Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 2)

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( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 2.

— Day Two, 9am —

“Hold the door, Max!”, Joey calls good-naturedly from just behind me, and heavily jogs up the steps into the tiny ante-room we amuse ourselves by calling a ‘foyer’. “Was that…?”

“Yes, it was indeed our purple-haired encyclopedia girl Germaine.” I reply, putting the office kettle on and corralling four coffee mugs onto a small tray. “Though she says we should call her ‘Mayne’.”

“Ah, as in The Spanish”, Joey nods conspiratorially, slowly backing his ample frame onto the less-than-entirely-new office sofa. “So… how do you think this is going to play out, young Mr Harmer?” He’s called me ‘young’ ever since college, when he was in the year above: it’s sometimes hard to believe that was fifteen years ago.

“Well…”, I muse, reaching for the coffee jar, “half of me thinks we’re completely doomed: but the other half is looking at the money our man Charlie has already wired through, and liking it a lot.”

Light taps at the door herald Mayne’s return, along with two sizeable crates of Voynich-related books she’s wheeled along on a kind of powered carrying gadget. “Charlie said that you’ll be wanting these.”

Fortuitously, this is when Parker – the third (and fittest) member of our troika – skateboards in: and so the kettle is left to boil while he and I ferry the books up the steps and onto our war table.

By the time everything’s in its proper place, Joey has – slightly unusually, it has to be said – finished making coffee and has moved on to thumb through Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, though with what looks like a slightly sour look on his face.

I catch his eye. “Not quite to your legalistic taste, J-Man?”

He winces. “If this is as good as it gets, what we’re dealing with with this Voynich Manuscript thing isn’t ‘evidence‘ but ‘stuff that people think might one day become evidence‘. Really, it’s all a bit virtual for me – and you know how much I hate that word.”

“Along with every other word coined after Shakespeare”, chimes in Parker. He’s not wrong there.

I turn to Mayne, who by now is happily sniffing the coffee fumes from her mug. “What’s the low hanging fruit?” I ask her.

“Yes. Ah.”, she stutters. “That would be ‘The most easily achieved of a set of tasks, measures, goals, etc.‘”

A silence falls on the room. Mayne looks around slightly puzzled.

“Oh, and a 2012 track by Tenacious D. ‘She wears the beekeeper suit‘. Is that the answer you wanted?”

I perhaps should have instead started the day by telling Joey and Parker about Mayne’s tendency towards extreme literalism.

“Ohhhh kayyyy…”, I interject, “let’s try asking you about the low hanging fruit of the set of Voynich theories we might reasonably consider disproving.”

“That’s also a good question”, she frowns. “Perhaps Gordon Rugg’s grille-text?”

“Hey – isn’t that the one from Scientific American way back when?” puzzled Parker.

“June 21st 2004, yes. Rugg famously claimed that, by using Cardan grilles randomly moving over a set of tables, a 16th century hoaxer could have produced a manuscript indistinguishable from the Voynich Manuscript.”

This has me puzzled. “But the Voynich’s radiocarbon dating was 15th century, right?”

“Yes, the same dating that a whole bunch of other internal evidence has.” She slurps her coffee unself-consciously. “Rugg therefore concludes that it must have been written on century-old vellum, while all those other features must similarly have been contrived by a sophisticated hoaxer to look as if they had been added in the 15th century.”

“But given that there are no 15th century books that look like it, Rugg has to be claiming that it’s a hoaxed copy of a book that never itself existed?”

“That’s correct.”

“How marvellously 1980s”, shrills Joey, “a Baudrillardian simulacrum!”

There’s an awkward, tumbleweedy silence as Parker and I stare at him blankly.

Germaine coughs politely. “Jean Baudrillard used the word ‘simulacrum’ to denote a thing which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Its earlier meaning was ‘an image without the substance or qualities of the original’.”

Parker, ever the mathematical logician, is shaking his head. “That’s all very well, but… come on – was Rugg actually able to prove any of this?”

We all look at Germaine. “In fact, no. Skeptical physicist Mark Perakh demonstrated that the Voynich-like text Rugg reconstructed had statistical properties much more like those of gibberish than those of the actual Voynich text.”

Parker shakes his head: “So all Rugg really proved was that a 16th century hoaxer could have produced something that superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript, as opposed to something that actually had the same statistical properties as the Voynich Manuscript.”

“That is correct,” Germaine nods.

“As a piece of computer science, it’s probably quite interesting”, Parker muses, “but as historical research, it seems worthless. Who really cares if a 16th century hoaxer could possibly have made something that only superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript?”

“So have I got this right?”, I ask. “Rugg has no actual evidence, an hypothesis that doesn’t do what he says it does, and has spent the last decade dining out on the headline rather than fixing the problem. Meanwhile, all the actual Voynich evidence out there he dismisses, saying that reproducing anything that trivial should be well within the range of a sophisticated 16th century forger.”

Joey dejectedly sinks back into the far end of the sofa. “If anyone’s a hoaxer in that whole sorry saga, I’d have thought it was him.”

“But guys, guys”, I say, “- and Mayne, please consider yourself an honorary guy – whatever our opinion, how do we go about trying to disprove Rugg’s theory? You know, like we’ve been paid to?”

“Do we need to?” Parker asks. “That Mark Perakh guy has already cut it down to almost nothing. And if Rugg, with all the modern computing power at his disposal, hasn’t in a decade been able to use his grilles and tables to construct a replica of his supposed simulacrum with the same statistical properties, the chances of a supposed 16th century hoaxer doing the same must surely be basically zero.”

“Yeah”, says Joey, “if Rugg thinks it’s a fake replica but can’t replicate it using the approach that he claims was originally used to make it, why should anyone else think the same? Case closed, in my opinion.”

“Great work, guys”, I concur, “I’ll email this through to boss-man Charlie straightaway. Then shall we break for an early lunch?” I look out at a roomful of eagerly nodding heads. Proof is good, but lunch is better.

Dembski’s Archer and the Voynich Manuscript…

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I’ve been reading the late Mark Perakh‘s book Unintelligent Design on the train into work the last few days. His first chapter lands a long series of hard punches on William Dembski’s neo-creationist glass jaw: it’s a good read, even though pitting a properly sharp physicist against someone who merely mimes mathematics and logic does make for a fairly one-sided bout.

(Oh, and if you don’t know about Dembski, Behe, Johnson et al, they are “Intelligent Design” Christians aiming to ‘prove’ that DNA cannot have been formed by pure chance; that the biochemistry of life cannot have incrementally evolved into its current state; that Darwin and neo-Darwinians was/are all Just Plain Wrong; etc etc.)

In his books, Dembski uses a broad set of structural and logical arguments to try to categorise the kind of thing DNA is, in terms of probability and complexity.

Fairly unsurprisingly, Perakh rips these artificial categorization schemata apart, by demonstrating with numerous examples (particularly the Voynich Manuscript, nicely enough) how real life things fail to fit Dembski’s neatly-made (but false) pigeonholes, as well as how Dembski’s conceptions of probability and complexity simply don’t work the way he seems to think they do.

But for all Dembski’s (numerous) flaws, he does employ one particular analogy which amused the heck out of me, and yet also challenged me to properly think its implications through. (Though not about his hopeful brand of Intelligent Design, I hasten to add.)

Dembski’s Archer

One of Dembski’s tricksy categorization hacks involves trying to differentiate between genuine patterns (which he says are the result of what he calls “specification“) and fake patterns (which he says are the result of “fabrication“). His much-quoted example colourfully compares a true archer who causes his arrow to hit a genuinely pre-drawn target (specification) with a fake archer who shoots his arrow anywhere he pleases into a wide wall and then proceeds to paint a target around the landed arrow to retrospectively ‘prove’ his initial skilfulness (fabrication).

I like Dembski’s fabricating archer as an antipattern – a recurring pattern of wrong-headed and/or self-defeating behaviour that, once named, becomes painfully obvious all around you. I mean, haven’t we all met plenty of fabricating archers in our lives? By which I mean people who try to add imaginative ‘fabric’ to their otherwise substance-less and evidence-free arguments.

Perakh also uses the better-known phrase “just so stories” in his Chapter Two, but that’s actually a phrase for ad hoc narratives purporting to explain something that manifestly is the case, such as “how the elephant got his trunk”, or perhaps “how the wooden politician got his long nose”. What I’m talking about here is something slightly more virtual: plausible-sounding narratives concocted to try to justify improbable (or indeed impossible) claims.

Voynich Fabricators

The messily rubbish world of Voynich Manuscript theories has long had a glut of these fabricating archers, constructing their post hoc secondary narratives to support a badly chosen and/or emotionally-invested initial position. However you try to pass off this process (‘lateral thinking’, ‘abductive reasoning’, “Ockham’s Razor” or whatever), it really all boils down to nothing more than painting your made-up target on the wall after you’ve shot your little bolt.

Look, (they say), this constellation of secondary stories I made up clearly demonstrates how close I was to the mark in the first place. Oh, and don’t listen to all those other fabricating archers, their post hoc stories don’t have even half the explanatory power of my post hoc stories.

And how many overdressed little bolts masquerading as supposed big shots do you think I’ve seen, hmmm? Perhaps a more difficult challenge would be to list how many Voynich theories you can name that don’t fit this dismal pathology?

Of the recent wonky crop, Tucker and Talbert’s article certainly follows it, as does Stephen Bax’s theory (he seems eager to get into a rebuttal posting war, but what was that American phrase about not getting into a pissing contest with a fire-hose? Spare me from Voynichological fire-hoses, O Lord!) and indeed pretty much all of the others.

However, the disappointing truth is that for all these Voynich theorists’ wobbliness, excessive hopefulness and sparseness of evidence, they still remain rank outsiders in the fabrication department. They’ve been beaten by what can only be described as a class act…

The #1 Voynich Fabricator

Cipher Mysteries regulars will probably have already worked out which particular Colossus stands atop the list of Voynichological fabricating archers (and by a mile): Professor Gordon Rugg. Despite authoring a 2013 book about blind spots in reasoning and research, he manifestly leaped wholeheartedly (and unashamedly) into this foolish epistemological trap back in 2004 or so, and has resolutely stayed there ever since.

For me, Rugg’s hoax argument is nearly the ultimate example of fabricating archery, in that his entire Voynich ‘research programme’ isn’t even remotely about any critique (or indeed meta-critique) of internal or external evidence. Rather, it is about post hoc fabricating a conceptual Cardan grille-style mechanism whereby an existing hoax hypothesis (for, of course, Voynich hoax hypotheses long preceded his entry to the arena) can be ‘proved’ to have been more possible.

The first problem is that you can’t prove something is ‘more possible’. Broadly speaking, an hypothesis is either possible or impossible (issues of constructability aside), and as far as I know nobody ever claimed that an ultra-sophisticated Voynich hoax wasn’t possible. So if Rugg is talking about ‘possibility’, he’s just been kicking at an open door for the last decade. (So let’s assume that he’s better than that.)

The second problem is that Rugg also isn’t talking about probability, because his focus is purely on whether it would have been ‘practically possible’ for a 16th century hoaxer to have produced a simulacrum of a book with the same properties as the Voynich Manuscript’s text – and this focus consciously excludes consideration of all the (fairly obviously, I think) 15th century evidence (e.g. the radiocarbon dating, the art history, the palaeography, etc). Hoax theories are more like meta-theories, in that they try to ‘win’ by sidestepping all the awkward issues of historical probability: any pesky conflicting evidence gets filed away into the ever-fattening “must have been fabricated somehow” folder.

(Yet when Rugg’s computer-fabricated ‘Voynich-cheese’ was passed through Mark Perakh’s Letter Serial Correlation (LSC) tests, it yielded the same type of result that gibberish texts did. The Voynich Manuscript’s LSC test results resembled those of real languages, so even the statistics are against him.)

Possible is not plausible is not probable

But surely, Rugg claims, the existence of his fabricated narratives wrapped around the core claim of a hoax serve to make the whole idea of a hoax more plausible?

Here at last is what Rugg is actually talking about: plausibility. Now, if you have read Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahnemann’s exemplary (2012) Thinking Fast And Slow (which I highly recommend), you’ll know that many otherwise clever people confuse ‘probable’ with ‘plausible’. But they are far from the same thing.

Specifically, plausibility is a story-telling quality, not an evidential quality. A story can be highly plausible but still impossible when tested: a story can be highly plausible but still extremely improbable when tested. Really, you don’t have to read many court transcripts to see that plausibility is no guarantee of either possibility or probability. In fact, if I had tuppence for every plausible-sounding Voynich-related claim I’ve read or heard, I’d surely be able to give every Cipher Mysteries subscriber a 14″ pizza, and still have enough left to buy a helicopter. And a yacht.

For clarity, I’ll repeat that every single notion within Rugg’s palette of historical assertions is fashioned from the same fabricating clay, the same post hoc painted rings around his hoax arrow. Take away this fabric, his set of imaginative reconstructions and post hoc narratives, and there is nothing left: not a page, not a paragraph, not a line, not even a word. His plausible-sounding narrative about an historical fabricator is itself nothing more than a sustained present-day fabrication, with absolutely nothing to back it up beyond his desire for the fantasy to be true, perhaps for the sake of meta-theoretical neatness. Whatever this makes it, what he has done is not history and it is not science.

Hence all I can conclude is that what Rugg has done with the Voynich Manuscript has literally been a waste of a decade, both his own and that of many others.

The Man Maketh The Word, or The Word Maketh The Man?

In closing, I’ve long struggled to find a word or phrase that sums up the pointless anti-historicism (and indeed unhelpfulness) of Rugg’s work: and so I find myself curiously grateful to William Dembski for his fabricating archer antipattern – this has given me the tool I needed to scratch this particular itch.

Yet I can’t help but feel that perhaps Dembski himself is an even bigger fabricating archer than Rugg: the neo-creationist arrow Dembski lodged in the wall is transparent and visible for all to see; while Perakh was clearly in no doubt that all the maths-styled and logic-styled presentation of Dembski’s books was no more than a decoration or distraction to conceal the conceptual vacuum at the heart of his argumentation.

So we end up with a curious pair of ironies: not only of Gordon Rugg writing books about logical fallacies and yet trapped for a decade in Dembski’s fabricating archer antipattern, but also of William Dembski employing an analogy to make plain to the world the same core fallacy that he himself is stuck in.

“For ’tis the sport to have the engineer. Hoist with his own petard.“

Gordon Rugg, the Search Visualizer, and the Voynich…

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The Voynich Manuscript is a dismal reality TV channel, where every participant’s ten minutes of fame segues quickly into an eternity of opprobrium: few people dipping their feet into its toxic slurry get to keep all their toes for very long. I’m sorry to have to say such a thing, but as the modern philosophers Run and DMC put it, “it’s like that, and that’s the way it is“.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), Gordon Rugg has this week returned to the Voynich’s rancid riverside with a fresh supply of podalic digits for dunking. But this time around he’s appropriating its mysteries not to promote the claimed benefits of his “Verifier Method” (a meme which seems not to have taken root), but to promote his newly-patented toy for 2013, that he somewhat grandly calls the Search Visualizer (rather as if he’s inventing a whole new field).

Yet unless I’ve misunderstood it significantly, all the Search Visualizer actually does is:
* draw a rectangle representing an input document
* draw dots on it wherever one of a user-defined set of syllables or words appears, with each dot a different colour.
Thus a SV user can, for example, map out that ‘witch’ and ‘sleep’ appear in different clusters within Macbeth. So far, so facile.

Nonetheless, I (perhaps) hear you ask eagerly, what can the Search Visualizer teach us about – dan dan darrrr – the Voynich Manuscript? Unsurprisingly (given the amount of exposure his Voynich claims gave the Verifier Method all those years ago), that’s the subject of this week’s blog post from him.

Having used SV to draw a lot of diagrams of (in the EVA transcription) “daiin”, “qo”, “dy”, and “ol”, Rugg concludes from the “banding” (basically, section structure) visible in those diagrams that…

It’s completely inconsistent with the theory that Voynichese is a single unidentified language, or with the theory that Voynichese consists of two dialects of a single unidentified language.

If we’re looking at dialects, then there are at least six of them, and some appear to be more different from each other than English is from German, at least on the preliminary results from my work so far (I looked at other German texts, and saw the same distribution patterns as in the book example above).

If we’re looking at a coded text, then there appear to be at least half a dozen different versions of the code, or at least half a dozen different codes producing similar but not identical types of text.

Of course, the main person who failed to grasp that the whole Currier-A-&-B-languages things wasn’t anything like a binary either-or (despite Rene & I telling him several times, as I recall) was, errrm, Gordon Rugg himself. So this is, unusually, a straw man argument where the straw man is the researcher himself (but 9 years in the past).

Anyway, even though his “Verifier Method” (in my opinion) falls well short of David Hackett Fisher’s splendid book “Historians’ Fallacies”, let’s apply it to the Search Visualizer:-

1. Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.

I’ve read the article and most of his website, too. I’m an IT professional and a computer scientist. I can see what he’s doing: rectangles and coloured dots.

2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I don’t see any reference to:-
* codicology (though he’s added an addendum noting that the order of the pages may be wrong in “some cases”, this clearly isn’t reflected in his conclusions, which are almost entirely about the whole “banding” and “sub-banding” thing)
* Prescott Currier’s famous analysis (A pages, B pages, but plenty of intermediate ‘dialects’ too) isn’t mentioned once. That’s right, not once. Anywhere.
* statistical analyses carried out by researchers other than Gordon Rugg or his students.

Sorry, but that seems like a very uncritical, self-contained way of working.

I would add that I don’t see a lot of critical expertise being applied to historical cryptography: what instead appears seems to be a partial rendering of the history to support previously held positions.

3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.

There’s plenty of bias towards his grille method, as well as naysaying against mainstream historical cryptography (which, let’s remember, he is trying to rewrite to support his particular story).

There’s also bias towards his 16th century dating in the face of fairly rock-solid scientific, art history, codicological, and palaeographic dating to the start/middle of the 15th century, which doesn’t really appear in his presentation.

4.Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.

What Rugg calls “Search Visualization” (drawing a rectangle of coloured dots) surely seems rather a low-grade kind of search. The point about “search” (in the Google sense) is surely that it finds things you didn’t previously know about and includes filters that promote relevance: whereas feeding pre-determined syllables and drawing coloured dots in a rectangle is only barely pattern-matching, and only barely visualization.

5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.

* Using an outdated transcription
* Not filtering out all the embedded comments (is there a better explanation for this than sheer laziness?)
* Relying on computer science alone without integrating genuine historical research
* Arguing from possibility rather from probability or fact
* Not responding to criticism from actual domain experts

6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.

(Too boring to do if so many mistakes have been identified in steps 1-5.)

7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

Surely a proper academic would be building a tool that would find telling letter clusters for you from an input text, using Hidden Markov Models and all kinds of proper statistical mechanisms? Shouldn’t something like the Search Visualizer be about finding things you don’t already know about, and only then helping you visualize them?

All in all, I find it extraordinarily hard not to get cross about this, because Rugg seems to be exactly reprising what he did all those years ago, once again at the cost of the whole research area. And once again, his driving force appears to be “ask not what you can do for the Voynich Manuscript, ask what it can do for you.” Sad, very sad.

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! 😉

“Weird or What?” Voynich segment…

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“Weird or What?”‘s Desperate Housewives Cocaine Mummies episode came and went in its own breathless, deathless way, a strangely mismatched mixture of gravelly voiceover (exuding Danikenesque enthusiasm) and static talking heads (with more than a frisson of frozen-in-the-headlights). Purely for review purposes, I grabbed my copy from a terrrrribly slow torrent (the 13-minute Voynich segment started at 19:45), but frankly you might want to conserve your bandwidth for something slightly more edifying (was it really waiting 20+ hours for it to arrive? I suspect not).

The main subject of the show’s producers’ interest turned out to be, ummm, Gordon Rugg. Ably assisted by “three world-class calligraphers”, Rugg proceeded to demonstrate the fullest, absurdest consequence of his ideas: that, just as he predicted, three people with carefully constructed tables and grilles could indeed have simulated something resembling Voynichese at reasonable speed… some 150 years after it was in fact written. As a piece of conceptual proto-computer science, his work remains admirable: but as a piece of history (or indeed common sense), it was nothing less than a load of nonsense. His continued insistence on defiantly proving the possibility of something which manifestly did not happen is arguably even less use than straight ‘if-Hitler-hadn’t-been-born’ counterfactuality (and that’s saying something).

At the risk of sounding like the Daily Mail, ‘when oh when’ is someone of substance going to pull the rug from under Rugg? As a career programmer myself, I would be utterly unsurprised if computer science rides to our rescue further down the line: but given that Voynich studies are nothing short of drowning in a perpetually high tide of possibilistic nonsense, Rugg’s contribution has arguably hindered discourse far more than it has helped it. As I pointed out at the time, the fact that his account didn’t square with the palaeography and the codicology right from the start was a Really Bad Sign. And now that it doesn’t square with the radiocarbon dating either, perhaps the best you can say is that it is at least consistently inconsistent. Oh well…

Really, I was far more interested to find out from “Weird or What?” that the design of contemporary running shoes may well cause more shock to the human body (by encouraging people to run with heel-strikes) than less. But as for the Voynich Manuscript? Didn’t learn a thing, sorry. 🙁

Das Voynich-Rätsel – now viewable online (but hurry!)

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Here it is, the Austrian Voynich documentary we’ve been waiting so eagerly for – and you don’t even need to have a satellite dish to watch it (as long as you hurry, it’ll probably only be online for a few days).

(Hint and tip: if you click on the diagonal arrow button just above the video, you can watch it in your own media player – and if that happens to be Windows Media Player (*sigh*), don’t forget that you can turn on the (German) subtitles with the unforgettable key combination CTRL-SHIFT-C.)

The documentary features Micky Bet Rene Zandbergen chatting amiably with 21st century Voynich stalwarts Gordon Rugg and Richard SantaColoma, lots of “flying-low”-style rostrum sequences of the Voynich Manuscript, together with other historical / forensic talking heads you may not have heard of, such as Paula Zyats, Kevin Repp, Joseph Barabe, Gerhard Strasser and Greg Hodgins.

My German isn’t really industrial strength, but I’m reasonably sure I picked up most of the research-relevant stuff: a blue pigment that was tested was azurite, a red was red ochre (but I wasn’t sure about the green). And the 1404-1438 range was indeed 2-sigma (95%), and there’s a nice graph showing the peaks against the C14 dating curve.

The documentary showed Greg Hodgins slicing a fine edge off from the Quire 9 sexfolio: which I would argue is a Very Good Thing, because that is one of the bifolios least likely to be old vellum. Doubtless we shall hear more about this over the next few days…

I don’t know, though: at the end of the whole beautiful-looking documentary, the researcher part of me felt a tiny bit cheated – that for all their hard work, the documentary makers hadn’t really managed to engage with the last decade of proper Voynich research (and I don’t really include Gordon Rugg in that), but rather had steered their televisual plough along what I would call a resolutely “Voynich 1.0” furrow. Basically, whenever I hear keywords like “inquisition”, “alchemy”, “allegorical”, “Doctor Mirabilis” and “heresy”, something in me switches off: rather, I want to be hearing words like “layer”, “spectroscopic”, “multispectral”, “ductus”, “hands”, “composition”, “sequence”, “Raman”, “DNA”, “pollen”, “Urbino”, “ledger”, etc.

What do you think? Were Andreas Sulzer and his team wide of the target or did they actually hit the spot?

Voynich Summer Camp IM, transcript of session #2…

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As promised (though a little later than planned), here’s the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy!

[11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are
[11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy
[11:56:27] NP: 🙂
[11:56:35] vc: We are.
[11:56:35] NP: I think that’s on f113r
[11:56:40] vc: …
[11:56:45] NP: 🙂
[11:56:55] NP: So… how has it all gone?
[11:57:12] NP: Tell me what you now think about the VMs that you didn’t before?
[11:57:27] vc: It should be simple.
[11:57:36] vc: The solution should be simple.
[11:57:41] NP: but…
[11:58:07] vc: But …
[11:58:33] vc: The verbose cipher still permits us a lot of possibilities.
[11:58:52] NP: Verbose cipher only gets you halfway there
[11:59:03] NP: But that’s still halfway more than anything else
[11:59:28] vc: We could synthesize a coding which is capable to produce the same statistical properties as the MS
[11:59:48] NP: Yup, that was (basically) Gordon Rugg’s 2004 paper
[11:59:58] vc: simple enough to do manually of course
[12:00:31] NP: The problem is one of duplicating all the local structural rules
[12:00:40] vc: Gordon’s generating gibberish by encoding gibberish
[12:01:06] NP: Basically
[12:01:25] vc: Yes, we suspect that the text contains real information in a natural language.
[12:01:30] vc: We tried this.
[12:02:06] NP: Rugg’s work requires a clever (pseudo-random) daemon to drive his grille thing… but he never specified how someone 500 years ago could generate random numbers (or even conceive of them)
[12:02:07] vc: We tried to encode for example the vulgata with our method
[12:02:10] NP: ok
[12:02:23] NP: into A or B?
[12:02:24] vc: throw dices I guess?
[12:02:26] vc: lol
[12:02:37] NP: only gives you 1-6 random
[12:02:48] vc: 3 dices
[12:02:52] vc: ect
[12:02:52] NP: two dice give you a probability curve
[12:02:56] NP: not flat
[12:03:02] vc: hmm
[12:03:06] vc: roulette wheel
[12:03:11] NP: Anachronistic
[12:03:19] vc: Ok. We use no random.
[12:03:23] NP: 🙂
[12:03:25] vc: our encoder is deterministic
[12:03:33] NP: Good!
[12:03:35] vc: that’s the point
[12:04:28] vc: We suspect that the “user” added some randomness in some of the aspects of the encoding, but this is not overwhelming
[12:04:49] NP: That’s right
[12:05:21] vc: We also picked out the A and B languages
[12:05:23] NP: Though some aspects (like space insertion into ororor-type strings) were more tactical and visual than random
[12:05:27] NP: Good!
[12:05:33] vc: with different methods
[12:05:52] vc: so we basically verified a lot of past results
[12:06:17] NP: Do you have a synthetic A paragraph you can cut and paste here?
[12:06:17] vc: After that, we decided to concentrate on the first 20 pages
[12:06:22] NP: Good!
[12:07:17] vc: for example, A languages uses ey or y at the end of the words, while B language uses edy instead
[12:07:51] vc: Synthetic sample… ok, just a minute
[12:08:29] NP: ey/y vs edy – Mark Perakh pointed this out too, and suggested that it meant B was less contracted than A. It also forms the core of Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Biological Paradox”
[12:09:25] vc: Our results are largely independent – the guys didn’t know the past results
[12:09:54] NP: That’s ok. 🙂
[12:10:41] vc: nu stom huhoicpeey strifihuicom ristngngpeet pept suhors periet pescet sticpescom ichoey pt om icpeript
[12:11:17] NP: I hope that’s not EVA
[12:11:41] vc: Y, of course not
[12:12:08] vc: not close, but the whole thing started here when some of us tried out a method which produced some non-trivial statistics very similar to VMS
[12:12:43] NP: I’m certainly getting a partially-verbose vibe off this
[12:12:52] vc: the original:
[12:13:17] vc: haec sunt verba que locutus est
[12:13:18] vc: Moses
[12:13:40] NP: Ummm… that’s pretty verbose, then. 🙂
[12:14:04] vc: Again, a deterministic, static automaton.
[12:14:15] NP: Fair enough!
[12:15:09] NP: Sorry for asking a lecturer-style question, 🙂 but how has doing that affected how you look at Voynichese?
[12:16:03] vc: Sec
[12:16:49] vc: discussing 🙂
[12:17:38] vc: it’s a coded natural language text. We suspect that the language is Italian – from measured results.
[12:18:00] vc: That’s why we are very curious about your news!
[12:18:21] NP: Let’s finish your news first!
[12:18:38] vc: ok. Was that an answer for your question?
[12:19:02] NP: Pretty much – would you like to write it up informally to publish on the blog?
[12:19:55] NP: 1000 words should cover it 🙂
[12:21:18] NP: (you don’t need to write it now!)
[12:21:25] vc: We admit that we would like to work on our theory and method a bit before publishing it, because one of the important statistical feature doesn’t match
[12:21:31] vc: yet
[12:21:35] NP: 🙂
[12:21:52] NP: ok
[12:22:06] NP: that’s good
[12:22:23] NP: what else have you been thinking about and discussing during the week?
[12:22:35] NP: VMs-wise, that is 🙂
[12:22:42] vc: 🙂
[12:22:54] vc: haha, you got the point…
[12:23:02] NP: 🙂
[12:23:56] vc: We toyed with the idea that the astrological diagrams are so poorly rendered that they aren’t astrological diagrams. They are coder tools.
[12:24:10] NP: cipher wheels?
[12:24:22] vc: Kind of. Yes.
[12:24:35] NP: (that’s been suggested many times, though never with any rigour)
[12:24:36] vc: we also tried to identify some of the star names.
[12:24:47] NP: No chance at all
[12:25:01] NP: That is a cliff with a huge pile of broken ships beneath it
[12:25:21] NP: sadly
[12:25:27] vc: been there, done that, yes
[12:25:30] NP: 🙂
[12:26:22] vc: We also observed that the takeshi transcription becomes less reliable when the text is rotated or tilted.
[12:26:36] vc: The other places – it is quite good.
[12:26:45] NP: Yes, that’s a fair enough comment
[12:27:08] NP: A complete transcription has been done, but it hasn’t been released – very frustrating
[12:27:25] NP: (by the EVMT people, Gabriel Landini mainly)
[12:27:17] vc: Also we are not contented with some of the EVA transcription’s choices of the alphabet
[12:27:34] NP: the “sh” really sucks
[12:27:39] vc: YES
[12:27:45] NP: 🙁
[12:28:53] NP: Glen Claston’s transcription added stuff in, many people use that instead purely for its better “sh” handling
[12:29:26] vc: hmm, ok
[12:29:53] NP: In a lot of ways, though, who’s to say? A single ambiguous letter shouldn’t really be enough to destroy an entire dcipherment attack
[12:30:04] NP: given that it’s not a pure polyalpha
[12:30:37] vc: of course
[12:30:54] NP: But analyses still don’t seem to get particularly close
[12:31:03] NP: Oh well
[12:31:23] vc: Analyses of whom
[12:31:24] vc: 🙂
[12:31:25] vc: ?
[12:31:29] vc: 😉
[12:31:35] NP: not yours, of course 😉
[12:32:32] NP: is that your week summarized, then?
[12:32:53] vc: Yes.
[12:33:16] NP: has it been fun? worthwhile? frustrating? dull?
[12:33:32] vc: All of them.
[12:33:34] NP: and would you do another next summer?
[12:33:57] vc: No need of it. Maybe with the rohonc codex
[12:34:00] vc: lol, of course
[12:34:13] NP: 🙂
[12:35:06] NP: I’m really pleased for you all – it sounds like you have managed to get a fairly clearheaded view of the VMs out of the whole process, and have had a bit of fun as well
[12:35:51] NP: Most VMs researchers get very tied up to a particular theory or evidence or way of looking at it – you have to keep a broader perspective to make progress here
[12:35:53] vc: let’s say two bits
[12:36:14] NP: “two bits of fun” 🙂
[12:36:21] NP: good

[I then went into a long digression about the “Antonio of Florence”, about which I’ve already posted far too much to the blog… so –SNIP–]

[12:51:50] vc: ooo wait a sec…
[12:52:16] vc: Can we ask Philip Neal to post some some pages of a reference book he uses?
[12:52:42] vc: sorry about the redundancy
[12:53:02] NP: He’s a medieval Latin scholar by training, what kind of thing would you want?
[12:53:39] vc: about the alchemical herbals. Can we manage it later?
[12:53:45] vc: Please go on
[12:53:51] NP: Well.. that’s about it
[12:54:10] NP: Obviously I typed faster than I thought 🙂

[13:00:11] vc: What do you know? How much people is working on a voynich-deciphering automaton based on markov thingies and such?
[13:00:37] vc: So basically with the same hypotheses like ours?
[13:00:57] NP: The problem with markov models is that they will choke on verbose ciphers, where letters are polyvalent
[13:01:08] NP: Nobody in the literature seems to have picked this up
[13:01:24] vc: bad for them
[13:01:50] NP: Unless you pre-tokenize the stream, Markov model finders will just get very confused
[13:02:03] NP: and give you a linguist-friendly CVCV-style model
[13:02:11] NP: that is cryptographically wrong
[13:03:04] NP: perhaps “multi-functional” rather than “polyvalent”, I’m not sure :O
[13:04:23] NP: So, I’m not convinced that anyone who has applied Markov model-style analysis to the VMs has yet got anywhere
[13:04:29] NP: Which is a shame
[13:05:04] NP: But there you go
[13:05:25] vc: We hope.
[13:05:47] NP: 🙂

[13:06:24] NP: Right – I’ve got to go now (sadly)
[13:06:48] NP: I hope I’ve been a positive influence on your week and not too dogmatic
[13:07:09] vc: Why, of course
[13:07:16] NP: And that I’ve helped steer you in generally positive / constructive directions
[13:07:30] vc: Yes, indeed.
[13:07:35] NP: (Because there are plenty of blind alleys to explore)
[13:07:41] NP: (and to avoid)
[13:07:52] vc: VBI…
[13:07:52] vc: 🙂
[13:08:07] NP: Plenty of that to step in, yes
[13:08:14] NP: 🙂
[13:08:24] NP: And I don’t mean puddles
[13:09:42] vc: Well, thank you again for the ideas and the lots of information 🙂
[13:11:18] vc: Unfortunately semester starts in weeks, so we can’t keep working on this project
[13:12:04] vc: but as soon as we earn some results, we will definitely contact you
[13:12:15] NP: Excellent, looking forward to that
[13:12:54] NP: Well, it was very nice to meet you all – please feel free to subscribe to Cipher Mysteries by email or RSS (it’s free) so you can keep up with all the latest happenings.
[13:13:23] vc: ok 🙂
[13:13:57] NP: Best wishes, and see you all for the Rohonc week next summer 🙂
[13:14:04] NP: !!!!!
[13:14:11] vc: lol 🙂
[13:14:21] vc: that’s right! 😉
[13:15:16] NP: Excellent – gotta fly, ciao!
[13:15:36] vc: Best!
[13:15:37] vc: bye

Nick Pelling online radio interview with Red Ice Creations…

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Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂

Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂

And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!

OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!

The Voynich Cipher for code-breakers…

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Though (as was apparent from the rapid social media take-up of yesterday’s XKCD webcomic) the Voynich Manuscript is now firmly wedged in the cultural mind, sadly the level of debate on it is still stuck circa 1977 – and if anything, Gordon Rugg’s foolish “hoax” claims have helped to keep it there.

But it is demonstrably written in cipher: and so this post tells you why I’m certain it’s a cipher, how that cipher works, and what you can do to try to break it. I’m happy to debate this with people who disagree: but you’ll have to bear in mind that as far as this goes, I’m just plain right and you’re just plain wrong. 🙂 

1. What does the Voynich Manuscript resemble?

Firstly, the overwhelming majority of the Voynich Manuscript is written using only 22 or so letter-shapes: generally speaking, this is the size of a basic European alphabet. Voynichese therefore visually resembles an ordinary European language.

Secondly, even though most of its letter shapes are unknown or unusual, four of them (“a”, “o”, “i”, and “e”, though this last one is styled as “c”) closely resemble vowels in European languages – not only in shape, but also because if you read these as vowels (precisely as the main EVA transcription does), you end up with many CVCVCV (consonant-vowel) patterned words that seem vaguely pronounceable.

Thirdly, dotted through the Voynich Manuscript is a family of letter-groups that look like “aiv”, “aiiiv”, “aiir”, etc. To most contemporary eyes, this looks like some kind of curious language-pattern: but to European people in the 13th to 16th centuries, this denoted one thing only: page references.

  • The “a” denotes the first quire (bound set of folded vellum or paper leaves), “quire a”.
  • The “i” / “ii” / “iii” / “iiii” denotes the folio (leaf) number within the quire (in Roman numbers).
  • The “r” / “v” denotes “recto” / “verso”, the front-side or rear-side of the leaf.

Circa 1250-1550, this “mini-language” of page references was universally known and recognized across Europe: and hence “aiiv” denotes “quire a, folio ii, verso side” and nothing else.

Therefore, the Voynich Manuscript resembles a document written in a 22-letter European language, contains obvious-looking vowel-shapes that are shared with existing European languages, and scattered throughout apparently has copious page-references to pages within its first quire.

However, what even very clever people continue to fail to notice is that these three precise things (the compact alphabet, the obvious-looking vowels, and the page references) have an exact corollary: that this does not resemble ciphertext – for even by 1440, most European cipher-makers knew enough about the vulnerabilities of vowels to disguise them by use of homophones (i.e. using multiple cipher symbols for the vowels). A ciphertext would not contain unenciphered vowels, not unenciphered page references.

The correct answer to the question is therefore not only that the Voynich Manuscript does resemble an unknown (but CVCVCV-based) European language studded with conventional Roman number page references, but also that it simultaneously does not resemble a ciphertext.

2. Why is the Voynich Manuscript not what it resembles?

I think the big clue is the fact that the page references don’t make any sense as page references.

For a start, even though the Voynich Manuscript probably consisted of fifteen or more quires, the page references that appear throughout its text only ever appear to refer to quire “a” (the first quire). What’s more, the first quire appears not to be marked with any form of “a” marking, which is curious because the whole point of quire signatures was to make sure that the binder bound them together in the correct order. Another odd thing is that there only appears to be references to the first six pages of the first quire.

All very strange: but the biggest giveaway comes from the statistics. Counting the number of instances of the different page references, you’ll see that page references to verso pages apparently outnumber page references to recto pages by eight times. Here are the raw counts (from the Takahashi transcription):-

air ( 564)   aiir ( 112)  aiiir (  1)
aiv (1675)   aiiv (3742)  aiiiv (106)

So, even though these superficially resemble page references, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is what they actually are. In fact, the statistics imply the opposite – that despite their visual resemblance to page references, these are not actually page references.

And if it is correct that these are actually something else masquerading as page references, the entire visual-resemblance house of cards collapses – that is, if things are not what they seem, the other visual presumption (that this is a simple CVCVCV-based European language) necessarily falls down with it.

3. If the page references aren’t page references, what are they?

This is precisely the right question to ask: and so, when I visited the Beinecke Library in early 2006, I decided to spend some time looking at a single page containing plenty of clearly-written page references (as described in The Curse of the Voynich, pp.164-168) to try to answer it.

I chose page f38v, from which here are all the page reference letter clusters – can you now see what it took me hours and hours to notice?

f38v-page-reference-groups

The first thing I (eventually) noticed was that there was something a little odd about the top part of the “v” letter (which EVA wrongly transcribes as “n”, incidentally). Specifically, that many of the clusters appear to have been written using two inks – one forthe main “aiiv” part, and another (often slightly darker) one for the scribal “flourish” at the top.

But then… once you start looking specifically at the “v flourishes”, the next thing you might notice is that some appear to have a dot at the (top-left) end of the v-flourish.

The final thing you might notice is that these dots tend to appear in different places relative to the “aiiv” frame.

My conclusion is that what is happening here is steganography – that the position of the dot at the end of the v-flourish is what (possibly together with the choice of cluster) is enciphering the information here.

But what information is being enciphered in this way? I strgonly suspect that it is enciphering Arabic numbers 1-5 (probably with longer flourishes denoting larger numbers), and with “oiiv” clusters perhaps denoting 6-10. This might explain why we see so many of these “page references” immediately following each other (the famous “daiin daiin” pattern): each “page reference” therefore represents a digit within a multi-digit Arabic number.

However, what is strange is that this is only basically true for “Currier A-language” pages (Prescott Currier noted that, to a large degree, the text in Voynich Manuscript pages behaves in one of only two different ways): for Currier B pages, what seems to happen is that the information is enciphered by using different shaped flourishes for the final “v” character, and no dot.

From all this, I think I can reconstruct how the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher system evolved during its writing. In the early (Currier A) phase, some kind of data (probably Arabic numbers) were steganographically hidden by writing page-reference-like “aiiv” groups and placing a single dot above them. At a later date, however, the author decided (rightly, I think) that this was too obvious, and so went through the text hiding the dots by converting them into flourishes. Whereas in the later (Currier B) phase, the author decided to evolve the writing system to encipher the same data in a subtly different way (though still relying on the basic “page-reference” shape as a starting point).

And so the correct answer to the section’s question is: even though the “page reference” groups resemble page references, I think that they are cryptographic nulls designed to give the author sufficient visual space on the page to steganographically hide something completely different – probably Arabic numbers.

Of course, existing EVA transcriptions capture only the covertext (the nulls), while the actual data is enciphered in the dots hidden by the flourishes. But you have start somewhere, right? 🙂

4, What, then, is Voynichese’s CVCVCV structure concealing?

I am certain that the Voynich Manuscript’s apparent “consonant-vowel”-like structure is another visual trap into which the existing EVA transcription (unfortunately) helps to push people. By making Voynichese seem vaguely pronounceable (“otolal”, “qochey”, “qokeedy”, etc), EVA discourages us from looking at what is actually going on with the letters, while also falsely bolstering the confidence of those sufficiently deceived into believing (wrongly) that Voynichese is written in a real language. Basically, anyone who tells you it’s written in an archaic language has fallen into a gigantic intellectual trap first set five centuries ago.

But what of the CVCVCV structure? Where does that come from?

For the most part, I think that it arises from a late cipher stage known as “verbose cipher” (i.e. enciphering a single plaintext letter as two ciphertext letters). Though not all letters behave in this way, it certainly goes a very long way to explain the behaviour of common groups such as: qo, ol, al, or, ar, ot, ok, of, op, yt, yk, yp, yf, cth, ckh, cfh, cph, ch, sh, air, aiir, od, eo, ee, and eee. If you decompose the text into these subgroups (i.e. that these groups encipher individual tokens in the plaintext) while remembering to parse the “qo” group first, all the superficial CVCVCV behaviour disappears – and (I contend) you will find yourself very much closer to a kind of raw ciphertext stream that is more easily broken.

As supporting evidence, I point to those few places where the author has “twiddled” with the final code-stream to try to disguise obvious repeated patterns, arising from repeated letters in the plaintext (code-makers hate repeated patterns in their ciphertext). Perhaps the most notable of these is on f15v, where the “or” pattern appears three times in succession on line 1, and four times in a row on lines 2:-

f15v-space-transposition

I think that the author has added spaces in here to try to disguise the repeated “or” group: in line 1, he has inserted a space to turn “ororor” into “oror or“, while in line 2 he has inserted three spaces to turn “orororor” into “or or oro r“. I’m not fooled by this – are you?

I predict here that that “or” is enciphering “c” or “x” (probably “c”), and that the plaintext reads “ccc … cccc”: but you guessed that already, right?

5. Even if this is right, how does it help us break the Voynich?

I don’t believe for a moment that this explains the whole of the Voynichese cipher system: there are plenty of subtly surprising features that any proposed solution would also need to explain, such as:-

  • Precisely how (and why) Currier A and Currier B differ (for example, the whole word-initial “l” thing)
  • Why “yk / yt / yf / yp” occur more in labels than in normal paragraphs
  • Why so few non-trivial words appear more than once across the whole manuscript text
  • What “4o” codes for (I suspect a common initial-letter expansion, i.e. [qo] + ‘c’ –> ‘con’)
  • What word-initial “8” codes for (I suspect “&”)
  • What non-word-initial “8” and “9” code for (I suspect ‘contraction’ and ‘truncation’)
  • Whether the ciphering system is stateless or stateful (but that’s another story)
  • What “Neal keys” denote (but that’s another story, too)
  • etc

However, what I do believe is that all the above lays down the basic groundwork from which any sensible cipher attack would need to launch forwards. I do not share the widely-held pessimistic view that the Voynich is somehow intrinsically unbreakable – on the contrary, it is an all-too-human artefact from a specific time (between 1450 and 1500) and place (probably Northern Italy, though Germany is possible too), and the craft techniques it deftly uses to conceal its content from us are both far from invisible and far from infallible.

If you take the basic steps I describe above to look beyond the deliberate deception and the mythology, then I am certain you will find yourself on the right path towards seeing clearly both what the Voynich Manuscript actually is and how its cipher system works. Let me know when you’ve broken it! 🙂

Incidentally, there’s plenty more related stuff in my 2006 book (which is where the two diagrams above came from, p.165 and p.160 respectively)… but you knew that already, I’m sure. 🙂

The Oera Linda Book: a right proper hoax, I say…

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I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough to cover both historians posing as outsiders and outsiders posing as historians. 🙂

Yet probably the most dispiriting thing about nearly all the novel freethinking theories thus constructed (by either camp) is how boringly similar they tend to be, oxymoronifying the phrase “free thinker”. Did Alberti really write the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili? [Hint: no.] Was Leonardo da Vinci really a Grand Master of the [insert made-up name] Secret Society? [Hint: also no.] Read (as I have done) a fair few of these and you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that most trains of thought out there run along well-oiled rails, with nary a point in sight. Point-less stuff, indeed.

Of course, if you try to revisit something / someone particularly well-documented, you face a dauntingly uphill challenge from the start: which is why oddly nebulous objects and obscure people attract the most attention (from both revisionist camps) – because for these, there’s that much less that needs to be explained away from the start before you can really go to town & have some fun.

In this general vein, here’s a nice (2000) article by Mark Newbrook from The Skeptic magazine (it’s on pp.42-47), which brings together literally dozens of fringe historical revisionist communities (Velikovskyists, Saturnists, Afrocentrists, Dravidian- / Mayan- / Latvian- / Hungarian- / Basque-/ Etruscan-centred histories of language, Dogon, etc) to highlight their common traits – most of which seem to centre on a misplaced faith in the fallacies of eighteenth-century linguistic / etymological thought. It has to be admitted that the devotion shown to following through these mad ideas is sometimes quite extraordinary. Did Jesus on the Cross really cry out in Mayan? [Hint: don’t even go there.]

It’s no great secret that most hypotheses floated to explain the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex, and the Phaistos Disc match this overall template (i.e. of a simple linguistic misunderstanding taken to massive lengths). Even when top-drawer outsiders (David Icke, Dan Burisch, Terence McKenna etc) throw their lizard-skin top hats into the ring, the same tired old rabbits limp out… ‘Roger Bacon‘, ‘it’s the aliens wot dunnit‘, ‘hoax!’ and so forth.

Of all these , though, it is the “hoax” theorists that are stupendously annoying – not because they happen to be right or wrong (which is another question entirely), but because for the most part they use the idea as a kind of intellectual trick to sidestep the entire evidence corpus, preferring instead to revel in schadenfreude, poking fun at other researchers as they lock intellectual horns with the mute rhinoceros of meaninglessness (and lose the battle, of course).

In all these cases, the correct question to be asking is simply what kind of material, physical evidence would amply demonstrate the presence of a hoax – merely proving the possibility of a hoax (as Gordon Rugg famously tried to do for the Voynich Manuscript in 2004) is both hard work and vacuous. Or, if you prefer to stick with Popperian falsification, how can we actively disprove the notion that artefact X is ancient?

And so it all swings round to a resoundingly 19th century hoax, the Frisian Oera Linda Book (which I picked up on from Lady Goodman’s blog page). This describes all kinds of odd things (such as “Atland”, a 17th century revisionist Atlantis), and claims to have been written in 1256, but copied from texts some of which dated back as early as 2194 BC. Errrrm… “zeker niet, mevrouw“, methinks.

If you absolutely have to sample its purple faux historical prose, there’s an English translation here. To me, it all reads like a ‘worst-of‘ compilation of creative writing courses’ historical modules: but perhaps you’ll find some hidden depths there to which I’m blind. But is this a hoax? [Hint: for sure!]