Vogt mentioned some German manga in Blotch magazine which used Voynichese for the monsters’ language: though the picture he uploaded has long since disappeared, the speech bubbles said “dar shes shokey” (from f68v1), “ykeey ykeey” (from f89v1), and “ees aiir olcho” (probably made up).  We’ll have to wait and see what line Hiromi Taihei’s manga takes…

As an aside, I looked up the 13-digit EAN number (ISBN-13) for Voynich Volume 1 on a UPC database: to my surprise, it came up as being registered to the country of “BookLand” – this turns out to be a fictional country invented in the 1980s to hold article numbers for books (EAN codes have a country prefix, e.g. Indonesian barcodes start with “899” etc). Having recently spent so much time reading about the sixteenth century Republic of Letters, I found this wonderfully ironic – a 20th century Republic of Books, right under our book-reading noses, but disguised as numbers and hence invisible to our eyes. The secret life of numbers, eh?