The Somerton Man – Australian radio documentary by Ruth Balint…

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Australia’s ABC National Radio recently (23rd Feb 2014) broadcast an episode of the history documentary series “Hindsight” that you may well enjoy: entitled The Somerton Man: A mystery in four acts, it was written and produced by Ruth Balint, a senior lecturer at the UNSW School of Humanities and Languages. (A tip of the Somerton Man’s missing hat to Shane M and Furphy for emailing me about this, much appreciated!)

ruth-balint

Cipher Mysteries regulars may well remember Balint’s name from her piece on the Somerton Man that was published in Cultural Studies Review in 2010, though its mentions of Carlo Ginzburg (who I’ve blogged about many times) may well have gone over many readers’ heads… nobody (apart from a certain imaginative kind of hardcore historian) seems much taken by him, which is a bit odd. Ah well!

However, it has to be said that – as you’d broadly expect, extrapolating forward from Balint’s CSR article – the Hindsight episode didn’t really break any new ground. In fact, most of it is comprised of her mooching good-naturedly around Somerton Man-related sites with Gerry Feltus, pretty much everybody’s favourite retired Aussie cold case copper. But all the same, I think it’s more than entertaining enough to be worth a listen if you have 40-odd minutes to spare.

As for whether we will ever move this forward, I have to say that I really don’t know. While I was guardedly optimistic about the Somerton Man at the beginning of this year (2014), the whole “Jestyn” angle has now gone particularly cold: so unless someone has a splendidly good idea about how to find out if a Mr “Styn” or “Stijn” was admitted to RNSH in about 1943, I suspect my bucket of leads is currently pretty much empty.

I also had some information from a reliable historical source recently that “when Robin and Kate were born, both Prosper and Jessica put their details on the official birth certificates and signed it as mother and father”. Of course, any self-respecting conspiracy theorist will respond to this by saying “well they would, wouldn’t they?“, which would probably just go to show that Somerton Man theorists love facts so much that they can’t resist also believing the 180-degree opposite of any given fact. And in such a dialectically neutral-balanced world, what chance do we stand of making any real progress?

Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 1)

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Chapter 1.

— Day One —

Today, like every day, the phone rings: I answer it, but for once I’m genuinely surprised by what I hear.

What usually happens here at the Epistemological Detective Agency is that a client calls: he or she has ended up in some kind of nebulous everyone-loses train wreck scenario, surrounded by people spinning ridiculous stories to save their sorry skins. But if that’s you and you’re rich and really want to get to the truth (or, at least, to disprove the manifestly false)… well, you call us. In a world of wonky knowledge pipes, we’re the 24-hour emergency plumbers. Not so much lawyers, but rather something closer to ‘industrial logicians’.

But this afternoon’s call is playing out to quite a different script. On the other end of the line is a well-known billionaire Yale benefactor – let’s call him “Charlie” – who wants to hire our specialist services, but not necessarily in a way we’re going to be comfortable with.

“So…”, I say, trying to recap where we’ve got to, “do I take it that you want us to prove what kind of thing this manuscript actually is?”

“No, that’s not it at all.” He pauses: but even over the phone, I can hear him still trembling with anger and annoyance. “I want to hire you Epistemological detective people for some proper Popperian disproof. These crazy-ass Voynich theories are making my alma mater a laughing stock, and I want you to stop them in their ridiculous tracks.”

He’s definitely got a point: for months now the Voynich Manuscript has been all over the media and Internet, with one broken theory after another loudly trumpeting itself as supposedly irrefutable fact. They can’t all be right at the same time: but they definitely might all be wrong.

“I can see what you’re trying to do”, I muse, “but history is something of a… high-risk area for us.” And the less said about that whole sorry Vinland Map episode the better, we both think to ourselves.

“Look, sixteen thousand bucks a week says your agency will take it on. My PA says that’s double your normal rate, but I don’t care, I know you can do this thing and I want you guys on board ASAP, even if History does make your toes curl.”

After a lifetime as a captain of industry, Charlie is plainly used to getting what he wants. Right now, I haven’t really got any objections that $16K a week can’t comfortably fix. And he knows it.

“I’ll take it from your silence that you’re on board”, he beams, yet another deal won by sheer force.

“Yes, we will take it on”, I reply, “though I’m sure you already know it normally takes us about a fortnight to assemble a dossier of rock-solid premises to build out from.”

“In this instance, I have a short cut for you”, he smirks. “I’ve taken the liberty of putting Encyclopedia Girl on a plane, she’ll be at your door first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Encyclo-who?”, I hear my voice say, though a touch more incredulously than I actually intended.

“Her name’s Germaine Zayfert; she’s from Long Island, and has spent the last two months filling her capacious photographic memory with everything to do with the Voynich Manuscript. She’s on my payroll until the summer, as a kind of intern: just keep feeding her bagels and coffee and she’ll tell you everything you want to know. I’ll wire a fortnight’s money in a minute. Goodbye!”

And with that the line goes dead. Whatever made Charlie his billions, I think to myself, it certainly wasn’t his phone manner. I call Parker and Joey to let them know to clear their diaries and to be in at 9am: we’re going to be busy for a good while.

— Day Two —

When I arrive to open up our Little Italy office at 8.30am, there’s a purple-haired girl already sat on the stone steps outside. Her eyes seem distant, yet raster back and forth as if she’s counting far-off cars only she can see: she looks about fifteen, but I know she’s older.

She springs to her feet and juts out a small white hand for me to shake. “You must be Maxten Harmer?” she asks with that superfluously upwardly-inflected final syllable that everyone under twenty-five seems to, like, like so much?

“Yes, I must”, I reply, shaking her hand lightly. “But call me Max. How should I introduce you to the others?”

At that, she recoils backwards, physically withdrawing into her coat. “I… don’t see anybody else here,” she mumbles into the fabric. “Who the heck are you talking about?”

“Joseph Serrani and Parker Hitt II, the Epistemological Detective Agency’s other two principals: they’ll be here in half an hour. I expect Charlie already told you about them.”

“Oh. Yes. That’s right.” I watch in curious fascination as her body language slowly winds from scared witless back down to merely tense as hell. “Sorry about that. I have a tendency to be quite… literal, sometimes. Call me ‘Mayne’. Can’t stand that whole ‘Encyclopedia Girl’ thing.”

“Yeah, that would bug me too,” I commiserate, opening the door and disabling the alarm. “‘Mayne’ is good. Coffee?”

“Perfecto”, she answers with what can only reasonably be described a homeopathic flicker of a half-smile. “I’ll fetch my bags.” And she turns, marches down the steps and then away down the street, without once looking back.

I can’t honestly see how this is going to work.

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.“

Doctor Blake meets the Somerton Man (sort of)…

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Fans of Australia’s ABC TV channel’s “The Doctor Blake Mysteries” (that just started a new series) will doubtless have already seen Series 2 Episode 3 “A Foreign Field” (it aired yesterday, 21st February 2014).

The-Doctor-Blake-Mysteries-article

But if you haven’t, and fancy a bit of meanwhile-in-1959 retro-stylee forensic crime-solving period action, and with a storyline clearly based on the Somerton Man cold case, then there may still be time to catch up with it online on ABC’s iview website – though sadly (as I quickly found out) only if you happen to be in Australia.

Anyway, my mystery informant (OK, OK, it’s actually Bob, thanks Bob!) tells me that the episode has a “handsome stranger dying in a Ballarat park“, as well as poetry from the great Australian poet A. D. Hope (whose “The Wandering Islands” (1955) had only just been published), “codes, and Russian spies in the mix“. Sounds like fun, shame I can’t see it myself! 🙁

Some silly cryptograms for you to enjoy…

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As you can probably predict, I’m getting a tad tired of reviewing so many intensely po-faced Voynich theories one after the other. So I thought I’d instead post some silly puzzles to cheer myself up, hope you enjoy them!

(1) What links Burst Uvula and Chief Ghillie with Heroic Defiance, Solemn Operas, and Foxy Zappers? Feel free to suggest your own! 🙂

(2) J x AITKEN = SLEAZE. Can you solve Bill Hartston’s maths cryptogram?

(3) Of course, the most famous numeric cryptogram was composed by Henry Dudeney in 1924 for an article in Strand Magazine. SEND + MORE = MONEY. Can you work that out as well?

(4) A dog bitten by a snake fears sausages. True or false?

Stephen Bax and the Voynich Manuscript…

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A new day breaks here in the suburbs, bringing with it birdsong, A-road traffic noise, and yet another Voynich theory to bang my head against.

On paper, Professor Stephen Bax certainly has the combination of big brain, linguistic experience and personal ambition that you’d think would be needed to crack open the Voynich Manuscript’s crab-like shell. But… then again, so did poor old Professor William Romaine Newbold; and his Voynich non-decryption ended up enraging Charles Singer so much (justifiably, it has to be said) that he was still angry thirty years later.

All the same, Bax believes that he has tentatively identified a number of words in the Voynich Manuscript, and has posted a 62-page PDF on his website describing his findings. His initial press release has been picked up by BBC News, the Bedfordshire on Sunday, and the irrepressible Daily Grail amongst many others. He has a lecture arranged for 25th February 2014 in Luton (if you happen to be nearby and interested), and is even planning a small Voynich conference in London in June 2014 to try to get other academics involved in his Voynich research programme.

Yet as Rene Zandbergen likes to point out, the most difficult thing about Voynich research is developing chains of reasoning while avoiding big mistakes. And while I hate to be the one to unplug the sound system just as it’s starting to really get the party started, I’m quite certain that every single one of Stephen Bax’s conclusions to date have been built upon a long sequence of easily demonstrable mistakes.

In fact, even though he is trying to use a sensible sounding methodology to elicit his results, I can’t think of a single piece of Voynich Manuscript evidence or secondary historical evidence he uses that I’d agree is a sound starting point: and I’m not convinced that any of his conclusions could be right either. I’ll go through a whole load of points, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

1. “Initial Words On Herbal Pages Should Be Names”. Errrm…

As Bax rightly points out, you might reasonably expect the unique-looking first word on each of the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal pages to be the name of the plant depicted on that page, because that is indeed how many medieval herbals were laid out. This is not a new observation or idea: Leonell Strong assumed this as part of his Voynichese decryption in the 1940s (he thought the plaintext was written in English, but enciphered using a curious repeating offset into a local substitution alphabet).

But there’s an immediate problem: almost all the Voynich’s Herbal A pages start with one of the four gallows letters: EVA ‘p’ (53 times), EVA ‘t’ (24 times), EVA ‘k’ (21 times) or EVA ‘f’ (10 times). Which for simple substitution ciphers, broadly as John Tiltman pointed out roughly 50 years ago, would mean that the name of pretty much every plant in the Herbal section must start with one of three or four letters. Which would be nonsensical. (Leonell Strong was fine with this, because he thought the cipher scrambled all that stuff up a little: basically, he didn’t think it was a straightforward language.)

Yet Bax persists, and asserts that all of these gallows glyphs simultaneously map to plaintext C or K (in order to keep his ‘oror’ mapping intact, see [3] below), and as a result almost all of the plant names he considers start with the letter C – Centaurea, Cotton, Kaur, Crocus, etc. I’m sorry, but this whole notion is directly contradicted by the immediate statistical evidence. This isn’t something to build on, it’s something to abandon and leave far behind while you find some genuinely useful historical evidence to work with.

2. Bax’s proposed Voynichese alphabet has three letter R’s

This too flies in the face of supposed common sense. The Voynich Manuscript has a limited and compact alphabet, with roughly 18-22 characters occurring with particular frequency: and yet Bax concludes from his multi-language linguistic analysis that three of these (EVA r, EVA m, and EVA n) encipher the letter ‘R’. Come on: this is surely close to as unsystematic a system as could be constructed, a giant Red Flag of Non-Believability being waved in front of his train of reasoning.

3. The Voynichese word “oror” = the Hebrew word “arar”, meaning ‘juniper’

f15v not only has “oror” on, it has “oror or” and “or or oro r” immediately above each other on the first two lines. Did Bax not notice this when he picked this out? This is terribly selective and unconvincing. Moreover, “arar” itself is twice as common in the Voynich Manuscript than “oror”: while Bax himself points out good reasons why it shouldn’t be “oror”.

So… why does he persist with “oror” == juniper? “oror” appears throughout the Voynich Manuscript, while “or” appears extraordinarily frequently. This just seems a hopeful (and unsystematic) stab in the dark in exactly the wrong kind of way.

4. Bax thinks that EVA “kydain” = ‘centaur’ – but has he not noticed “dain” everywhere?

Now this is just ridiculous. One of the genuine mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript is the repeated presence of what look extraordinarily like medieval page references (EVA “aiin”): and here’s one apparently embedded in a word right at the top of f2r. So is there any real chance this also happens to encipher “kentaur” in the way he thinks? No, none whatsoever, I think.

5. “doary” = Taurus. Oh, really?

The reason people have in the past suspected the label by the “Pleiades”-like group on f68r might be “Taurus” was because of the late-medieval “-9” style Tironian nota at its end, preceded by a letter that looks like “r”. But both those correspondences remain a bit of a stretch, and so this seems basically unworkable in the way he hopes.

6. Reading EVA “keerodal” as “coriander”.

Ask people who have been working with the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” language for a few years and they’ll probably tell you (as I’m saying now) that this word is almost certainly a copying error by the Voynich Manuscript’s scribe. It is extremely rare to see “eer” (while “ar” and “or” are both extremely common), so I’m confident that this should instead have been written “karodal”, which closely matches how the Voynich Manuscript’s “labelese” often parses out in pairs, i.e. “k.ar.od.al”. Hence I have practically zero faith that this word could be a natural language version of “coriander” in the way Bax suspects – he has misparsed and miscategorised it.

7. Relying on Edith Sherwood’s hopeful plant identifications.

Oh, come on. Edith tries hard to do her thing, but remember that we’ve had real herbal authorities (such as the fantastic Karen Reeds) look closely at the Voynich’s herbal drawings, and they haven’t seen even 10% of what Edith Sherwood thinks she has seen.

So, in summary: of the nine words Bax claims (in his Appendix 1) to have identified, I disagree with the evidence, reasoning, and linguistic rationale for every single one. I am also sure that his letter assignments are fatally flawed. Contrary to the title of his paper, I honestly don’t believe that through his efforts he has yet identified a single “plausible” word in the Voynich Manuscript.

For me, this isn’t even a matter for Ockham’s blessed Razor: to be even remotely workable, a hypothesis needs to have a single example of evidence that chimes with it in a way that can actually be seen to work. And on the above showing of evidence, what he has presented so far is not yet a workable hypothesis in any obvious way, sorry.

The Castel del Monte Voynich theory, reviewed…

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Over the past week or so, I’ve spent some time patiently going over Fallacara & Occhinegro’s book which tries to connect the Castel del Monte with the Voynich Manuscript. The two guys are clearly intelligent, hard-working architecture historians who have spent several years trying not only to understand the Castel del Monte’s physical construction, but also to reconstruct how it was built and the purposes for which it was designed. But they have additionally posited a connection between the building’s design and numerous key design features found within the Voynich Manuscript, and have made lots of follow-on claims yada-yada-yada.

Hence what I’ll do here is look at their architecture bit first, and then move on to the Voynich layer perched atop their architectonic stuff. OK? Let’s go.

A River Ran Through It

The Castel del Monte in Puglia has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and over the years its unusual physical configuration has attracted numerous fringe theories claiming to explain its many odd features. To what degree have these two authors succeeded in looking past the façade of history and documentation to the actual building underneath?

Actually, I think their architectural research project has been a great success. What emerges from the (admittedly carefully chosen, but nonetheless strongly relevant) fragments of evidence presented in their book is that, contrary to its modern appearance, the site originally was very probably home to a natural spring thought at the time to have health-giving properties. A river even ran close by in previous centuries, as evidenced by the way the area is represented in the Tabula Peutingeriana.

On this location, Frederick II had a curious octagonal edifice built, one too small to be a proper castle but also not really functionally suitable for being a hunting lodge. Fallacara & Occhinegro have picked up on suggestions made by previous architectural historians as well as on numerous physical and archival clues, and have pieced together a reading of the Castel del Monte as a hamam – a restorative Turkish bath complex of the type that at that time was just starting to become fashionable in Europe.

This all aligns with what we find in Pietro da Eboli’s bath-praising poem De Balneis Puteolanis, which has been mentioned on Cipher Mysteries a fair few times, and which arguably helped to start the whole balneological ‘craze’. So up to this point, I don’t see anything at all wrong with the two authors’ reading of the Castel del Monte.

But are they justified in also reading the evidence as of an alchemical obsession by Frederick II? Their evidence in this regard seems to be no more than some circular-shaped stains on the floor, from which they somehow infer alchemical activity on the site. This seems decidedly thin: and I’m fairly certain that the idea of alchemy as promoting eternal life is something that came in many centuries later – in Frederick II’s Europe, chrysopoeia (‘gold-making’) was alchemists’ almost total focus.

This whole idea extends further to spagyria (herb-based alchemy, or herbal medicine made using alchemical-style processes), which as both a term and a practice dates to Paracelsus (much later in the 16th century). I therefore don’t see a way to accept their argument that Frederick II would have designed a building focused on spagyric alchemy with the purpose of retardatio senectutis, because that would simply be anachronistic.

Finally, the authors try to make some play about the 8-sided structure, but I personally see the likelihood of there having been some kind of Platonic or numerological basis for this as basically zero. So-called “sacred geometry” is one of those secret history things that sounds nice in an airport novel, but in almost every case disappears when you look for it in the cold light of day. The Castel del Monte has a nice little design, sure, but… anything beyond that is just too much hand-waving for me to bear.

So, in summary, I like the chain of inference that leads to the Castel del Monte’s being a hamam, at the forefront of the whole balneological fever: but extending this claim to include alchemical or numerological significance seems speculative at best, if not just plain wrong-headed.

All That, And The Voynich Manuscript Too?

Well… no, not really. Given that I don’t accept the link they claim between the Castel del Monte and alchemy or spagyria of any sort, the evidence they present in their book attempting to link the Castel to the Voynich Manuscript is a thin, unnourishing soup indeed.

For example, the image from the book’s cover tries to conflate the (apparently) hexagonal-bodied, round-turreted magic circle page in the Voynich Manuscript with the Castel del Monte’s (very definitely) octagonal-bodied, octagonal-turreted design. Personally, this looks to me no different to other super-selective Voynich theories: really, you have to do better than one partially suggestive image match to back up a claim of a systematic “philological” match between these two very different things.

And similarly for the plants: a palmful of comparisons with carefully selected individual drawings plucked from a broad set of medieval herbals really isn’t methodologically good enough. The bigger problem with comparing the Voynich Manuscript with medieval herbals is that quite a few of its drawings are apparently drawn from life, a practice which happened before and after the Middle Ages (if after, say 1425 or so), but not really during them.

The authors are also aware that it is a long way back from the (early 15th century) radiocarbon dating to the (early 13th century) court of Frederick II (the Castel’s Decretio Regis dates from 1240), and so conclude, unsurprisingly, that it must have been copied by a later dumb copyist etc etc. There are indeed a number of codicological features that suggest that the Voynich Manuscript was in some way a copy.

But there are many problems with a 13th century dating for its original content, which is why nobody has seriously re-proposed Roger Bacon as its author for several decades now. Never mind the 15th century stuff I keep going on about, the crossbow technology depicted in the Sagittarius archer’s hunting crossbow points to “the first half of the 14th century”: while Erwin Panofsky famously opined “as he came to the female figures (in conjunction with the colors used in the manuscript) he came to the conclusion that it could not be earlier than the 15th century“. The hair-styles and clothes (such as they are) are all thought to be 15th century (or possibly later) – which is an inexact method of dating, sure, but it really should be good for the nearest century.

I also don’t buy into their ideas about “proto-toilets”: having read numerous earnest-sounding books on the secret history of toilets over the last decade (I kid you not, and recommend Lawrence Wright’s (1960) “Clean and Decent”), I really don’t think 13th century engineers were even remotely close to getting that nailing that tricky jelly to the garderobe wall. Yes, they did have limited water engineering and hypocausts: but my own reading is that toilets only became a plumbing possibility once Vitrivius had been revived in the 15th century. So that suggestion doesn’t work for me either.

Hence I think it’s going to take a lot of saving hypotheses (mainly around embellishing copyists, rather than time-travelling Gallifreyans) to pull a 13th century dating back from the cliff-edge sheer drop its feet are pedalling rapidly over, Wile E. Coyote-style. And while that’s still possible, it’s not very likely on this showing.

I don’t know, really. Fallacara and Occhinegro were very kind to send me a copy of their book, and I do wish them luck with their ongoing research into the Castel del Monte, which offers a reasonably solid hamam-based angle on a nice and genuinely mysterious piece of Puglian tourist history. But I can’t even remotely endorse the 13th century Voynich story they want to tell (which will probably come as no great surprise to them): unfortunately, it mars what is otherwise a perfectly nice (if fairly specific) piece of architectural / balneological history.

I think the simple truth – or as close as we can get to it without going excessively TL;DR – is that the Castel del Monte was on the leading edge of European nobility’s obsession with thermal baths, while the Voynich Manuscript was far closer to its trailing edge. Fifty or a hundred years yet further on, baths were thought (wrongly) to be the cause of syphilis and all kinds of other STDs: and so the whole craze abruptly stopped, with baths (and books about baths, which flourished in the 15th century) falling rapidly into disrepair. Perhaps the last century’s craze for unsupportable Voynich theories will abruptly stop some time in the future too? Well… I can dream, can’t I?

Mark Perakh and the Voynich Manuscript

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I was deeply saddened this week to find out that Mark Perakh died last year, on 7th May 2013 in Escondido, Calfornia. He wrote with such vitality I never even stopped to consider his age: but he was in fact 88.

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Perakh’s was a life of three professorial acts: first in Russia, then in Israel, and then finally in America. It seems that Perakh was goaded most frequently into action by a drive to resist that which he considered false knowledge – for him, dissenting sincerely meant fighting.

In recent decades, the things that goaded him to greatest action were the grand pseudoscience and pseudohistory constructions of fundamentalist Christian literalism: specifically, the Bible Codes (don’t get me started on that, or I’ll be typing all night) and literal Creationism. His book “Unintelligent Design” surely forms as good a sustained counterargument as needs to be written to the pro-creationist arguments of William Dembski et al.

Back in the world of cipher mysteries, for a short while Perakh brought his mathematical and statistical heavy guns to bear on the Voynich Manuscript’s confounding ‘Voynichese’ text: and his exemplary 1999 paper “APPLICATION OF THE LETTER SERIAL CORRELATION TEST TO THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT” is something I often suggest that researchers take a look at.

Unfortunately, since 2011 all the copies of it outside the Wayback Machine seem to have withered on the virtual vine: so I thought I’d take this opportunity to praise the man and resurrect his paper here on Cipher Mysteries, for anyone with an interest in statistical studies of the Voynich Manuscript.

So, here’s part 1 (his experimental tests and raw data) and part 2 (his conclusions): highly recommended stuff!

Incidentally, until just now I’d forgotten that Mark Perakh also ran his LSC (Letter Serial Correlation) tests on Gordon Rugg’s generated Voynichese-like text: and that it produced results that were close to those returned by the artificial gibberish text mentioned in Perakh’s paper, and quite unlike those yielded by Voynich A or B texts (which are very close to those characteristic of proper languages). In an online comment from 2004, Perakh expressed disappointment that Rugg had felt the need to gild his experimental lily for publication in Scientific American.

Is Voynichese an abjad?

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In case you’ve arrived late to the linguistics party, abjad is a term used to describe a writing style for a language (primarily) made up from consonants, where the reader is required to fill in the unwritten vowelled gaps for himself/herself. Perhaps the best-known example of this is the modern Arabic script, from the first four letters of whose alphabet the term “abjad” comes – in fact, it’s the Arabic word for “alphabet”.

So… might Voynichese be written in an abjad writing style?

Freelance systems analyst Joachim Dathe thinks so: inspired initially by the apparent similarity between the Voynich Manuscript’s (occasionally ornate) script and Arabic calligraphy, for the last few years he has been promoting and refining his theory that Voynichese is nothing more than Arabic written in an apparently unique (and rather idiosyncratic) abjad stylee.

Yet at the same time, Dathe also believes that the Voynich’s Arabic plaintext can only be extracted with difficulty, because in his particular Arabic reading of it:-
* Punctuation is absent
* Sentence structure isn’t at all obvious
* Word boundaries are often inexact or missing
* Spaces are often inserted inside words
* “Words often appear […arranged or ordered…] in a way which is not compliant with the Arabic language”
His overall conclusion: “Obviously, the texts were dictated to a writer who did not master Arabic scripts.”

For example, Dathe and his translator collaborator admit that their transliteration of the start of f1r yields a fairly jumbled (if not actually random) set of Arabic words, and offers the following interpretative translation of it (though naturally only one of many possible):-

“A dervish continues to Elate, believing that he is forgotten, and when I am surrounded by his presence, I am in Eden. I am a naught in his life. When despaired of Iman Taha (the faith of The Prophet Peace be upon him), he was purified by an illusion, this is what my faith has inspired me yesterday. I see it distantly in the image of my mother. Do we blame he who offered his life? If you deny him you pierce my eyes, and if you embrace him your excuse will be realized.“

Now, claiming a Voynichese abjad decryption that proves unrelated to the drawings and imagery (in Dathe’s case, of “religious content from Sufism”) isn’t unique: John Stojko’s (in)famous vowel-free proto-Ukrainian Voynich decryption of f18r – “What slanted Oko is doing now? Perhaps Ora’s people you are snatching. I was, I am fighting and told the truth. Oko you are fighting mischievously (evil manner). Ask this. Are you asking religion for your clan?” – springs to mind.

Of course, this comparison is hardly breaking news: Elmar Vogt noted much the same similarity in 2012, though going on to compare both sets of mangled-sounding plaintexts with Vogon poetry was perhaps a teensy bit harsh. Still, I do find it hard to disagree with Elmar’s sentiment that Dathe’s “approach is flagrantly naïve”: if there is a real, tangible difference between the way Stojko and Dathe both approached Voynichese, I certainly can’t see it. And if one is wrong for that reason, then so surely is the other.

(Remember: the long-established template for bad Voynich theories is (a) to conjure up a simple-sounding explanation, and then (b) to wrap that up in a long series of what are known as “saving hypotheses” – additional weasel-like meta-explanations that serve to explain away conflicts between that wonky core explanation and an inevitably long succession of inconvenient historical truths. Voynich theorists like to think of themselves as following in the giant decrypting footsteps of Young, Champollion, Ventris et al: but none of that august list put forward theories that needed extensive sets of saving hypotheses to explain away contingent problems.)

In many ways, though, simply grabbing hold of a given abjad script (whether Arabic or vowel-less proto-Ukrainian, if such a thing ever genuinely existed) as a starting point for decrypting the Voynich is without much doubt a poor way to proceed. The proper first question is instead this: what is the linguistic evidence that Voynichese is a script that has no vowels?

Linguists have long exercised their cunning (if you’ll excuse the reordered juxtaposition) by running text corpora through consonant-vowel analysis programmes: basically, they’re looking for hidden Markov models (HMM) with a small number of vowels that constantly recur without leaving consonants adrift in blocks (known as CVCV structure).

Reddy and Knight reported:-

“[Jacques] Guy (1991) applies the vowel-consonant separation algorithm of (Sukhotin, 1962) on two pages of the Biological section, and finds that four characters (O, A, C, G) separate out as vowels. However, the separation is not very strong, and several words do not contain these characters.“

At the same time, when they ran their own 2-state bigram HMM programme on Voynichese, the only feature they noted was the strong binding between the final letter of words (typically EVA ‘y’) and the space following it: which model they thought similar to Arabic script. So… it is Arabic, then?

Well… no. What this actually means is that a 2-state bigram HMM is woefully inadequate for analysing EVA-transcribed text. Essentially, EVA is a stroke transcription rather than a glyph transcription (hence many composite shapes are transcribed in two or three strokes): and so should never be used as the “raw” input to a statistical analysis programme. So they wasted their time using a 2-state bigram HMM: not even close. (Even if they didn’t use EVA, I would argue that a 2-state bigram HMM is thoroughly unsatisfactory for numerous other reasons, most of them connected with the behaviour of the EVA letters ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, and ‘o’.)

In fact, arguably the fundamental statistical paradox about Voynichese as a script is that while it is riddled (quite literally, I suppose) with multiple overlapping internal structures, analysts have had very little luck building up Markov models to describe its behaviour; all of which is really quite the opposite of how you’d expect a well-formed language’s script to present. Even Jorge Stolfi’s long-standing “crust-mantle-core” model falls well short of being properly explanatory about the text. So, if Kevin Knight wants something Voynichian for his 2014 summer interns to get their teeth into, surely building up properly substantial Markov models for Currier A and Currier B (oh, and labelese too) would be an excellent starting point. Sort that out and we should all be sharing turkey and pepperoni pizza by Thanksgiving. 🙂

Jacques Guy applied Sukhotin’s algorithm to a glyph transcription, and so stood a better chance of getting sensible results than Reddy and Knight: yet I think the patterns in the text tell us a very much more complicated historical story than is captured by either of these two analytical tracks.

On the one hand, I think it is plain as day that we (the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘audience’, so to speak) are supposed to ‘read’ Voynichese in part as if it were a CVCV structured (non-abjad) thing. Look at the Pisces labels: these not only have a strong CVCV structure, but 25 out of the 30 also begin with the letter ‘o’ (presumably followed by a consonant, usually a ‘t’ or ‘k’ gallows character):-

otalal / otaral / otalar / otalam / dolaram / okaram / oteosal / salols / okaldal / ykolaiin / sar.am / oty / oky.ody / oty.or / okaly / otody / otald / otal.dar / okody / opys.am / chckhhy / otaly / otal.rar / otal.dy / okeoly / okydy / okees / otalalg / okasy / otar

There is also the heavy repetition of ‘or’, ‘ar’, ‘ol’ and ‘al’ throughout the text to consider, especially in phrases such as “or oro ror”. Once you visually ‘tune in’ to this kind of pairing, I think it becomes hard not to see the text as largely CVCV structured.

On the other hand, I think it is very nearly as plain that there’s something terribly wrong with this CVCV model of Voynichese. The simplest objection is that if it is correct, then only ‘o’ and ‘a’ seem to participate in CVCV structured words, making Voynichese a vowelled language with only two genuinely combinable vowels. Which would be a nonsense, right?

So if you think the Voynichese script is directly expressing an actual natural language, you’re stuck halfway between two extrema, because it’s neither consonanty enough to be an abjad (unvowelled) script, nor vowelly enough to be a proper abugida (vowelled) script. It’s a paradox, right?

Hence I personally think the only sensible conclusion is that Voynichese is a script that is neither an abjad nor an abugida, but is instead a covertext designed to resemble a plausible-looking language script (albeitone with too few vowels to register solidly as either category). The cryptographic truth falls between these either-or categorical boundaries erected by linguists, and in a much more subtle and devious way than linguists’ tools are able to handle comfortably. Good isn’t it?

Indeed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.“

Willen Styn, the end of a thread…

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A quick update on yesterday’s Willen Styn post.

Debra Fasano very kindly took a second look at the form I received, and her sharp eyes picked up everything I missed. In her words:-

“The Port Albany was a cargo vessel and didn’t normally carry passengers so I think he was more likely a fireman/trimmer onboard the ship. The document was filled out when the ship arrived in Fremantle and the “place of abode (abroad)” would be Penarth in Wales.

There are not many non-immigrant ship arrivals which are indexed so for cargo ships like this you would need to go to State records in real life. NSW is the only State that I know of which is indexing and digitising the manifests of all ships great and small.

The month by month is pretty much complete to 1900 but after that it gets a bit patchy, however they are all online at Ancestry. On that page there is also a link to the shipping arrivals index into Sydney and as many ships went to all ports from WA to Queensland, I checked the 1919 voyages into NSW and a fireman listed as W. Styne (or whatever!) aged 34 from Holland does turn up in 1919; someone obviously had his age wrong.

The August arrival is from New York via Adelaide (and Fremantle where the form was filled out), and the September arrival into Sydney is from Bowen and Townsville so they certainly got around.

It is quite possible that he didn’t set foot on Australian soil.“

I also had an independent email follow-up from “Cymroz”, who correctly pointed out the existence of “Lord St in Penarth, near Cardiff, where his ship came from“. Thanks for that too! I think that this all hammers a sufficiently large number of nails into that thread’s coffin. Still, I’d rather know for sure it’s not him than not know at all.

One last thing: a few weeks ago, I drew up a list of all the partially open leads I could see in the Somerton Man case that I thought stood any chance of yielding anything genuinely productive. By far the best of these was trying to better understand the story behind the “Jestyn” signature: but without any “Mr Styn” to pursue in the archives, I’m now very nearly out of ideas.

Might a quite different Mr Styn / Stijn have been a patient at Royal North Shore Hospital in 1942/1943/1944? As I recall, there was a single newspaper report which said that the nurse had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to a patient: as always with journalists, that could very well have been misheard, miscopied, misreported or invented, but right now I can see very few archival avenues left to check.

Unfortunately, according to this page, it seems as though RNSH patient records are archived only back as far as 1963. Still, it might well be worth contacting the Assistant Medical Records Manager, archives can have all kinds of odd secondary records (admission books, etc).