Japanese Voynich academic…

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In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the “Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university in Tokyo) and Mari Agata on “Applications of Text Clustering to the Voynich MS”.

Teru Agata subsequently gave a public seminar on the Voynich Manuscript in February 2008 at the University of Tsukuba, called “Judgment of the Possibility to break Undeciphered Documents -With the Example of the Most Mysterious Manuscript-“. And if the search box in Asia University’s website worked, perhaps there would be more I could dig up there.

OK, so in the big scheme of things “Japanese academic gives at least two talks on the VMs” isn’t really huge news. But it did make me think that perhaps I should start compiling a page listing academics who are actively looking at the VMs, such as Angela Catalina Ghionea (who I mentioned here), Volkhard Huth (who I mentioned here), Gordon Rugg / Andreas Schinner, possibly Peter Forshaw (who seems to enjoy surfing the Renaissance foam surrounding the VMs), and so on. Perhaps at some point they’ll form some kind of critical mass, and the VMs will start being taken seriously?

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…errr, fat chance. 🙁

PS: Google Translate turned a Russian VMs webpage’s references to Rugg into “Ruggie”, “Ragg” and “Ragga”, which made for slightly surreal reading.

Pseudo-science and The Curse of the Voynich…

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A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).

In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg & Schinner (who both took one transcription of the Voynich out of the manuscript’s codicological context) deserve a far more skeptical reception than they received from the mainstream press. Yet Schmeh is also critical of my Filarete hypothesis, seeing it as merely the most recent pseudo-scientific approach in a long line of (let’s face it) Voynich cranks. That’s OK by me: I see his piece as merely the most recent shallow summary from a long line of journalists who failed to engage with the Voynich Manuscript, and I hope that’s similarly OK by him. 🙂

With The Curse of the Voynich, I took what business writers sometimes call an “open kimono” approach (though if you know where “transparency” ends and “Japanese flasher” begins, please say), insofar as I tried to make plain all the evidence and observations relevant to my thesis, and not to hide any murky stuff beneath layers of rhetoric. Many Voynichologists, particularly those with an axe to grind, responded by drawing their swords (if that isn’t mixing too many bladed metaphors) and charging: yet most of the attacks have been ad hominems rather than ad argumentums, which is a shame.

I suspect Schmeh sees my book as pseudoscience because of a category error. Rather than being a scientific proof, “The Curse” is actually a detailed historical hypothesis (who made it, when they made it, how they made it, what need it satisfied, how its cipher system began and evolved, what subsequently happened to it, etc) announcing an ongoing art historical research programme (developing and testing those ideas through archival and analytical study). The kind of deductive scientific proof (A.K.A. a “smoking gun”) which people like Schmeh demand would most likely come as a final stage, not as a first stage.

So, Klaus: while I welcome your skepticism in the VMs arena, I can only suggest that – as far as The Curse goes – your train perhaps arrived a little before the station was built. 😮

As far as the details in Schmeh’s article go, many are outdated (and wrong): for example, the notion of a 20th century forgery has been very strongly refuted by letters found in Athanasius Kircher’s archive. The dates Schmeh gives for Anthony Ascham are for the (more famous) 17th century Anthony Ascham, not the (less famous) 16th century one proposed by Leonell Strong. The idea that there are zero corrections in the VMs has also been proved wrong. John Tiltman was a non-machine cipher specialist (one of the finest ever, in fact), and only indirectly connected with Colossus.

If my German was better, I could doubtless produce more, but none of that (nor even his dismissal of my hypothesis!) is really the main point here. What I most object to about Schmeh’s piece is his repeated assertion that we still know almost nothing about the VMs, which he uses to support his skeptical position. Actually, we’ve come a very long way in the last few years – but the online hullabaloo tends to hide this.

The wisdom of a crowded forum…

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On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple – hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, the overall level of discourse seems to have gone dramatically downhill over that same period.

I used to believe that everyone’s contribution was potentially worthwhile, because anyone might see a connection that helps to unlock a door: but this inclusive liberal viewpoint isn’t tenable any more, basically because you have to be able to read the VMs’ pictures in a pretty sophisticated way to get even close.

The curious rubbed-through hole on f34r/f34v of the Voynich Manuscript

Even for the very brightest, there are numerous traps to fall in: such as Sergio Toresella’s belief that the hole rubbed through the tree-trunk-like thing on f34r signals the mad scribe’s sexual frustration (it would require a great deal of work to rub such a neatly arranged hole through vellum). Perhaps Sergio is right (he’s extremely close in almost every other way): but this presumes a very specific kind of irrationality – and so the observation relies very heavily on the hypothesis to validate it, which is a kind of circular argument.

All of which colours my reaction to Zachary1392’s post on the Facepunch Studios forums: when looking at the same hole rubbed through on f34r/f34v, he sees it as a representation of female genitalia. Which (having then thought about it some more) he then concludes we should perhaps worship, as part of a Voynich religion.

In some ways, it’s an optimistic moment: a very sophisticated opinion informed by Sergio Toresella’s lifetime of studying medieval herbals, being duplicated by some amusing forum troll. But it’s also a pessimistic moment, because it gets us nowhere: “Greeman” on the same forum similarly points out:

Haha it was probably some shmuck from 600 years ago who thought;

“I bet if I write some crazy letters and draw some real fucked up stuff on a book someone will find it years later and totally freak out.”

It worked, you all got trolled from an Ancient Pothead.

Good Game.

While “Trogdon” helpfully suggested that, because one word looks like “crop” (EVA chol), the VMs might instead be a Photoshop tutorial. And Draicia thinks the whole thing might be a viral advertisement (but for what? Another Dan Brown novel? Have book publishers suddenly evolved?)

I think that all this forum chatter demonstrates something quite basic: that Linus’ Law sucks for things you can’t easily decompose. Reductionism is such a fundamental tenet of scientific thought that nobody even thinks to mention it these days – but the awkward dizzying truth is that to get started on difficult problems, scientists actually have to actively exercise their scientific imagination to generate novel decompositions (which may or may not be right), within which the hard slog of execution can be split up amongst a virtual cloud of volunteers / academics /  workers. Hence string theory, etc.

Linus’ Law fails for the VMs because nobody wants to sign up to any apparently mad theory before committing any serious amount of effort to testing it. But the truth underlying such an odd object will most likely appear somewhat alien (if not outright demented) to our present day minds – and so any person proposing the hypothesis is naturally expected to do all the hard work of proving it.

The sad thing about the VMs is that we do now have a collection of basic art historical facts and observations which tell us broadly where and when the VMs came from: but these point to so prosaic a subset of answers that almost nobody wants them to be true. Far more interesting to put your trust in David Icke’s, Dan Burisch’s, or Gordon Rugg’s brand of alternate history: they’re scientists, aren’t they? (Errrrrrrm…)

Put it all together, and I think the wisdom of the crowded forums perhaps points to the antithesis of Linus’ Law: that if enough people help to trample on every suggestion, nothing is simple. Or perhaps even simpler: given enough troll eyeballs, everything becomes worthless junk. Oh well. 🙁

More Dan Burisch Voynichification…

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It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.

Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the face of anyone trying to understand Burisch’s claim, by asserting things such as “The Voynich Manuscript may provide clues to the shape and function of items found in the YSC cells, spooled material“. No, you’re absolutely right: it means nothing to me either.

Other discussion boards have whole bunches of people saying Dan Burisch is a fraud, though with occasional rambling posters popping up to defend him:-

From the website ‘world mysteries’ concerning the Voynich document we read in an except from Dr. Levitov: “There is not a single so-called botanical illustration that does not contain some Cathari symbol or Isis symbol. The astrological drawings are likewise easy to deal with; the innumerable stars are representative of the stars in Isis’ mantle.” The fate of the the Cathars resembles that of the Knights Templar, does not the dualism of the former also receive a modicum of redemption in the restoration of the latter?With Dr. Burisch’s background in microbiology, the Voynich ‘botanical illustrations’ were child’s play, and the astrological designations had already been previously noted as corresponding to the Milky Way Galaxy, and by conversion of linear transformations into ‘diagrammatic notation,’ the determinant of the matrix was solved. ‘As above so below’ was not, in this case, a spiritual derivative, it was simply and starkly a ‘spacial’ one.

Ohhhh dear: if a novelist tried to get away with froth like this, he/she would get taken apart. There is no Milky Way link, there is no microbiology, there is no Cathar link, there is no Templar link, there is no matrix (spatial or otherwise), there is no religion, no gnosis, no dualism. The Voynich Manuscript being summoned up here is an imaginary one, a heretical MacGuffin for a potboiler that never quite got written.
In many ways, I get a sense from all this of a deeply tragic situation, of a bright (but disturbed) person grasping at anything they can find on the glittering, shallow surface of Net knowledge that might just explain (however temporarily) their personal pain, the loss they feel: but it never does, and their pain never goes away.
I have no idea if that person is Dan Burisch or someone else: and in most of the important ways, it really doesn’t matter. John Manly was right in detail but not in scope: more than simply a blank cryptographic screen to project ideas and emptions upon, the VMs is actually like a magnet for unhappy PhDs, a sandpit for them to play out their make-believe stories of intellectual redemption. By doing this, they can “rescue” someone from historical oblivion whose frustrated life-experience somehow chimes with theirs: all of which amounts to a kind of intellectual displacement activity directed at the past when they should be putting the effort into their own lives in the present to save themselves – but perhaps that’s too emotionally hard for them to do.
Perhaps I’m no less guilty (with my reconstructed story of Antonio Averlino “Filarete”) as Levitov, or Rugg, or any of the other 20+ Voynich theories out there. I don’t feel unhappy: but I can at least see that maybe I was hoping for redemption in some other way. In my defence, all I can say is that I at least tried my best to let the manuscript do the talking… and hope that this will in the end prove to be enough to move the history forward. Isn’t that as good as it gets?
As a (frankly slightly spooky) postnote on the whole Dan Burisch affair, there’s an online novel (with a bit of a Voynich thing going on) posted to a blog that you might well find fascinating. It’s called “Josef6” by Benjamin Kerstein, and deals with a claimed time-traveller from the future posting messages to an online community, and all the cultish madness that follows on.

The peril of science fiction is that it attracts the worst kind of lunatics
— those prepared to believe not only their own delusions but each others. The
frenzied construction of delusional architectures of thought is a fascinating
talent, and one which reached its pinnacle in the late twentieth century.

 

Sounds familiar, Burisch fans? Though it’s not strictly a Voynich novel per se, I really quite enjoyed it (and even donated $5 to the author via PayPal for posting it up). Recommended! 🙂

How many Voynichologists does it take to change a light bulb?

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It’s a sad (but true) observation that most webpages (and particularly blog posts) on the VMs are serious, dull, dry, high-minded, conceptual guff, at best offering up a semi-quirky restatement of either the Wikipedia page, Rene Zandbergen’s page, or of Gordon Rugg’s hypothesis-of-possibility. You would scarce believe, dear reader, what oceans of cack I have to swim through to reach the occasional archipelago of Voynich-related interest… *sigh*

And so it is with great pleasure that I landed upon the shore of this gently satirical review of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Read it and enjoy!

As for the rest of the Voynichian web, it is (sadly) pretty much uniformly humourless, with the joyous exception of the excellent Uncyclopedia Voynich Manuscript entry, which has been heavily updated since I mentioned it last year (though I’m pleased to see the “medieval VCR manual” gag is still there). Recommended!

PS: the answer to the question is (of course) “None, they like being in the dark.“

"Verifying" the Verifier Method…

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John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, I thought it perhaps should be examined in more detail. Sweat summarises Rugg’s 7 steps as:-

  1. “Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.
  2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.
  3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.
  4. Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.
  5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.
  6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.
  7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.”

All of which can, I think, be summarised even more brutally:-

  1. Engage with so-called “experts” and their writings
  2. Decide if those “experts” are indeed actually experts
  3. Do those experts have a particular agenda?
  4. Do the words they use get in the way?
  5. Are their theories basically built on sand?
  6. See how their errors beget other errors
  7. Work out the biggest issues, and continue until you’ve had enough

This seems to be describing intellectual history, which I would characterise as a thinky, “Florentine humanist”-style knowledge-critiquing methodology based around herding all the arguers in a field together, logically dismantling their arguments, and then using whatever is left standing to construct tentative explanations. Technically, the difference between intellectual history and the history of ideas is that the former tends to see ideas as actively shaped by agendas and as flowing between cultural frames of reference, while the latter tends to try to engage with ideas-in-themselves. (Having said that, the Wikipedia entry for history of ideas cites Michel Foucault as a sympathetic practitioner, yet he sees everything as a product of the agendas implicit in cultural frames of reference. But I digress!)

At its best, intellectual history throws up dazzling insights: in the hands of a master (such as the extraordinary Anthony Grafton), it can be a virtuoso performance of brain over matter, not unlike a QC’s persuasive mastery of his or her brief. Yet at its worst, it can be a sterile exercise in intellectual futility, divorced from the world by its shallow insistence on examining only the participants and their claims, not the validity of the evidence expressed in the ideas, and so ending up in a kind of over-finessed, intricate superficiality.

As an example, even though Grafton’s generally excellent book on Leon Battista Alberti shows precisely how Alberti’s form and ideas flowed from classical topoi, I think Grafton perhaps takes the whole humanist conceit (that if we all wrote as well as Cicero the world would be a better place) a little bit too literally – whereas humanism was by and large more like a courtly Latinistic game of patronage – and as a result his book never really engages with Alberti the person.

If we bear this kind of thing in mind, it should be reasonably clear that Rugg’s “Verifier Method” looks to verify not evidence qua contents but instead expert opinions qua methodology: a kind of faux legalistic framework, with the investigator as self-appointed armchair judge in his/her own kangaroo court, and with no power or desire to step outside into the real world.

In the case of the Voynich Manuscript (in case you were wondering when I’d ever mention it), I think the Verifier Method falls right at steps (1) and (2). Because Rugg’s conceptual framework had no mechanism to critique evidence (in particular the various transcriptions of the text), and what separates experts in such an uncertain field is by and large their conception of what constitutes relevant evidence, Rugg has no intrinsic way of deciding who is (and who is not) an expert, let alone trying to infer their agendas (3) or to diagnose any linguistic/semantic difficulties (4)

Essentially, it seems to me that the Verifier Method relies so heavily on the underlying field being regular that it fails to be a satisfactory tool to apply to such irregular areas of study as the Voynich Manuscript. But the problem then is that regular fields of study tend not to need exploratory methods such as the Verifier Method to help traverse them.

Finally, I think that “Verifying” is such a weak aim of any knowledge methodology as to be virtually useless: as a strategy, all it really tries to elicit is some kind of limp correlation. The “Cardan Grille” nonsense that Rugg concocted to “verify” that the Dee/Kelley hoax hypothesis was “possible” is precisely such a thing: of course the hypothesis was possible, that’s why it was a hypothesis, duh. Come on: when dealing with an uncertain field, when would the Verifier Method ever be preferable to Popper’s Falsificationism, where you collect together plausible hypotheses and actively design experiments to try to kill them? Now that’s what I call proper Popper science…

Enigmatic Instrument…

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Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website – click on the picture there for a detailed view.

enigmatic_instrument_by_iisaw_mini

As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA font) when etching enigmatic script on his enigmatic instrument. He writes:-

This “Cosmolabe” is a prop for a movie. The fifteen circular symbols on the front represent different worlds and the signs on the outer rim are components of magical runes used to travel between the worlds. The instument itself is a way to calculate which runes need to be used for opening gates between specific places.

Cool! What’s also nice is the way that it mirrors many of the circular diagrams in Quire 9. As to the text, I can see “qoksheedy” (which only appears on f108v) there, though the phrase it is in does not: so it looks to me like he’s done a nice job of simulating Voynichese, possibly even better than Gordon Rugg’s grilles ever did. 🙂

APOD Voynich discussion…

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Browsing idly through the few Google search results for Voynich above Voynich News a few days ago, I wondered how voynich dot org, a parked domain with no content and no inward links could rank so highly out of 225,000 hits. Now that is a mystery: whatever SEO ayahuasca they’re using, I want some.

Following that micro-enigma, the next two search hits along (dated 2002 and 2005) are for APOD, the “Astronomy Photo of the Day” from our dear friends at NASA, faux Star Wars space mission specialists and erstwhile inventors of the Techno-Trousers. Why does Google mysteriously rate these two tiny pages (both featuring the same cropped picture of f67r1) so highly?

Well… it seems that the author of the 2002 APOD entry received so many emails related to it that he re-posted it again in 2005, with a request that interested parties should not post their, ummm, fascinating thoughts to him (tellingly, the email address has been replaced by “[email protected]“) but instead post them to The Asterisk* online forum. And so they did, again and again, with about 280 posts in the main thread within a week, plus various auxiliary threads (such as this one) since.

I thought I’d trawl through them to see if there’s anything of any interest there. Despite lots of posts debating Gordon Rugg’s “Ruggish” hoax hypothesis in a fairly vacuous way, here is what I found (though heavily edited, or I’d still be typing in a week’s time).

(1) Adrian Nedelkovic from Beograd (Belgrade) in Serbia, mentioned his hypothesis that had been published on p.42 of the 28th October 2004 edition of “Planeta”, a Serbian popular science magazine. In a dusty corner of the Wayback Machine are copies of his first two pages (part 1 and part 2, though the images have long vanished into the ether), where he proposes that one particular fragment of Voynichese should be transcribed (you’ll see in a moment why I’ve put certain parts in bold) as:-
Nedelkovic believes that this “is about applying a medicine in a right and wrong way, with a warning in the end about the wrong appliance or a lost recipe”, and translates it as (with “?” for missing words):

Tu kur uluruda ula kur deiiv fulkaiko fuias kus cius deiiv D kur fueiiv
kileiiv kllur kus kur clus da uila fuileiiv da
Ailca kur a ileiv deiiv cilla u leiiv uila ulccl deiiv
Allcallk a leiiv ulcur ulus ula lusda

 

To cure your ? cure ? ? fools ? close ? ? ? ?
The cure (for you) cause cure close the ? ? the
? cure a life ? ? you live ? ? ?
All call a life you’ll cure, you loose you’re lost

Which would seem to add an as-yet-unknown type of deciphering delusion to the list: the misplaced belief that text messaging was invented in the early Renaissance.

(2) As a representative sampling of the messages in the thread, Samten suggests that the 24 spokes on f67r1 represent the “planetary hours”, “D J Matulewicz suggests that the same picture might represent a “sailor’s compass through the night sky”, while geon wonders whether f34r shows when to cultivate opium poppies, f76r1 when to harvest them , and f75r/f78r how to turn them into morphine, possibly as part of an entire book about manufacturing narcotics.

(3) The first really substantive post on f67r1 in the whole thread (a third of the way down this page) comes from dandelion, who excitedly points to “the Calendar Pages from the “Antiphonal, León Cathedral, 8 Fol. 10v and 19v., 10th-11th century” ” as mentioned in “Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain” by Mireille Mentré: and concludes that “it is definately a Calendar” of undetermined age.

(4) Woody NaDobhar suggests (a third of the way down on this page) that the VMs might be a “Book of Shadows”, “a book of times and recipes used by practitioners of hedge magic”, but with many of the “obviously not real” plants being “botanical chimera” in a kind of “Georgia O’Keefe” way.

(5) It should be noted that few of the posters really engage with the VMs (but then again, at least one of them was a 9-year-old boy, who at least showed courage). This annoyed Helen, who rather snarkily wrote: “The poster who suggested that we can’t read [the VMs] because it’s not English and the one who enters nonsensical links followed by emoticons are to be commended for managing to post on the internet in spite of their severe limitations.” Say it like it is, sister: how many times have I pulled back from typing this myself?

(6) About halfway down this page, Hotrod (Mike H) sees f67r1 as an “Archeometre“-style drawing [actually a 19th century “Atlantean” text, with a pseudo-Lullian Renaissance vibe], and infers from the large number of apparently-pregnant women that the whole manuscript is about fertility: while at the very bottom, theAtarian suggests a similarity between it and an Egyptian hypocephalus. The preceding page has a post by MrTim (Tim Ackerson), linking to his page describing the VMs as being a single substitution cipher hiding a mix of Early Welsh, Irish, Latin, Old Cornish and numerous unknown (and probably unknowable) languages. While on this page, Misfit wonders whether it is written in cursive Bulgarian, before going on (in a separate post) to suggest a translation of “qokedy” as “who will give”, “qochek” as “the head or hard part of a cabbage”, while “dal” means “whether or not”.

(7) We’re now onto page 17 of 19, and (at long last) a sensible post. John Keirein had just seen a PBS travel program about Arcos de la Frontera in Spain, with an f67r1-like pattern on the plaza outside the church. “But the mysterious highlight is this 15th-century magic circle: 12 red and 12 white stones — the white ones with various constellations marked. Back then on a child’s baptism day, the parents would stop here first for a good exorcism. The exorcist would stand inside the protective circle and cleanse the baby of any evil spirits. Then they could proceed into the church.” (Copied from this site). Then Misfit posts again, this time about a magic circle his aunt gave him; and then some more translations (he says it is phonetic “Macedonian”, i.e. a Bulgarian dialect): “oteey chedal oteedy” = “why does it burn why did you give“; followed by tales of his aunt apparently poisoning half his family, but that’s OK because it’s her religion.

Then, just as things were starting to warm up in a nicely mad way, the moderator pulled the plug and locked the thread. Finito, fin, the end: all in all, he’d had just about enough of so many odd-shaped peas jammed in APOD. And, despite all the occasional flickers of intelligence, can you really blame him?

German skeptic conference…

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At an upcoming skeptical conference in Darmstadt from 1-3 May 2008 (with a loosely Creationist / Intelligent Design / paranormal theme), the “scientist [and] author” Klaus Schmeh will be giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript. There’s a German blog entry here, in which Schmeh sets out his stall: which is that, basically, the VMs is (just as Gordon Rugg & Andreas Schinner have claimed) a 16th century hoax.

This kind of superficial category error sets my teeth on edge every time I encounter it: such people seem to think that a “hoax” explanation must somehow also be the most “skeptical”. Actually, if they would bother to look at the object (rather than at the EVA transcriptions), they would find that the VMs has 15th century quire numbers, and a complex codicological history. Sixteenth century hoax theories requires that all those many layers of evidence be part of the hoax too: of course this is a “possibility”, but multiplying the various unlikelinesses together, you end up with a dwindlingly small final probability.

Instead, a properly skeptical reading would say: “the presence of 15th century hand-writing in the quire numbers is a strong indication that the manuscript was made no later than 1500, while the presence of various art history features in the drawings points to an earliest date of around 1440. Explanations significantly outside this date range would require strong evidence to support them, which has not yet been found or demonstrated. And that’s about as far as we can reasonably go at the moment.”

What I’m getting at is that the hoax hypothesis displays the wrong kind of incredulity to be genuinely skeptical: it portrays the evidence itself as incredible, rather than “typical” Voynichian hypotheses (Cathar, Alien End-Times, Old Ukrainian, Baconian telescopy and microscopy, Leonardo etc) themselves as incredible. The curious Voynich solution mentioned in one of the comments to the German web-page on Schmeh seems to fall into this general category, sadly.

Dutch Voynich hoax bloggery…

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I just stumbled across part 1 and part 2 of a long-ish Dutch blog entry on hoax theories of the Voynich Manuscript, specifically Gordon Rugg’s Cardan grille nonsense. If, like me, you don’t speak Dutch, note that Google Translate‘s Dutch-to-English translation appears not to be working, and so use FreeTranslation.com instead (which does work fine).

Actually, I do (thanks to Tanya) have a single Amsterdam survival phrase, which I learnt long before I was married: “Zeker niet, mevrouw: ik word getrouwd!” Anyway, moving swiftly on…

What tickled me about the Dutch bloggery was the fact that the people commenting on it were amused by f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” sequence, with one of them asking “Wat dacht je van de smurfen?” All of which prompted (Proust-stylee) long-buried memories of the abysmal Smurf collectible figurines BP gave away as promotional items in the 1970s (and which are doubtless now worth the GDP of Morocco each) to surface. I just never dreamed I’d join Smurfs and the Voynich Manuscript in the same sentence. Life is strange.

Incidentally, 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of the Smurfs’ burf: thankfully, the movie tie-in has been delayed to 2010 (though if we’re really lucky, Paramount will cancel it first). But here’s a blog entry on them that does ring true (oh, and here’s a working Smurf Name Generator).