Nothing much to say, except the Spanish Voynich cartoon is online here, and translates as (basically):-
Professor Ibáñez presented his increasingly widespread theory: that the Voynich Manuscript is merely a set of squiggles made by someone on hold waiting to talk to their local cable company’s customer service team.
OK, so it’s kind of an XKCD-lite Voynich theory, but I’m sure you get the basic idea… 🙂
I mentioned a few days ago that Google Trends showed a huge surge in searches for “voynich” triggered by the xkcd webcomic’s Voynich theory gag. While I guessed that the spike was over 50x baseline, I wondered to myself whether there was a reliable way of accessing accurate hit statistics on Wikipedia pages, because that would be a pretty nice graph to see.
Well… it turns out (thanks to a post today from the Feral Graphing blog) that there is precisely such a thing: Wikirank. This shows that the Wikipedia VMs page got 68631 hits on 5th June 2009, compared to a normal daily average of (say) 1000 or so, so a roughly 68x spike.
OK, it’s not hugely important, but it’s a nice resource to know about. 🙂
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript has weaseled its way into a serious contemporary medium – the webcomic. Here’s a link to some nerdy stick-figure Voynichian fun from XKCD (“a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language“): its brand new theory should raise at least half a smile. 😉
Meanwhile, someone else has suggested on their blog that the Voynich Manuscript is the world’s first hippy/nerd manifesto. Is the leading edge of a wave – are the nerds reclaiming the VMs?