Here’s a nice little thing that might possibly earn a Cipher Mysteries reader 100 US$!

Once upon a time in Copenhagen, a bright mathematics professor called Julius Petersen briefly stepped into the world of codes and ciphers. He wrote and published a pamphlet on cryptography called Système cryptographique, as well as a series of eight fortnightly articles on the subject for the weekly magazine NÆR OG FJERN (‘NEAR AND FAR AWAY’) – these ran from issue 150 (16 May 1875) to issue 164 (22 August 1875).

Though the articles did not actually say Petersen had written them, they are very much à la main de Petersen: and according to Professor Bjarne Toft, “we know from other sources that [Petersen] was the author (or one of the authors)“.

The point of interest for us is that the author(s) signed his / their name(s) in this unusual encrypted fashion:-

By 46, 9, 4-57, 3, 5.

This has left Bjarne Toft so mystified that he has offered money to anyone who can crack it:-

Does the dash ‘-‘ indicate that there are two authors? If so, the other could be Frederik Bing, who was an extremely good mathematician and a close friend of Petersen. Bing was mathematical director in the state life insurance company. And are the numbers dates? Or what??

I have offered a prize of 100 US$ to anyone who can give a convincing solution (convincing for me that means!).

Here are some things that might possibly help you crack such a tiny cryptogram (even smaller than the Dorabella Cipher!):

  • Petersen’s full name was “Julius Peter Christian Petersen”, so his initials were presumably JPCP;
  • Petersen’s friend’s full name was “Frederik Moritz Bing”, so his initials were FMB;
  • The cryptogram looks an awful lot like a tiny book cipher (along the lines of the Beale Papers);
  • If it is a book code, no obvious attempt has been made to use high numbers;
  • If it is a book code, common letters would presumably tend to appear as smaller numbers, less common letters slightly larger numbers, with extremely rare letters potentially very large numbers: so the pattern here would seem to be “rare common common dash rare common common“;
  • Surely the number one candidate book for testing the “book code” hypothesis would be Petersen’s Système cryptographique. Yet Worldcat lists no copies in the UK, so it would be down to someone to have a look at one of the scant few copies owned elsewhere…

Over to you, armchair cryptogram detectives…

With “write what you know” apparently ringing loudly in his ears, Brad Kelln constructed his fictional protagonist Jake Tunnel to be, just like him, a Nova Scotia-based psychologist (and is Kelln married with young kids too? Almost certainly). But probably unlike Kelln, Tunnel’s best friend at college Benicio Valori constantly globetrots on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the lookout for claimed miracles, in a very Gabriel-Byrne-in-Stigmata (1999) kind of way.

Hence when an autistic boy on a primary school tour of the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is shown the Voynich Manuscript in a permanent glass display case [this never actually happens, but never mind] and is miraculously able to read it, Benicio is sent by the CDF’s morally-suspect-yet-self-harmingly-devout Cardinal Espinosa to check it out. Once again, all very Alfred-Molina-in-The-Da-Vinci-Code (2006), though of course this is no more than a slightly updated version of the centuries-old ‘wicked Jesuit’ trope for whom the (holy) end always justifies the (unholy) means. Oh, and the autistic kid is pretty much Simon Lynch in Mercury Rising (1998), who goes on a similarly mad road trip with Bruce Willis. La-di-da.

Rapidly, the boy is revealed to be the last of the Nephilim, a race of (what X-Files scriptwriters would term) ‘human-alien genetic hybrids’ fleetingtly mentioned in the Bible and about which Erich von Däniken has spent the majority of his life writing phantasmagorically imaginative historical nonsense. And hence the Voynich Manuscript is revealed to be the Nephilim Bible, a document so earth-shattering it would Rock The Very Foundations Of The Church If Anyone Were To Read It And Reveal Its Secrets etc.

Complicating the plot are Shemhazai and Azazel, the two cursed ‘Grigori’ aliens / angels who landed on Earth seventy generations ago and whose intergalactic miscegenatory misdeeds quite literally spawned all this trouble. Despite having awesomely glowing megatronic powers, the pair mooches around the book, languidly chasing after Benicio and the boy in an almost Rastafari laid-back stylee. And complicating the matter yet further are the CDF’s dysfunctional twin thugs Maury and Jeremy, who are also tasked with chasing after the protagonists.

Kelln’s book covers a lot of ground and tells its story briskly, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated by it in two main ways. Firstly, even though it’s written by a hard-working forensic psychologist, none of the characters presents any noticeable character depth or development: sure, they move around the board rapidly enough, but they basically remain Ship, Boot, Dog, Iron, Hat, and Car for the duration of the game. Secondly, there are so many parallels between “In Tongues of the Dead” and Kevin Smith’s thoroughly enjoyable (1999) film Dogma that it’s hard not to see Kelln’s book as a dourly humourless anagram of the latter. For example, Shemhazai and Azazel are basically Bartleby (also a Grigori) and Loki crossed with Jay and Silent Bob; Maury and Jeremy are basically the Stygian Triplets; Metatron and Bethany Sloane are basically Harold Grower and Jake Tunnel; and so on.

As you can probably tell, I’m getting a huge screenplays-circa-1999 buzz off Kelln’s book, and not in a particularly good way: ultimately, it seems like he has fallen into the old trap of writing not about what you know, but about what you have seen at the movies. Brad writes perfectly well – but given that he’s a psychologist, where did all the psychology end up? 🙁

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 3 – “Unjust Desserts”

“I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?”, said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket’s material through her Swiss army knife’s magnifying glass.

“No, it was my grandfather’s – Mani Harvitz, he was a WWI codebreaker. He knew John Manly well, so must have known all about the Voynich Manuscript, I guess.”

“Hmmm… so why’s it in such good condition?”

“Ah”, said Graydon as he leaned over to pick up his club sandwich, “there’s a family story. On the boat back to the US from some European trip in the late 1920s, my grandpa fell seriously ill – and that turned out to be the tail end of the whole encephalitis lethargica epidemic.”

“Oh my God”, said Emm appalled, “the whole Oliver Sacks ‘Awakenings‘ thing, right?”

“Right. My grandfather stayed in a kind of catatonic state for decades – he died before I was born. Somehow I ended up inheriting his favourite jacket.”

Emm paused, looking at him through narrowed eyes, furious mental calculations plainly rattling through her head. The moment she turned her magnified gaze around to the small piece of parchment. Graydon stuffed an ungraciously large lump of sandwich into his mouth, trying hard not to moan with pleasure at his accelerated relief from starvation.

“Well, at least we know what he was doing”, Emm said, her shoulders relaxing a little as she began to take off her white cotton gloves.

“Errrm… which was… what?” Graydon replied, trying hard not to open his overfilled mouth too widely.

“For a start, he was visiting the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – the Czech National Library, you can tell from the handwritten shelfmark. And here’s the giveaway he was stealing this”, she continued, pointing at the vellum’s left hand side , “the clean edge where Mani cut it out – probably with a smuggled-in razor blade – before stashing it in his secret pocket.”

 “Jeez, so now I’m on a lunch date with Gil Grissom. Did you happen to notice any anomalous beetle larvae?”

“You ate your sandwich first, you tell me. Was the salad unusually… crunchy?”

But now it was Graydon’s turn to go vague and starry-eyed, triggered by a cascade of half-memories from his capacious mental warehouse of Voynich trivia. “I reckon the connection here is… Edith Rickert. See, my grandpa had had this massive crush on her from the codebreaking office, but she was utterly devoted to working with John Manly and so turned him down: basically, Mani got married on the rebound. I went through Rickert’s letters in the archives: the last one from him promised to travel up and show her something she’d be very interested in. Didn’t say what it was, though.”

“So, if Edith Rickert was into the Voynich…”

“Way back then, Wilfrid Voynich called it his ‘Roger Bacon Manuscript’, but I don’t think she was ever fooled.”

“OK, whatever the damn manuscript was called, it seems pretty likely to me that the thing hidden in this jacket was a Voynich-related fragment your grandpa stole from the Czech museum library to try to impress Rickert.”  Emm said as she finally reached over to her plate. “You know, exciting her mind to get her into bed.”

“People do recommend that, but honestly, it’s never worked for me yet”, said Graydon. “Personally, I tend to find a nice lunch far more effective.”

Emm laughed, nearly choking on her sandwich, before frowning and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don’t you get any ideas – it would take much more than a club sandwich to get me into bed.”

“Whatever you say, Scully. Oh, the desserts here are pretty good, by the way.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

“And you’d definitely have to promise not to wear those cotton gloves”, continued Graydon grinning. “That would be wrong on so many levels.”

“Well, as long as I get to keep my magnifying glass and ruler, though.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

They both paused awkwardly, eyes scanning the other, resolutely reading between each other’s lines.

“Look”, said Emm as she began putting her things back into her clutch bag, “I’ve… I’ve got to get back to work now, before Mrs Kurtz starts punching the film crew. Could turn ugly.”

“That’s good”, said Graydon, noticing that even he didn’t believe the sound of his own words. “Ummm… thanks for dismantling my jacket and giving me a whole new research lead. Might even save my PhD. Oh, and I’d be very happy to help you with your cleaning, any time.”

“That’s great”, she replied, but her face was looking away as she stood up to leave. “Anyway, the Voynich film crew are filming an interview with Marina Lyonne this afternoon, I guess you probably know her, right?”

Graydon’s face dropped faster than a Wile E. Coyote grand piano. “Yeah, I know her”.

Ouch-a-rama.

His Voynich über-skeptic ex-wife was in town.

Oh, Marina, Marina, Marina: she knew the Beinecke curators very well – far too well, in fact  and she had a score of scores to settle with him. And this was more than just a bad moment for her to turn up wielding her +10 Axe of Grudgery, this was surely the worst imaginable moment.

Whoever said “one step forward, two steps back” was surely wearing X-ray specs, looking at the workings of the heart…

…writing a letter? In what is probably the hidden-writing news story of the year, “The UK spy agency MI6 experimented with using semen as invisible ink“, under the steady hand of department head Mansfield Cumming. “Next time you’re banging out a message, 007, use a pen.”

(As James Bond himself would say, “this stuff writes itself“).

The original story is here, but you’ll probably enjoy reading the comments on Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post more, as they basically run through most of the spy-who-loved-me seminal puns you’re ever likely to come across.

Just so you know, this is one of the newspaper-friendly saucy tidbits culled from the just-published MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 by Keith Jeffery, who is no doubt fully aware that the pen is (indeed) mightier than the sword. 🙂

Here’s a great “hidden history” news story from Der Spiegel (in English), that manages to link Ptolemy, Roman trading, Istanbul, Nazi history, and archaeology – well worth reading!

A long-standing mystery about the early history of Germany is that nobody has really had much of an idea where its towns were. Yet the Romans left plenty of references to trading with miscellaneous German peoples, to crossing Germany to get to the Baltic, to arranging politically expedient assassinations, etc: and every once in a while a huge cache of buried treasure turns up. So there plainly were people there… but where were their towns?

Helpfully, the famous 2nd Century CE Alexandrian Greek geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included a nice-looking map of ‘Germania Magna’ in his Geographia, which almost certainly drew on many earlier documents and accounts (Ptolemy never went there himself). Frustratingly, however, the countless attempts by scholars to make the towns indicated there match up to modern towns have failed to please, perhaps because the earliest copy of it they had access to was medieval, dating only to around 1300. Hence the map became infamous as something of an “enchanted castle”, a Voynich Manuscript-like intellectual quicksand apparently designed for PhDs to drown themselves in.

However, a Berlin-based team of academic surveyors and mappers now claim – after a six-year struggle – to have finally worked out how to remap Ptolemy’s 94 German town coordinates onto actual coordinates. What made this possible was the dramatic discovery in the Topkapı Palace library in Istanbul of an earlier copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia (a reproduction of which is due for publication in 2011): the team’s results appear in a new book “Germania und die Insel Thule” (“Germania and the Island of Thule”).

Incidentally, I noted a while back that Professor Gülru Necipoglu had mentioned at a conference in 2006 that a new inventory of the Topkapı Palace library had been uncovered, so perhaps this copy of the Geographia turned up as part of some wider efforts at carrying out more systematic documentation there. Let’s hope so, as many historians believe that this library is likely to contain many more as-yet-unknown historical treasures.

Generally, I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised by this story: firstly, because I’d have thought that the #1 thing any sensible 21st century historical geographer would do would be to map the datapoints into Google Earth for everyone to see; and secondly, because it fails to mention that this ought to yield a bonanza for metal detector hardware shops in Germany, as countless armchair treasure hunters dust off ancient Teutonic myths for clues to legendary gold and silver caches to unearth. Happy hunting!

PS: a great big hat-tip to Matthew Kagle for passing the story on, much appreciated! 🙂

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 2 – “Game On”

Vivid dreams of a towering manuscript library on fire: the Renaissance inks and paints boil, become gas and swirl upwards into an angry elemental wind, textual spirits entombed for centuries but now set free to roam the atmosphere, their haunting transmuted into a gigantic elemental pall above New Haven, a Jovian minium spot written upon the Earth’s skies, a full stop in the book of the sky for many-parsec-distant alien telescopes to read…

“Hey, Mr Graydon Harvitz! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

He started from his mid-day café reverie, nearly knocking his second half-cold latte over onto the sprawl of Voynich Manuscript scans as he half-rose, no less surprised by the sensation of his newly-shaven chin on his fingertips than by Emm’s voice.

“Yeah, well, what with my committee appearance coming up, it was time I cleaned up my act. A bit, anyway.”

Emm reached over to his shoulder, her long fingers swiftly transcribing the diagonal weft and weave of his grandfather’s ancient twill jacket, one of the few things Graydon had inherited. She paused for a second longer than he expected, reading the material’s texture as if it were a familiar book, her eyes briefly absent from the room. “Ah”, she said, “you like antiques as well”.

“When history surrounds you, you can’t really avoid it”, he replied grimly. But the truth was, he wore it in a superstitious half-hope that his grandfather’s whisky-soaked ghost might lend a hand on those occasions when he particularly lacked cryptographic inspiration. Which had been… most of the time this last few months. “Hungry?”

“As a horse – any protein-rich House Specials on today?”

“Naah”, he replied, “it’s all carbohydrates à la mode. But their Club Sandwich is pretty good.”

“Good call!”, she smiled, “I’ll be the hunter-gatherer, back in a minute…”

Graydon watched with no little curiosity as she lightly sashayed across to the counter, attracting both jealous and covetous eyeballs from the other customers as she went. Yet… even though Graydon had survived his epic (and admittedly much-delayed) battle with the razor this morning, he still felt like nothing whereas Emm really was something: where was the balance in the equation? What was in it for her? And moreover…

“What exactly does a cleaner do?” he asked as she carefully squeezed a fresh latte and her cappucino into two of the polygonal gaps between the printouts on the table.

“Well… we clean things – old things. Such as your favourite manuscript. The Beinecke’s curators have put off fixing it up for years, but let’s face it, the Voynich does need a bit of TLC, right?”

“I guess so”, he said. “I must admit my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to unfold the rosettes page. On balance, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who trashed the VMs‘.”

“Just so you know, sorting it all out is my next job, once ze feelm crew ‘az returned to La Belle France. Their director has already annoyed Mrs Kurtz, so I don’t think they’ll be here long.” She snatched a brief sip of her coffee, looking sideways through the café’s glass front. “Technically, I should just be able to get on with it, but… I’m going to need your help.”

Graydon exhaled relief as a smile rolled across his face. “And there I was thinking it was my eyes you were lusting after.”

“No, it’s your mind, you fool. Ordinary manuscripts are easy to tidy up because everything has its place. But in the case of the Voynich, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who wiped the code off the VMs‘. Without knowing what might be hidden where, being a cleaner isn’t such an easy gig.”

“Ordinarily”, he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’d be a sucker for a beautiful woman so blatantly calling me to adventure, but… I also have the not-entirely-small issue of a ticking clock and a funding gun pointed at my head. And it’ll probably be no big surprise to you that my work on the manuscript is not quite as advanced as had been hoped.”

“So… is that a yes or a no?”

“Actually, as with everything else with the Voynich, it’s an ‘I-don’t-yet-know‘. I need to figure out in my mind whether hanging out with a supermodel doing cool codicology is worth risking my PhD for.”

“OK, no problem”, Emm said, quickly resting her forehead forwards onto her hand. Despite the amused self-deprecating smile on her face, Graydon could not help but notice a wave of stress flash through her eyes. “Maybe it’s not an either-or thing. Anyway, I’m just dying to ask you – what is that bulge in your pocket?”

“Jeez”, Graydon gagged,”what finishing school did you go to?”

“No”, she sighed, “not your pants, your jacket. If – as I’m pretty sure – it’s pre-1950, it really shouldn’t have a purely decorative pocket on the front. So… what’s it for?”

Graydon looked down at it as an oddly restrained silence fell over him: even though he’d worn his grandfather’s jacket countless times, he realised that he’d never properly looked at it before.

“Come on, then, pass it over”, she hustled, getting out a pair of white cotton gloves, a small ruler and a tiny flashlight from her Biba chainmail clutch bag. “I’ll have a closer look. Do you have a cameraphone?”

“Errr… yes I do”, he said, taking his Nokia out of the jacket as he passed it over the table to Emm, her eyes alive with the detail. “Though, I haven’t actually used it yet.”

“Here’s your chance to learn. You’ll need to photograph this seam here before and after I cut the thread, so I can restore it later.” Shining her light on the top seam with the ruler placed alongside it, she waited impatiently while Graydon haltingly navigated through the phone’s Byzantine user interface all the way to its camera submenu. At the clatter of the fake shutter sound effect, she lurched into action, selecting a microscopic pair of scissors from a diamante-studded Swiss army knife. One deft snip later, she was tweezing out the single long thread that had fastened the top edge in place for God-knows how many decades.

“Keep photographing, Gray… yup, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny…”

The waiter arrived with their Club sandwiches, but Graydon slid them to one side of the table: for all their previous hunger, suddenly neither had any appetite for food at all.

At first, all they could see was a sliver of a pale brown edge: but this grew one tiny fraction at a time until Emm had finally pulled out a small scrap of aged parchment, covered in fingerprints and dirt. At its top was an inventory reference written in a mid-Victorian European copperplate hand – but in the centre there was an 8×8 table of unusual letters.

Up until now, these curious letter-forms had – for all their study – been unique to a single historical document.

But not now.

Unmistakeably – incredibly – the grid contained letters from the Voynich Manuscript.

“Game on!”, moaned Graydon, shaking his head in disbelief. “Game on!”

“Wow”, gasped Emm, her mouth dry with the tension, “even I didn’t really think codicology could beat sex.”

“But… maybe it’s not an either-or thing?”

I’ve long wondered about what’s going on in the Voynich Manuscript’s final (and, many think, ‘boringest’) quire, Quire #20: I summarized a lot of current Q20 research here last month. But just what Q20’s paragraph markers – whether they turn out to be stars, comets, or flowers – are remains a mystery… basically, why are they there at all?

You see, because each star sits at the start of a paragraph and (as Elmar Vogt helpfully pointed out) many are arranged on pages in what seem to be repetitive x-o-x-o-x-o patterns, it seems fairly safe to conclude that these are mostly decorative, and hence there is probably nothing much “written in the stars”. Of course, anyone who desperately wants to go a-huntin’ for a biliteral ciphertext hidden there is more than welcome to try (go ahead, feel free to knock yourself out), but I don’t honestly think you’ll squeeze much juice out of that lemon, sorry. And wipe that sour look off your face, OK? 🙂

Yet even so, the brutal fact remains that the paragraph stars are there: and given that pretty much everything else in the VMs mutely screams of carefully-executed disguised intention, I think we should expect there to have been a perfectly good reason for their existence, however mundane that might actually be. So probably the best question to be asking is: what function (however minor) could these stars be performing? What did they help the author(s) do?

Until a few days ago, this was pretty much the brick wall my chain of reasoning had hit: but then I read an interesting post by Rich SantaColoma on the ‘weirdo’ red glyphs on f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript). In particular, Rich points out the striking similarity between the first “bird glyph” (the first symbol of the second paragraph in the VMs) and marginal paragraph markers in some 16th Century Spanish manuscripts, the Codex Mendoza [1541/2], the Aubin Codex [started in 1567] and the [probably fake!] Codex Cardona, while in the comments to Rich’s page, Ernest also mentioned the Codex Osuna [1565] and the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.

Ultimately, Rich’s reasoning comes down to this: in these Spanish manuscripts, the glyph is simply a decorative “Y”-shape, short for “Ydem”, which is used in lists pretty much the same way as both “item” and “ibidem” (which we still use in its differently-shortened form “ibid.“), so it seems reasonable to infer that this is what’s happening  on f1r of the VMs too.

All fair enough: but regardless of whether Rich’s idea turns out to be right or wrong (and it’s desperately hard to build up a really convincing case on a single instance of a single shape), what struck me most was the parallel between the paragraph stars and these similarly itemized lists. (But no, I’m definitely not proposing that Q20 is a Powerpoint presentation from the Renaissance).

So… might each star simply be an embellished / disguised “y”, short for (say) “ydem” / “ytem” / “idem” / “ibidem” / “item”? Actually, I think yes: look at the following picture (which contains all the paragraph stars from f104v), and I’ll show you how I think the “y” was hidden in the first four stars (highlighted in bright red), make up your own mind for the rest:-

Now tell me the second best explanation for these! And yes, I do know that some of the (probably later) pages in Q20 have tail-less stars, but the basic hidden-in-plain-sight steganographic conceit was probably getting a bit boring by then, 300+ stars later. 🙂

More than 30 years ago, ex-US military codebreaker Prescott Currier was looking at the Voynich Manuscript, when he noticed not only that the handwriting changed (though he was uncertain how many different scribes were involved), but also that the language itself (or, more precisely, the rules governing how Voynichese letters meshed with each other) changed. He called the two major Voynichese ‘dialects’ thus identified “A” and “B” (though it turns out that quite a few pages are subtly intermediate between A and B).

Hence one large shadow hanging over any discussion of Voynichese is the issue of why such a clearly constructed language / system as Currier A (which was almost certainly written before Currier B) needed to be modified to make Currier B. After all, as Jerry Pournelle used to say every couple of months in Byte magazine, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it“, surely?

And yet it seems that the Voynich’s author did fix it: so, might the presence of statistical differences be a clue that Currier A was in some way broken? To me, this implies that we should try to quantify and model the differences between A and B pages, so that we can see what aspects of A were modified to make B pages, just in case this exposes some subtle weakness of the A language. Basically, what flaws in the A language were the A→B hacks trying to cover up?

As part of this whole process, I’ve recently been looking closely at the ‘l’ character in EVA transcriptions of the Voynich Manuscript, and what the different treatment of ‘l’ characters on A and B pages might be able to tell us. It’s well-known that ‘l’ is very commonly preceded both by ‘o’ and by ‘a’ – but does this behaviour change much between A pages and B pages?

According to my online Javascript analysis tool:-

  • In A pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 72.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 22.9% of the time.
  • In B pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 43.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 29.0% of the time.
  • Freestanding ‘l’ (i.e. ‘l’s not preceded by ‘a’ or ‘o’) occur 118 times in A pages, but 1706 times in B pages.
  • ‘ol’ usually appears preceded by a space (97% of the time in A pages, 96% of the time in B pages)
  • Freestanding ‘l’ usually appears preceded by a space (90% in A, 95% in B).
  • The summed counts for ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ remains roughly the same (5.1% in A, 4.7% in B)

What is most interesting about this to me is that it seems to be saying that ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ function in very similar ways, but in the transition from A to B, freestanding ‘l’ seems to have replaced ‘ol’ in about 37.5% of cases. That is, it seems to me that ‘ol’ and ‘l’ (when not preceded by ‘a’) might well represent exactly the same token: which is to say that, al’s aside, ol = l.

So, according to my current forensic reconstruction, ol and al were verbose tokens in the A pages, but because ol appeared so often (4.57%) in A pages (thus bloating the size of the ciphertext), the author finessed this in B pages. By replacing many ol’s with l, ol’s percentage went down to 2.67% while freestanding l went up to 1.66% in B (relative to 0.27% in A).

I’m pretty sure that Glen Claston’s concern about the bloating effect of verbose cipher was shared by the VMs’ author, and that at least some of the changes between A and B were done in order to tighten up the output. Why else fix it if it wasn’t broken?

A nice email arrives from Anne Reeves of The John Dee of Mortlake Society: there’s an AGM scheduled for Tuesday 19th October 2010 at 8pm at St Mary’s in Mortlake (£5 for non-members, but includes a glass of wine), though you can turn up to chat from 7pm. According to the JDoMS’s newsletter, their guest speaker will be Jenny Rampling, who will give a talk on “Dee the Alchemist“. Rampling is a Wellcome Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, is doing a PhD on 16th century intellectual history, and even organized a two day conference on Dee at St John’s last year… so doubtless knows her stuff.

Given that I didn’t know that Dee had any strong connection with alchemy beyond owning a copy of the Voarchadumia (which reminds me that I still haven’t got round to reviewing that here, sorry!), this sounds fairly intriguing. Most of the ‘alchemical-Dee’ literature I’ve seen seems pretty speculative and thin (e.g. I’m far from convinced that the Monas Hieroglyphica is Dee’s alchemical pièce-de-resistance, even if lots of alchemists did appropriate his Prince-like monad), so it should be quite fun.

Oh, and if you can’t wait that long for your fix of Dee-related arcana, she’s also giving a talk at the British Society for the History of Mathematics Autumn Meeting and AGM on 2nd October 2010 in Birmingham, entitled “John Dee and the Elizabethan mathematics of everything“, which focuses more on his Mathematicall Praeface to Henry Billingsley’s (1570) “Elements of Geometrie“. Just so you know! 😉

Here’s another (possibly?) Voynich Manuscript-themed musical composition on YouTube you probably haven’t heard of. The notes that go with it say:-

Circle: N-tone
Album: Side material “FLOW”
Artist: ziki_7 [Dust_Box_49] (which seems to be some kind of Japanese musical fanzine?)
Original: ヴワル魔法図書館 (which is Japanese for “Voile, the Magic Library”, whatever that means)

Make of it what you will – it reminded me in places of semi-ambient computer game soundtracks circa 2001, which I don’t think is a completely bad starting point. Enjoy! 🙂