Nick’s thoughts on the Somerton Man, Part One…

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The news of the moment is that Australian Attorney-General John Rau has refused Professor Derek Abbott’s request that the Somerton man’s body be exhumed for DNA / autosome testing, commenting that Abbott’s application wasn’t “compelling”. Well, I guess that means we’re going to have to do it the hard way, then… 🙂

So here (as long-promised) is Part One of my thoughts on the Unknown Man and his mysterious cipher note, perhaps they’ll open up some new research avenues. Overall, while I’m pretty sure my reasoning is basically sound, please feel free to disagree! (PS: I’ve included a few page references to Gerry Feltus’ book for Klaus Schmeh and other hardcore cipher mystery buffs).

[For background on the Somerton Man / Unknown Man / Taman Shud / Tamam Shud case, here’s a pair of links that should get you started]

(1) Why was the Unknown Man in Somerton? As with pretty much all historical mysteries, it is ‘within the realms of possibility’ that all the evidence that the police were (eventually) able to assemble had been consciously constructed and arranged to give a certain impression, and that the real story behind them all was entirely different. Yet while we should acknowledge that each individual piece of evidence might well have been influenced, finessed, modified or even faked, we should be trying to look through them to the overall narrative. So, I view as basically reliable the link between the Unknown Man and the copy of Taman Shud subsequently found nearby – and hence between the Unknown Man and the nurse ‘Jestyn’, whose private phone number was written in the back, and who lived close to Somerton Beach in Glenelg.

Given that a man was seen knocking at Jestyn’s door during the day before the Unknown Man’s appearance on the beach, it seems to me a wholly unremarkable conclusion that the Unknown Man almost certainly came to Glenelg specifically to visit her. Moreover, Jestyn had not long lived in Glenelg, so had had that phone number for only a short time: and must therefore have given the Unknown Man her phone number relatively recently.

(2) Where did the Unknown Man die? I think the answer – without a shadow of a doubt – is “not on the beach“. He was found propped up on Somerton beach yet with “lividity above the neck and ears” [p.204] – i.e blood pooled at the back of his head after death. If he had quietly died in the position in which he was subsequently found, gravity would have pushed his blood to his feet: hence I conclude that he died somewhere else entirely, where in fact his body was left for a while with his head below the rest of his body, before being carried to the beach and arranged in that oddly casual pose.

Moreover, Somerton Beach is sandy – so if the Unknown Man had lain on that beach for any period of time with his head at its lowest point before being physically rearranged by a random passer-by, there would surely have been sand in his hair… but there was none. As such, I disagree with the Coroner T.E.Erskine who concluded that “He died on the shore at Somerton on the 1st December, 1948.” [p.205] – rather, though the man was found dead there, I find it highly unlikely that it was the scene of his death.

No: to my mind, the only realistic scenario is the Unknown Man died somewhere else entirely and was carried to the beach – probably, from his weight, by a man. The report mentioned by Gerry Feltus [pp.143-144] of someone seen apparently doing exactly this around 10pm on the previous evening would seem to be entirely consistent with this scenario.

(3) How did the Unknown Man die? The first pathologist noted that the man was in good physical shape, and that his “heart was of normal size, and normal in every way”. There was blood in his stomach along with the remains of a pasty eaten roughly three hours before his death.

Though his spleen was significantly enlarged (3x times normal size) AKA splenomegaly, note that this is most likely a symptom of a different problem rather than the problem itself. As I understand it, your spleen can’t suddenly enlarge in a matter of a day: and given that the Unknown Man was apparently only in Somerton for less than a day, he must have arrived there with his spleen already enlarged. The lack of any obvious signs of another problem points to a problem that had just receded, quite probably a recent viral infection. So to me, the presence of an enlarged spleen implies that the Unknown Man had only just recovered from an significant illness, and that he was perhaps still in quite a fragile state. He would very probably have also had some lingering discomfort or back pain from his enlarged spleen.

(4) What was the cause of the Unknown Man’s death? It’s important to remember that coroners and pathologists repeatedly examined his body and screened his blood, looking for any faint clue that might help to narrow down the cause of his death, but with no success. Given the healthy state of his heart, the two best theories left standing (in my opinion) are (a) a deviously hard-to-pin-down poison deliberately administered either by himself or by someone else but which quickly disappeared from his system after death; or (b) an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something he had ingested, with the most notable candidate being excess sulphur dioxide used as a preservative in the pasty, which in 1948 was yet to be controlled [pp.202-203].

For me, I have to say that there is only one likely scenario I’m at all comfortable with: that while at Jestyn’s house late that afternoon, he had an unexpectedly strong allergic reaction to something in the pasty he had had for lunch (for why else would there be blood in his stomach?) In my mind, he must have laid down on a bed suffering from acute stomach cramps; but because he was so weakened by his recent illness, he unfortunately died as a result of his reaction, slumping with his head falling backwards over the edge of the bed – not upside down, but with his neck supported at an angle by the edge of the bed, leading to the distinctive lividity observed by the pathologist.

Even though Jestyn had worked as a nurse (and more on that later), I suspect she was not physically strong enough to move him from that position, so left him just as he was until her husband arrived home in the evening. I believe the Unknown Man remained on the bed until later that evening, when they carried him to the beach to pose him there, to be found in the morning.

(5) What was the Unknown Man’s personal situation? In his modest suitcase, there were stencilling tools for making signs such as Third Officers use on ships to mark baggage and crates, along with the princely sum of sixpence. It was December (the middle of the Australian summer), and his body had the remains of the kind of outdoor tan you’d expect from someone who had worked outside the previous summer, but not that summer. His clothes came from a variety of places, and in a variety of sizes (his slippers were smaller than his shoes), and most had their labels removed. The items that did have a label were marked “T. Kean” or “T. Keane”.

This has led to a lot of spy theories (“an international man of mystery who didn’t want to be identified“, etc) and conspiracy theories (“his killers removed the labels from his clothes in order to conceal his identity“, etc), none of which rings true at all to me. For me, however, the simplest explanation by a mile was simply that he was poor (if not actually destitute), and had been given these clothes by a charity. The original owners’ name tags would have been removed by the charity before being given to the needy.

Furthermore, given the probable connection with sea-faring implied by the stencilling tools in his case, my prediction is that he was given these clothes by a local Mission to Seafarers or Stella Maris branch.

So: as far as I can see, the most likely overall scenario is that the Unknown Man had recently had a serious viral infection, travelled to see Jestyn in Glenelg, had a pasty for lunch, was taken ill with an allergic reaction, died on her bed, but was posed on Somerton beach that night. But… why was he there at all, and what of his mysterious enciphered note? More on that in Part Two…

Vernon Lee’s imagined Renaissance history…

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I don’t quite know how I manage it but I do keep on tripping over odd stuff, not unlike Christine Jins’ sensitively made peppermill, something definitely not to be sneezed at.

So here’s this week’s microdose of historical weirdness for you, the supernatural Victorian fiction of “engaged feminist” lesbian Vernon Lee (the pen-name of Violet Paget), such as “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady“. All of which would be a mere footnote to a footnote, were it not for her curious 1895 book “Renaissance Fancies and Studies“, a collection of oddly imagined essays on Art History.

One of its sections is entitled “A SEEKER OF PAGAN PERFECTION : BEING THE LIFE OF DOMENICO NERONI, PICTOR SACRILEGUS”, and is (to my eyes, at least) a bit like a Forrest Gump take on the Quattrocento (there was never a painter called “Domenico Neroni”). In Paget’s imagination, Neroni is “under the influence of that humanist Filarete“, who has had “long and adventurous journeys […] in India and the East, and in Greece, returning to Italy only when Constantinople fell before the Turks. During these years he had acquired immense learning, considerable wealth, and a vaguely sinister reputation. […] He was busying his last year in a great work of fancy and erudition…”

This turns out to be not the real Antonio Averlino “Filarete” (despite all the borrowed similarities), but a “Niccolo Filarete” invented for her task. And his book?

“The book of Filarete, of which the rare copies are among the most precious relics of the Renaissance, was a strange mixture of romance, allegory, and encyclopædic knowledge, such as had been common in the Middle Ages, and was still fashionable during the revival of letters, which merely added the element of classical learning. Like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of Francesco Colonna, of which it was doubtless the prototype, the Alcandros of Filarete, though never carried beyond the first volume, is an amazing and wearisome display of the author’s archæological learning. It contains exact descriptions of all the rarities of ancient art, and of things Oriental which he had seen, and pages of transcripts from obscure Latin and Greek authors, descriptive of religious ceremonies; varied with Platonic philosophy, Decameronian obscenities, in laboured pseudo-Florentine style, and Dantesque visions, all held together by the confused narrative of an allegorical journey performed by the author. It is profusely ornamented with woodcuts, representing architectural designs of a fantastic, rather Oriental description, restorations of ancient buildings, reproductions of antique inscriptions and designs, and last, but far from least, a certain number of small compositions, of Mantegnesque quality, but Botticellian charm, showing the various adventures of the hero in terrible woods, delicious gardens, and in the company of nymphs, demigods, and allegorical personages.”

Paget’s pretend Filarete was also busy in Rome, the place where the real Filarete was thrown into jail:-

Strange rumours were current in Rome of unholy festivities in which Filarete and other learned men—some of those whom Paul II. had thrown into prison—had once taken part. They had not merely laid their tables and spread their couches according to descriptions contained in ancient authors; but, crowned with roses, laurel, myrtle, or parsley, had sung hymns to the heathen gods, and, it was whispered, poured out libations and burned incense in their honour.

Paget has her Filarete and Neroni do all manner of unspeakable pagan things before coming to a sticky end in July 1488, allegedly noted in (the real) diary of Stefano Infessura (1435-1500). For a bit of fun, I had a look at Stefano Infessura’s real diary entry for 1488 (p.235 or so, if you’re interested) to see if there was some kind of actual event of the day that Paget had woven into her story… but nothing particularly jumped out at me.

Having myself spent such a long time wondering whether the real Filarete might have assembled a curious book of secrets (enciphered as the Voynich Manuscript), it is decidedly peculiar to read Paget merrily assembling countless historical fragments (such as the Libro Architettonico and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii!) into her own faux collage about a similar sounding book. Enough footnotery!

Letters hidden in Voynich plants (yet again)…

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I recently found an old email from Sander Manche mentioning his Voynich blog: going through its pages just now, one particular post on letters hidden in Voynich plants jumped out at me. To be precise, it discussed a single symbol that appears to have been hidden in the middle of the plant drawings on both f20r…

…and f32r…

Sander wondered whether this might be an ultra-rare Voynichese letter. It’s not, but I think it’s something even better: a “p”-like letter that appears both in the marginalia and hidden in a separate Voynich plant drawing. I discussed this subject at some length back in 2010, but the upshot is that f9v (the “viola tricolor” page, A.K.A. “love in idleness“), the marginalia on f66r (once) and the marginalia on f116v (twice) all contain this same character. Here’s what they look like (ignore the f4r part):-

Incidentally, there’s an interesting 2011 page from P. Han describing the viola on f9v, concluding (as I think others have done) that it was drawn upside down from life by an artist rather than a botanist, who tried to depict both the front and back views of the plant.

What are these “p”-like shapes for? Why did the author(s) bother to add them? I don’t necessarily buy into René Zandbergen’s idea that the letter-triple on f9v reads “rot”, an instruction to a German-speaking colourist to paint the drawing’s petals red. (For a start, viola tricolor isn’t even slightly red.) But all the same, I’d really like to see multispectral scans of f9v so that we can better work out exactly what is going on there. For now, f9v remains a mystery.

All three appear in Currier A / Hand 1 herbal pages, but otherwise have no obvious connection: I’d suggest that these might have been the first (“primum“) pages of individual quires in the original plaintext. That is, I suspect that these “p”-shapes might in some way be encrypted ‘Herbal A’ quire marks. Fascinatingly, the shapes appear to have been added in a slightly different ink (as per the McCrone report,), so perhaps at a different time: which means that a multispectral scan should probably be able to de-layer all such writing.

Personally, I think the presence of Voynichese in the marginalia (both on f116v and on f17r, with the latter only visible under a UV black-lamp) was already pretty close to a slam-dunk proof that most of the marginalia were added by the original author. But in my opinion, also finding the same “p”-like shape apparently concealed in three plant drawings basically makes this whole link a dead cert.

The bigger point here is that at some time, my long-standing inference that nearly all the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia were added by the original author(s) will probably become some kind of grudgingly-held mainstream opinion: but what of it? So what?

Personally, I think this is a really big deal, because it elevates the whole “michiton oladabas” tangled mess on f116v from a secondary issue (i.e. “it’s something that could conceivably have just happened to the Voynich Manuscript, so we needn’t really worry about it”) to a primary issue (i.e. “it’s an integral part of the original manuscript and we need to understand it”).

A single multispectral scan of f116v would take less than 10 seconds to perform, and might well open a completely different set of research doors to us. Of course, I’m still a bit disappointed that the Beinecke turned my multispectral proposals down in 2006, but hey: doubtless they’ll catch up with me in the end. I’m normally eight years or so ahead of the game, so set your alarm clock for 2013! 🙂

Update: having put all this together, I discovered that (of course) some of it was anticipated by a nice page posted by Reuben Ogburn in 2004. Oh well!

The Lady Magdalene De Lancey ciphers…

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Here’s a delightful little cipher story that has so far defeated the NSA’s cryptologists. Can you do better?

In 1819, Lady Magdalene De Lancey, whose first husband Colonel Sir William De Lancey had died at Waterloo shortly after their honeymoon, was busy being wooed by the (presumably) no less dashing Captain Henry Harvey. While the latter settled his affairs in preparation for their marriage, she assailed him with letters nearly every day. What is nice here is that her lovesick correspondence was retained in a family archive, where a few years ago it was found by David Miller while researching his (2000) book Lady De Lancey at Waterloo. But what is curious is that some of the letters contain short sections apparently in cipher…

Transcriptions of coded phrases used by Magdalene Hall De Lancey when writing to her fiancé Henry Harvey.
Note: the letters are in the possession of Philip Davies and have been transcribed by David Miller and Sally Smith.

Letter #6: 4/5 February 1819

I told you to the Tytlers, & George St but I find myself invariably the worse of it – so I refuse all without exception of any but Geo: St – such kind parents deserve a little sacrifice – I dine there today – My Mother talks to me wt such delight of all my prospects shtesirreshteltdtyetoogdterldcofcshtsr glateshedeshdgtrshitdhlyskbtwisterhdgthis Oh I forgot I forgot – I beg 10000 pardons – (it was a joke)

[Alternative transcription: Mteirrethteltdtyetoogterloefeshtrplatesheideshdytehtdhlyskhtwiserhyithis
]

Letter #9: 8/9 February 1819

Lying down in the carriage is not comfortable — nor to be wished as we must not think of travelling at night — I know where I shall lye when I need rest, & I do not care for any one else you know. Oh that we were in the carriage, anywhere! This delay, this probation thatlydsrsofseedltilingsorgtrdbghiliglingsolersafftchiy Gfetdjsitlotltertelrleslity
pdgrebrditlosefdrelrsethligksofillttle’selrg but we shall be much much happier for the delay — we shall know each other thoroughly — we shall begin with an acquaintance of years, from the interest & constancy of our present communications —

Letter #12: 14 February 1819

You must allow me, henry, to look up to you as to a being superior in as much as is good for me – do not fear, my beloved – at moments when we are playful & alone & relaxed & easy I shall be your equal altogether & as fearless & familiar & impertinent as a spoilt child, but this is not at all incompatible with deference for your opinion & respectful attention to your wishes ridthjdbgdtehtetsisovdlgansdtofdrhtghldsdbtdilijche-
soerdreisgdrdtatderihjsthit’sIBitbdersjchrtdthsdpsprotis&shojosbtjeexptrtiyleitltsbijte besides, Henry, I cannot lean unless I feel the power of my support – & I positively insist on leaning on you – I am all feminine – I have no independent powers, naturally – they have been forced up & called forth by circumstances & they have, like other unnatural & forced cultivation left the stem weaker than ever – I am as a honeysuckle which creeps & scrambles all over the tree near which it takes root –

On the one hand, it’s completely plausible that these are in cipher. David Miller wonders whether Magdalene met General Sir George Scovell at Waterloo, the man famously responsible for cracking Napoleon’s codes. (Yes, Scovell could possibly have given Magdalene some kind of cryptographic tip for keeping her correspondence secret… but all the same, that does seem a touch heavy-handed to me.)

On the other hand, they may not be in cipher at all. Sally Smith (whose book on Lady Helen Hall [Magdalene’s mother] is due next year) suggests that these odd little sections might simply be textual expressions of Magdalene’s frustration at the limitations of polite language, and that her husband-to-be would understand completely what she was alluding to in context. That is, he would have known from context what was frustrating his wife-to-be without her actually having to name names. Lady Magdalene does quickly follow the cipher-like sequence in the first letter with “(it was a joke)“, so perhaps this is the safest interpretation?

All the same, I do get an odd sense of things poking through the mix (and it’s not just the few actual words that are embedded in the ciphertext-like sequences), and of sense rather than merely nonsense. The first sequence appears to relate to what Magdalene’s mother was saying to her about her prospects; the second to Magdalene’s feelings about (presumably) her sexual frustration caused by the temporary separation from her fiance; while the third I’m not really sure about. The fact that there are characters on the pages in the places where they are does make sense… it’s just that the words as formed by those characters don’t.

The bigger problem is that they don’t make any obvious cryptological sense. The NSA Historian published at least some of them on the NSA’s internal e-message history page asking for people to try to crack them (for inclusion in David Miller’s book), but as yet nobody has succeeded.

So… what do you think? Lovesick random scrawls or calculated encipherment? Reading beyond the short extracts above, I think it’s fair to say that Lady Magdalene De Lancey’s thoughts quickly range from hot flushes to cool calculation: she thinks in a very multimodal (dare I say heteroscedastic?) way, making it hard to pin a single interpretational tail on her historical donkey.

Personally, I’m kind of stuck in the middle here. Even though I’m sure that Sally Smith has transcribed these accurately as possible as characters, I’d much rather see the cipher-like sections for myself before forming an opinion. There must be a thousand ways of steganographically hiding short texts in plain sight (upside-down, left-right mirrored, different inks, embellishments, marks, dots, strokes, pinholes, etc), and my nagging suspicion is that Lady Magdalene may well have employed one such trick to highlight letters within the long random-looking sequences to form her (much shorter) secret message. Not sophisticated, but clever enough to get the point across to her beloved. Hopefully, we shall see… 🙂

Kryptos sculpture update…

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Given that several living people know exactly what it says, I don’t think it would be entirely right to classify the fourth (unbroken) cipher on the “Kryptos” sculptures outside the CIA building in Langley VA as a “cipher mystery”. From my point of view, it’s not so much a case of “what does it say?” as “when we will find out?”

All the same, here’s a link to a New York Times news item from late 2010 you might possibly have missed, telling how its sculptor Jim Sanborn is (basically) getting tired of waiting for Elonka Dunin to crack its message. 🙂 As a result, he’s now released a few letters from K4’s plaintext: BERLIN. Incidentally, I found the story via Slashdot, whose comment cup brimmeth over – as ever – with Ovaltine references (such as “The mug is round. The jar is round. They should call it Roundtine”, etc).

Regardless, the Kryptos cipher sculpture has four parts: K1 and K2 are both polyalphabetic Vigenere ciphers (keywords: “Kryptos, Palimpsest” and “Kryptos, Abscissa” respectively), while K3 is a transposition cipher. Sanborn has said that the first three parts hold clues to K4: e.g. because K3 is a (slightly wobbly) version of Howard Carter’s account of the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, it seems fairly likely to me that the sentence that originally followed it (“wonderful things” or “yes, it is wonderful”) is connected with K3, perhaps as a keyword.

One of the things making K4 tricky to break is that it is a meagre 97 characters long: here it is with the revealed partial plaintext next to it (letters 64 to 69) that Sanborn has given us:-

...........................OBKR ...........................----
UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO -------------------------------
TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP ----------------------------BER
VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR LIN----------------------------

What, you may ask, do I make of all this? Well, the implication would seem to be that this is neither a transposition cipher (such as K3) nor indeed (if there is some kind of progressivist increment from K1 and K2) a straightforward polyalpha. Furthermore, given that Sanborn appears to be expressing some kind of impatience, it seems slightly unlikely to me that there is a further (as yet unrevealed) part of the cipher installed in the CIA’s grounds.

Of course, it’s not a monoalpha (IN –> TT): and though 6 doubled letters (BB QQ SS SS ZZ TT) is slightly above chance for a 97 character text, that’s not hellishly improbable. Really, it does looks a lot like a keyworded Vigenere polyalpha once again… but it apparently is not. So what is it?

I don’t know: but if you think this is something you’d like to try cracking, there’s a (remarkably active) Kryptos newsgroup on Yahoo that would seem to be just perfect for you. Good luck and happy hunting!

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! 😉

Heteroscedasticity and ciphers…

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Heteroscedasticity – now there’s a word you don’t see very often (thanks to Rosco Paterson for kindly plonking it in my path). Which is a pity, because it’s a particularly useful concept that might help us crack several longstanding cipher mysteries.

The idea behind it is not too far from the old joke about the statistician with his feet in the oven and his head in the fridge, who – on average – felt very comfortable. A set of numbers is heteroscedastic if it simultaneously contains different (‘hetero-’) subgroups such that (for example) their average value falls between the groups. As a result, looking to that average for enlightenment as to the nature of those two separate subgroups is probably not going to do you much good.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that a lot of statistical properties implicitly rely on the data to be analyzed not having this property. That is, for data with multiple modes or states, the consequent heteroscedasticity is likely to mess up your statistical reasoning. Though you’ll still get plausible-looking results, there’s a high chance they’ll be of no practical use. So for cipher systems in general, any hint of multimodality should be a heteroscedastic alarm bell, a warning that your statistical toolbox may be as much use as a wet fish for tightening a bolt.

Plenty of Voynich Manuscript (‘VMs’) researchers will be sagely nodding their heads at this point, because they know all too well that the plethora of statistical analyses performed so far on it has failed to yield much of consequence. Could this be because its ‘Voynichese’ text heteroscedastically ‘hops’ between states? Cipher Mysteries regulars will know I’ve long suspected there’s some kind of state machine at play, but I’ve yet to see any full-on analysis of the VMs with this in mind.

Historically, the first proper ciphering state machine was Alberti’s 1465 cipher disk. He placed one alphabet on a stator (a static disk) and another on a rotor (a rotating disk), rotating the latter according to some system pre-agreed between encipherer and decipherer, e.g. rotating it after every couple of words, or after every vowel, etc.

Even if you don’t happen to buy in to my Averlino hypothesis (but don’t worry if you don’t, it’s not mandatory here), 1465 isn’t hugely far from the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum radiocarbon dating. It could well be that state machine cryptography was in the air: perhaps Alberti was building on an earlier, more experimental cipher he had heard of, but with an overtly Florentine, Brunelleschian clockwork gadget twist.

As an aside, there are plenty of intellectual historians who have suggested that the roots of Alberti’s cipher disk lie (for example) in Ramon Llull’s circular diagrams and conceptual machines: in a way, one might argue that all Alberti did was collide Llull’s stuff with the more hands-on Quattrocento Florentine machine-building tradition, and say “Ta-da!” 🙂

All the same, we do know that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher is not an Albertian polyalphabetic cipher: but if it is multimodal, how should we look for evidence of it?

A few years ago when my friend Glen Claston was laboriously making his own transcription of the VMs, he loosely noticed that certain groups of symbols and even words seemed to phase in and out, as if there was a higher-level structure underlying its text. Was he glimpsing raw heteroscedasticity, arising from some kind of state machine clustering? For now this is just his cryptological instinct, not a rigorous proof: and it is entirely true he may have been influenced by the structure of Leonell Strong’s claimed decryption (which introduced a new cipher alphabet every few lines). Despite all that, I’m happy to take his observation at face value: and that Voynichese may well be built around a higher-level internal state structure that readily confounds our statistical cryptanalyses.

So, the big question here is whether it is possible to design tests to explicitly detect multimodality ‘blind’. The problem is that even though this is done a lot in econometrics (there was even a Nobel Prize for Economics awarded for work to do with heteroscedasticity), economic time series are surely quite a different kettle of monkeys to ciphertexts. Perhaps there’s a whole cryptanalytical literature on detecting heteroscedasticity, please leave a comment here if you happen to know of this!

I don’t know what the answer to all this is: it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, without really being able to resolve to my own satisfaction. Make of it what you will!

At the same time, there’s also a spooky echo with the Zodiac Killer’s Z340 cipher here. I recently wrote some code to test for the presence of homophone cycles in Z340, and from the results I got I strongly suspect that its top half employs quite a different cipher to the bottom – the homophone cycles my code suggested for the two halves were extremely different.

Hence it could well be that most statistical analyses of Z340 done to date have failed to produce useful results because of the confoundingly heteroscedastic shadow cast by merging (for example) two distinct halves into a single ciphertext. How could we definitively test whether Z340 is formed of two halves? Something else to think about! 🙂

The Queen goes crypto…

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In all my years of high-velocity web-browsing, I’ll honestly admit I’d never stumbled across www.royal.gov.uk, “The official website of the The British Monarchy. At first, I found it all a little bit eery, somewhat like finding mafia.it (which incidentally has some rather nice ASCII art in the HTML source).

The reason I was there was that a few days ago, I’d stumbled across a Slashdot news story I’d missed:Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge from July 2011. This described how the Queen had released The Agent X Code Book Challenge, “aimed at getting children [specifically aged 13-16] interested in cryptography”. It was produced to accompany the Queen’s opening of a memorial at Bletchley Park, which was covered well in an I Programmer web news-story.

Naturally, I decided to download this Code Challenge from the Monarchy’s website to try out on my 7 year old son: though he needed a little bit of help to get going, he quickly got the hang of it, and actually quite enjoyed it.

There are issues, of course. For one, the “Agent X” of the title is more of a 1950s conceit than a 2011 street name, arguably leaving that side of the whole presentation a little bit too stiff-collared for contemporary yoof. Similarly, the message itself does read as if it had been transcribed from a gramophone recording, which also doesn’t really help. Finally, there isn’t actually any cryptography as such, but rather just using a very WWII-like phrase table and letter table to decipher a series of messages (and even there, the phrase “Bletchley Park” appears three times, twice with exactly the same letters).

In short, I suspect it’s more likely to stimulate interest in WW II history than in cryptography per se: so if GCHQ had some kind of school-age outreach in mind with this, I think they’ll end up quite disappointed.

All the same, it was all worth it simply for one comment on Slashdot. Amidst all the normal “be sure to drink your Ovaltine” snarkiness and noise you’d expect to find there, Nicko van Someren (whose brother Alex I happen to know well) simply commented this:

I had the pleasure of meeting HRH the Duke of Edinburgh at an event once and, upon hearing that I worked in cryptography, he told me about his time working signals in the British navy during the second world war. He said he had always been fascinated by the operation of the British TypeX equipment that he used back then. I don’t suppose that he did any code breaking but he certainly was using codes well before the Cypherpunks came along.

So while my son happily put down the Agent X code book to go back learning how to draw manga and/or playing that week’s Wii game and/or whatever else he was so busily into that day, the picture I got from the whole thing was one of Prince Philip not just playing at crypto (like so many of the Slashdot trolls), but actually using it in the field. That’s real cipher history for you.

HLHL DCDC DMDM HWHW KHKH AQAQ HMHM!

Review of Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” (Tamam Shud) book…

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Though I’ve blogged about the Tamam Shud / Taman Shud case before, it’s still very far from closed. The man found on South Australia’s Somerton Beach in December 1948 remains unidentified, the nature of his death continues to be unresolved, his relationship with the nurse “Jestyn” is still not fully locked down, while as for the curious note tucked into his pocket…

MRGOABABD
MLIAOI
MTBIMPANETP
MLIABOAIAQC
ITTMTSAMSTGAB

…it’s as mysterious as ever.

Arguably the best starting point for people intrigued by this whole story is to watch a 1978 documentary on the subject from Australia’s ABC channel. Handily, it has been posted in three 10-minute sections on YouTube: 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3. Because so much of the police evidence has been destroyed over the years, the great thing about this film is that you get to actually see things in The Unknown Man’s suitcase (right at the start of part 2), which I for one found particularly interesting.

What I suspect you’d really want to leaf through next would be a dossier on the case, carefully laid out by a former policeman who had been assigned to it, and who went to some lengths to be factual, not judgmental. If my guess is even remotely close, then I’d say you simply have to get yourself a copy of G. M. Feltus’ (2010) book “The Unknown Man: A suspicious death at Somerton Beach“.

Yes, Gerry Feltus was indeed a policeman assigned between 2002 and 2004 (when he retired) to the Somerton Man cold case: and I think he does an admirable job of bringing together both the numerous strands of (often painfully thin) evidence and the various claims and theories as to the dead man’s identity.

It’s entirely true that his lengthy roll call of dud theories in the middle of the book can get very slightly wearing: but he’s clearly trying to give armchair mystery solvers everything they could reasonably need to get under the skin of this peculiar case, and so arguably couldn’t present it in any other way. Recommended!

Of course, there’s an extensive Wikipedia page for you to go through too (frankly, I’d recommend pouring yourself a nice glass of lightly-oaked Australian Chardonnay and watching the ABC documentary before you do anything so completist), though it’s not really a patch on Gerry’s 200+-page book.

Incidentally, there’s a lot of recent speculation that the Unknown Man may well have been the father of Jestyn’s son (there’s now even talk of exhuming bodies and performing DNA tests). Though my own belief is that this is – for entirely separate reasons – most likely true, I also think that this is missing the point. The right first step would be to do much more to explore the Somerton’s Man’s life before his death: thanks to Gerry Feltus, I think we can tell a great deal about him, and make some well-educated hunches.

In a few days’ time, I’ll post about what I think the odd cipher message contains, as well as my thoughts on the Unknown Man’s life, his travels in Australia after the Second World War, and his premature death (yes, I’m quite sure he was poisoned). But that’s by the by: for now all that’s important is that I think anyone with an interest in this enduring cipher mystery should buy themselves a copy of Gerry’s book from his Australian website and try to make up their own mind!

Copiale Cipher update…

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Today’s New York Times has a short article by John Markoff on the Copiale Cipher, the oculist secret society initiatory document recently cracked by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer. I discussed it in reasonable depth on this blog a few days ago, click there if you want to know more.

I do suspect that there must be hundreds of uncracked ciphers like the Copiale Cipher (though typically much smaller) languishing in <cliche>dusty European archives</cliche>, so it would be excellent to give people a chance to crack them (not just Kevin Knight & his student cadre 🙂 ).

So, archivists of the world, email me scans of your uncracked ciphers, let’s see what cipher mysteries we can crack together!

PS: before I forget, The Curse of the Voynich should finally be back on sale next week, so when it’s in I’ll email a reminder to those people who have asked to buy a copy. At £9.95, it’s far cheaper than the £32.79, £171.98, and £270.46 quoted on Amazon Marketplace! =:-o