How to become an Ascended Master of Google-fu…

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Because Google is like a jetcar with a 20-speed manual gearbox, first gear is plenty for most people. However, if you want the other 19 gears, here are some ideas to get you fired up (just make sure you’re pointing in the right direction first)…

Google’s 2nd gear – Exact-fu

Without much doubt, I think the two basic Google tricks everyone should know are:-

  1. If you want an exact word match (i.e. not a nearest sound match, or a plural/singular), precede the word with ‘+’. This is most useful when (as is often the case with historical research) you’re looking for a particularly obscure word or name, for which Google will suggestion zillions of alternatives. For example, if you want to search for Sirturi (but don’t want the 46,000 hits returned by Sireturi), search instead for +Sirturi and you’ll get the 79 hits you do want.
  2. If you want an exact phrase, wrap the phrase in double quotes. For example, searching for Nick Pelling gets 144,000 hits (any page containing the two words will do) – but searching for “Nick Pelling” will give you a mere 9,250 hits. (Lazy hack: you can usually omit the final double quotes, Google is smart enough to fill them in for you.)

Basically, if you know that a given (fairly rare) search term is correct, you’re normally better off preceding it by ‘+’, to ask Google not to get in the way. Of course, leave out the + if you’re not 100% sure!

Note that these two tricks overlap: if you Google for (the doubly-misspelt) cypher mistery, the top result is for cipher mystery (i.e. Google suggests corrections to both words) – but if you search for “cypher mistery” (i.e. the same word pair but in quotes), Google only suggests web-pages with one change to the pair of words.

Google’s 3rd gear – Success-fu

A recurring problem is how to deal with the vast number of pages returned (even with 2nd gear Google-fu): and with just the one lifetime at your disposal, how could you ever sensibly go through a million hits? Of course, you can’t: but here are some neat Google trickettes to help you when your search query has proved, errrm, too successful:-

  1. If there is some unrelated idea that is diluting your search results, add a word associated with that secondary strand to your search but precede it with ‘-‘. For example, if you want to search for Voynich but don’t want any hits related to the Broken Sword computer game (written by Charles Cecil’s company Revolution Software), you could search for Voynich -Revolution. For bonus Google-fu points, try excluding multiple things at the same time, such as Voynich -Revolution -Ethel -ufo
  2. Use “100 results per page” as your default Google preference. The “Page Down” button (or, more likely these days, “mouse scroll-wheel down”) is a quick way of browsing 10x more results than you would otherwise get. OK, it’s not ideal, but any half-decent researcher should be capable of speed-reading, surely?

In short, being able to use ‘+’, ‘-‘ and double-quotes effectively is a good practical starting point for would-be Googlers. Note: while it used to be the case that Google’s engine caused these mechanisms to interfere with each other (specifically, you used not to be able to search for quoted strings and excluding search terms at the same time), these days they seem to have sorted all that out. Just in case you run into some outdated information on the web! (As if…)

Google’s 4th gear – Refinement-fu

Let’s say you’d like to craft a search query to yield a manageable set of results – say, 50 or 100 hits. But what do you do if your ‘vanilla’ two word search gets a million hits, but an exact phrase search gets only 2 or 3 hits? How can you coax Google into returning a more useful number of hits?

  1. The OR operator (in caps) lets you merge pairs of search words. Rather than search for Sirtori telescopium and then search for Sirturi telescopium, you can search for Sirtori OR Sirturi telescopium – much more useful. If you’re after bonus Google-fu points here, try using multiple ORs in the same search, such as Sirtori OR Sirturi telescopium OR telescope
  2. Number ranges have their own merging trick! If you separate two numbers by two dots (i.e. 2006..2008), Google will find you pages containing any number in that range (though note that this doesn’t work with negative numbers, maths fans). A nice example is that searching for Voynich “500..700 ducats” will dig up references both to 600 ducats (Marci) and to 630 ducats (Dee) – pretty neat!
  3. The ‘*’ operator lets you find documents containing a pair of words separated by one (or two) words. This can be useful when you’re searching for two words that are connected but which don’t usually appear exactly next to each other. For example, if you wanted to find my middle name, Googling for Nick * Pelling returns pages with Nicholas John Pelling – here, note that because I didn’t specify +Nick, Google silently converts it to Nicholas. Also, note that you can progressively weaken the link by adding more stars in a line, but only if you put them inside double quotes – so, “Nick ** Pelling” and “Nick * * * Pelling” will all find pages where the two words appear progressively further apart (however, “Nick * * * * Pelling” won’t work, sorry!)

Basically, once you can consistently use your refinement-fu to control Google, you’re not coping with search results any more… you’re managing them.

Google’s 5th gear – Zigzag-fu

This is a hard one to describe, but as it defines a gear change all of its own, it needs its own section.

The big takeaway from the preceding gear-fu should be that the point of searching is not to find the perfect page, but rather to find a sensible range of pages clustered around the perfect page – while Google is pretty good at getting you close, you still need to be actively exercising a fair bit of choice if you’re going to find what you want. The skill lies in crafting queries that get you reasonably close (but not too close) to where you want to go.

However… in practice, the whole process doesn’t usually work out quite as well as you would hope – you can’t always “just get closer”, shaving 1,000,000 hits to 100,000 to 10,000 etc. The noble art of “zigzag-fu” involves constructing queries that iteratively zigzag you towards your final query – too many results is bad, too few results is bad, and too spammy / too general a set of results is also bad.

Zigzag-fu is where you build up a feeling for what you’re looking for (even if you haven’t seen it before), and somehow move around it and towards it without really realizing how. People with great zigzag-fu get to where they want to without really thinking – but as this is more of a craft skill, I’m struggling a bit to explain it.

Just practise – I’m sure you’ll get there yourself (if you’re not already there, of course). 😉

Google’s 6th gear – Operator-fu

Google has a sprawling set of obscure “operators” (you can usually recognize them by their trailing colon) for refining searches according to different aspects of the pages found. Having said that, in most cases these are usually only marginally useful – the big trick is realizing when you’re in a big enough hole that only a special-purpose Google crane can hoist you out. “Operator-fu”, therefore, isn’t so much a refined sense of power as a refined sense of danger – i.e. has your search floundered?

  1. site: – this operator filters out only those pages whose website name (partially) matches the pattern. So, if you only want to find Voynich pages on US university websites, searching for site:.edu Voynich should do the job. The OR operator works on this, so searching for site:.edu OR site:.ac.uk Voynich will find Voynich pages on US and UK university webpages. You can also use this to see how many pages Google has indexed from a given site: for example, searching for site:ciphermysteries.com yields about 613 results (as of today).
  2. intitle: / inurl: / intext: / inanchor: / allintitle: / allinurl: / allintext: – these tell Google where to look (and, conversely, where not to look) for the keywords you specify. So, searching for allintitle: Voynich Decoded will list all the webpages in Google’s index that contain the words “Voynich” and “Decoded” in the title. Not very useful, but might possibly save the day.
  3. filetype: – if you are trying to find (say) a pdf containing the phrase “chilled monkey brains”, then Googling for filetype:pdf “chilled monkey brains” should work OK. There are also a load of obscure Google filetypes (such as htpasswd), but that’s a story all to itself. 🙂
  4. date: – very useful for finding things within the last N months. Not very useful otherwise. 🙂
  5. daterange: – very useful for finding things within a range of dates. Sometimes a big help!
  6. The tilde (‘~‘) operator forces Google to look for synonyms, even when it doesn’t itself think the word is ambiguous. However, this isn’t really very useful as (by and large) Google guesses right.

For more on these (and other mad Google operators), there’s a nice guide on the Google Guide site.

Google’s higher gears – Ninja-fu

(OK, OK, I know it’s mashing Japanese and Chinese words together, but I wanted to evoke a feeling of mastery over many worlds – just so you know!) Ascended Google Ninja-fu masters come up with a constant stream of tricks that make just as much use of Google’s sprawling array of secondary search apps (half of which the GooglePlex’s Borg mind has probably forgotten about) and its business model. There’s also a 2003 O’Reilly book called Google Hacks, most of which is now out of date, but which should arguably be given to ten-year-olds with their first proper laptop. 🙂

But to such a 33rd Scottish Rite Googler as yourself, it should be clear by now that everything Google does and has is fair game. Here are just a handful of things to consider, from an insanely long list:-

  1. Google lets you search for ampersand and underscore characters (maybe it’ll help one day).
  2. Google doesn’t match search phrases over paragraph boundaries (that’s just the way it works).
  3. Google knows about C++ and C# (helpful for programming searches)
  4. You can search for stopwords (such as ‘the’, that Google normally discards) by preceding them with a ‘+’. Though some searches (such as for The Who) do automatically include them!
  5. PageRank dominates short query strings, context dominates long query strings. If you can decide whether PageRank is helpful or unhelpful for your query, you can adjust your query length accordingly.
  6. Google API-based tricks – too many to list
  7. Google Trends-based tricks – too trendy to list
  8. Google Widget-based tricks – too new to list
  9. Google’s cache, calculator, weather, currency, recipe, flight information… you get the idea!

Of course, if I disclosed these kinds of secrets, I would be hauled in chains before the New World Order’s special blogging oversight committee and thoroughly excoriated (and I like my corium just the way it is, thank you very much). Besides, because Google changes all the time, so does the array of useful higher-gear tricks – and so you’ll be unsurprised to find out that the real art of being an Ascended Master of Google-fu is… making up your own tricks.

Enjoy! 🙂

Hans Carvel, retold for the txt generation…

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While sorting out boxes of old books at the weekend, I dug up a 1955 Penguin copy of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. It’s one of those books you tell yourself you’re going to read ‘one day’, safe in the knowledge that such a day will probably never arrive.

…which (in this case) would actually be a crying shame, because it’s cracking stuff. Rather than being some kind of moralistic Renaissance fable written by a worthy-but-dull soul, it’s actually a mad Renaissance satire on such books, written by an erudite drinker to amuse and entertain other erudite drinkers. In fact, even ‘ribald‘ is far too wimpy a word to describe it:  in the absence of some hitherto-unknown 30-syllable German word that would fit it perfectly, ‘blisteringly fecal‘ is about as close as I dare get.

Honestly, you’d like it, trust me! 😉

Yet for centuries after Rabelais, authors seem to have lost their bawdy anti-fable mojo: James Joyce is about as close as moderns get (but he’s a wholly different kettle of mad fish, to be sure). Irvine Welsh has flashes, but he’s still no Rabelais, sorry! Anyone else? Your suggestions on a postcard, as always. 🙂

Actually, I’d say that the closest modern artform to the kind of thing Rabelais wrote is in fact the dirty txt msg – everyone seems to know someone who gets twenty filthy texts a day. Where do all these come from?

Well, if Rabelais is anything to go by, I’d say that the prototypes for most smutty jokes were probably dreamed up during the 15th century, yer blessèd Quattrocento (though he did dress them all up in his own distinctive way, it has to be said).

And so I took up a writing modern challenge: could I fit Rabelais’ wonderfully ripe story [Book 3, Chapter 28] of Hans Carvel (jeweller to the king of Melinda) into a 160-character text message? Here’s the result:-

"While you wear this ring",
said the Devil in Hans Carvel's dream,
"no other man can £%*& your wife!"
She woke up yelling "Hey!
Take your finger OUT of THERE!"

How little has changed over the centuries, eh? Enjoy! 😉

“Fringe” Glyph Cipher broken…

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Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez was belatedly watching the first season of “Fringe”, and recalled a discussion by Erica Sadun of all the hidden “Easter eggs” embedded in the edit. What caught his eys in particular was a “glyph code”, a distinctive pattern of shapes that popped up just before the commercial breaks. Could he break it?

Well… Julian just happened to recall a piece of code published by David Eppstein at UC Irvine for smashing your way into any monoalphabetic substitution code given a probability-weighted wordlist. And when he tried it out on the Fringe glyphs, it yielded their secrets almost at once (despite several errors in the ciphertext fragments – it’s just like the Renaissance all over again, eh?)

OK, I still prefer the Adrenalini Brothers’ cipher. But this one is nice too, in a kind of demented pigpen kind of way. 🙂

Florentine astrology shorthand…?

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Here’s a nice palaeographic puzzle for you! While looking at some images from a linked pair of Florentine astronomical / astrological manuscripts written circa 1400 (as Voynich researchers inevitably do), I noticed that one had an unknown shorthand (?). So far I’ve only had access to a handful of the pages, so the full document would probably contain several more examples – but the three below should be enough to get you going (click to see a higher-resolution image).

florentine-cipher-mystery

Personally, I’m reminded of the Quattrocento astrological shorthand that Robert Brumbaugh described finding on the back of a manuscript of a Plato text (he was, after all, a Plato scholar, though I don’t know which ms that was), which in turn reminded him of the Voynich Manuscript’s lettering.

The text around it is in Latin, relating to individual signs of the zodiac: and a quick examination reveals that many patterns appear in all three of the fragments. But what does it all mean? Any suggestions?

Once again, two more Renaissance ciphers yield to Mr Gaffney…

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By now I’m sure you’re all thoroughly sick of the way I heap superlatives and laurel wreaths onto Tony Gaffney’s hair-bestrewn head every time he cracks yet another of Bellaso’s ciphers… and now he’s broken two more, lifting his tally for the 1564 set of challenge ciphers to 6 out of 7. Though Tony dearly wants to make it 7/7, Bellaso’s remaining 1564 cipher appears to be an awkward one, a real Holmesian three-pipe problem… so let’s keep our fingers crossed Tony can make it a clean sweep. 🙂

Anyway, as compared to #7’s tortuous digrams, #3 turned out to be relatively easy: it involved five rotating reciprocal alphabets (Bellaso’s favourite starting point), with the confounding trick being that the first letter of each group is basically random, and indicates which one of the five rotated alphabets to use (by using the index of the letter within the cipher alphabet). There are asterisks marked at the two places (in lines 1 and 3) where this fails to quite work, but the basic idea seems completely solid.

1564 #3

 lasumita  demonti  secnserva  perche  lacque  otneve
CNRDEPSGT XEQRLLGP FDUHLLQMXX AMCABAA HPEEOHU MIDLDHU
 45123451  5123451  123451234  345123  234512 *234512
 chesopra  deesi  spesocadono  insi  contengono  leesalationi
REFQFLQAT NSUAIB GFMCLGTEHQFI TNLLP EBIJFDFNLLQ OPACLTPEFBGGN
 45123451  12345  23451234512  3451  1234512345  234512345123
 etvageri  terestri  asesi  nelaria  oxvirtu  solare  etcosi
FQCXXUQMN RFDLUGFAP SRDUGS BLDRHQSR PMCHOQFP QDIOXAQ LCGBIGS
 12345123  45123451  51234  4512345 *4512345  123451  451234
 latgu  cheper  lepiogie  scorgzoso  demonti  xepiogie  etnevi
CNRANX DXUUMCA MSQLNMTPU AGEQLNZLIQ FSUPMMAO RADIOLBBQ SDAGARB
 45123  512345  51234512  345123451  1234512  45123451  512345
 larepone sopra  detimonti
HPEUDIIICXLGLQX QSUDSNGGDS.
 23451234 51234  123451234
QFEN QUACDFGILM 1
     EHTBSNOPRX
UGHO QUACDFGILM 2
     XEHTBSNOPR
AITP QUACDFGILM 3
     RXEHTBSNOP
CLBR QUACDFGILM 4
     PRXEHTBSNO
DMSX QUACDFGILM 5
     OPRXEHTBSN

The (possibly meaningless?) keyword here is “QUA(C)EHTBS”, yielding a cleartext like this:-

La sumita de monti se conserva perche l’acque ot neve
che sopra de esi speso cadono in si contengono le esalationi
et vageri terestri asesi ne l’aria ox virtu solare et cosi
la tgu che per le piogie scorgzoso de monti xe piogie et nevi
la repone sopra deti monti.

And so we move onto Bellaso’s 1564 challenge cipher #4, which is also a bit of a pussycat (yes, it has five rotating reciprocal alphabets) – the secondary trick here is the autokey, wherein the last plaintext letter of each group indicates which of the five alphabets to start the next group with.

1564 #4

etper ilcontrario simarre conserva lasua profocsita
NCUTA REXEECSUAUB NUEFPAN FAGRTAIX HOUPU QHBADFMRDU
12345 12345123451 5123451 51234512 51234 5123451234
etgrandeza perche fluctrbu viena sotiliare larena etparte
MDLAOGTTZR FLPFRM PEAFBIXA IRLIR NACQGMOIL HOILIR OBFFPGN
23451234-5 234512 23451234 12345 512345123 512345 5123451
teree chein esosono liqualli cosi sotiliati etcon lacqua
CLPON XLNRH OFBRDSA DQSBODEN FAUQ NACQGMOCQ OBTCI DFXPIX
23451 45123 5123451 23451234 5123 123451234 51234 234512
mescolati sono salavirtu solarein aria levati etdali venti
INUODHOCQ FBHD MXEUBUIDA FBEUANRH OIQU ETBOCQ OBLFGM SLIGU
512345123 1234 123451234 12345123 1234 345123 512345 23451
indiverse plrti portati ethnacqua conversi restano
MELQAOHUL QCIDN FCPGOCQ MDMSOTIAR TCIBNIRN ANUDUSA
512345123 51234 2345123 234512345 23451234 5123451
distributi sulimonti etin altrilochi
OMFCSNUICQ FSENIAGDN NCQI XEEAUDCXLU.
4512345123 123451234 1234 2345123451
SDFM  SPABCDEGHI   1
      FXOTLMNQRU
PEXN  SPABCDEGHI   2
      UFXOTLMNQR
AGOQ  SPABCDEGHI   3
      RUFXOTLMNQ
BHTR  SPABCDEGHI   4
      QRUFXOTLMN
CILU  SPABCDEGHI   5
      NQRUFXOTLM

The (once again, somewhat mysterious) keyword here is “SPAFXOT”:-

et per il contrario si marre conserva la sua profocsita (profundita)
et grandeza perche fluctrbu vien a sotiliare la rena et parte
teree che in eso sono li qualli cosi sotiliati et con l’acqua
mescolati sono sala virtu solare in aria levati et da li venti
in diverse plrti (parti) portati et hn acqua conversi restano
distributi su li monti et in altri lochi.

Observant cryptologers will be pleased to note that Tony managed to crack both of these even though neither contained the word proportione. 🙂

Praise aside, all that I can say now is “Go, Tony, Go!” – good luck with the final cipher in the set!

The New Mayflower & Wilfrid Voynich…

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Yesterday, a set of random clicks somewhat akin to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (or do I mean “Six Degrees of Roger Bacon”?) took me to the Voynich Monkeys archive of the main Voynich Mailing List: there, I learnt to my considerable surprise, that one of the premises in London formerly used by Wilfrid Voynich is now the New Mayflower Restaurant (on Shaftesbury Avenue).

OK, I’ve probably been to at least half of the restaurants in and around Chinatown over the years: but I’ve been to the New Mayflower probably ten times – it’s a nice place.

If you’re going there, I highly recommend (hopefully they still do it) the chilli crab – very tasty indeed (if a bit messy, it has to be said). A big thank you to my chess-playing friend Neil Bradbury for recommending it, particularly the basement part of the restaurant.

Of course, it’s a little strange to think that I’ve eaten so many times in what was Voynich’s former bookshop – but historical London’s a bit like that, full of slightly unnerving coincidences! 🙂

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 1

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Back in 2003, the (Paleo) Ideofact blogger (William Allison) reminisced about having once jointly compiled a list of meaningless dissertation titles, such as “The Semiotics of (En)Gendered Archetypes: A Contextual Deconstruction of the Voynich Manuscript.”  His pleasantly-meandering blog train of thought quickly sped on to the possibility of Voynich fiction, continuing…

Later, I thought of writing a few detective stories centered on a career grad student who promised for his dissertation a translation and analysis of the manuscript. Never got around to it, though — maybe in my retirement.

Now there’s a challenge, I thought… so, six years on, here’s my version of how Chapter 1 might go…
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

The Voynich Translation

Chapter 1 – “Lesser Fleas”

7.07pm: Mrs Kurtz tapped Graydon Warnes Harvitz II sharply on the shoulder, waking him from his open-eyed slumber. “Stop sucking the end of your pencil so loudly“, she wheeshed through gritted teeth, “it’s disrespectful”. Vaguely nodding in approval, Graydon looked around at the empty chairs beached by the day’s ebbing tide of students – disrespectful to whom, he wondered? Perhaps she-of-the-library could see people that he couldn’t, he mused, possibly the ghosts of dead Yale grads, haunted by their own unfinished dissertations – a virtual “Skull and Bones” society? And look, over in the far corner, might that be dear old Montgomery Burns himself? Yesssss.

As the fug of dead presidents began to fade from his mind’s eye, Graydon’s own awful situation lurched back into sharp focus – of how to decipher the murderously intractable Voynich Manuscript for his PhD. All of a sudden, the purgatory endured by the library’s wraiths, endlessly waiting for long-stolen books to be returned to the stacks, seemed painfully close at hand. His boastful prediction (that this would be easy-peasy for someone as bright as him) had come back to haunt him.

All the same, his whole adventure had started brightly, zipping through all the literature on “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript” (so ‘P. T. Barnum’, wouldn’t you say, and isn’t there a Voynich Theorist born every minute?) Yet within a month, he had been reduced to trawling all the works of fiction appropriating the manuscript (typically as a tedious millennia-crossing conspiratorial MacGuffin). Then finally, not unlike an air crash survivor having eaten the seat-covers and the corpses of the other passengers before moving on to the dreaded airline food, Graydon had slurped his way messily through all the Voynich webpages. And the less said about that low-roughage diet the better.

Once the inevitable research euphoria had subsided, he had slid downwards into a bit of a decline – for if you don’t know what your subject is about, how can you read any secondary literature? He felt less like a Yale polymath than an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the marginal detritus left over by other scholars, trying in vain to rearrange the collected dust and mites into patterns that would endure longer than a single big sneeze. And so the years had passed – not quite a decade, but far too long by any reasonable measure.

Eating and shaving less (but drinking and swearing more), Graydon began in time to resemble his fearsome alcoholic grandfather Mani Harvitz, the semi-legendary Allied code-breaker who as a young man had worked with John Manly and Edith Rickert breaking German diplomatic codes in World War I.

Once, he had mused whether his own grandfather might have looked at what Wilfrid Voynich had called (rather optimistically, it has to be said) “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”? Graydon had tirelessly gone through all that group’s archived correspondence, finding only that the brilliant young Mani, newly emigrated from Europe, had something of a huge schoolboy crush on the no-less-stellar Miss Rickert.

But this was merely symptomatic of the Mandelbrot Research Maze Of Doom he was stuck in, where each dead-end you go down sprouts off an infinite number of smaller dead-ends for you to recursively waste your time on. He found himself humming Augustus De Morgan’s rhyme “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,: And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum‘. Graydon wished he didn’t know that this was in turn based on a rhyme by Jonathan Swift: his mind had become crammed with a near-infinite constellation of similarly useless fact-bites, all held in interplanetary hibernation, eternally waiting to arrive at an unseen off-world colony.

And now he had just ten short days to prepare a presentation for his supervisor about all the dramatic progress he had claimed to have made over the past six months, when all he actually had to show for his efforts was a pencil dangling from his unkempt, beardy mouth. Perhaps… perhaps that was his subconscious’ way of telling him to take up smoking again?

Lesser fleas, he thought to himself as he removed the pencil and took a closer look. Because he preferred harder pencils for note-taking (laptops gave him back-ache), he had a “2H” rather than an “HB”. The Pencil Code (all the way from 9H to 9B via HB ) was over a hundred years old, yet still sounds like a legal-ese sequel to The Da Vinci Code. More linked trivia tumbled out of his tangled skein of memory: pencils themselves were made of graphite, not lead (that was a 400-year-old misunderstanding, you don’t actually have “lead in your pencil”). But before the pencil came along, people had often used red lead to mark things…

That was it: the red lead drawings on page f55r of the Voynich Manuscript. The only other remaining construction marks (which had generally been so assiduously removed by the author, it would appear) were the horizontal lines drawn on f67r2, under a kind of odd-looking circular calendar with a starfish design in the centre: these lead lines were definitely symptomatic of something… but of what?

f55r-red-lead

Yes, these were the real deal – they were what his subconscious mind was telling him to examine right now, what he needed to be thinking about for his looming presentation. But what did they mean – and how on earth might such an incidental detail possibly help him translate the Voynich Manuscript?

Graydon’s mind raced through his Wikipedia-esque web of details – “red lead” A.K.A. lead tetroxide, better known to classicists as ‘minium’, from which we get ‘miniature’, a medieval style of small picture with lots of red finish. And what was that paper he’d never quite got round to reading? Yes, J. J. G. Alexander’s (1983) “Preliminary Marginal Drawings in Medieval Manuscripts“: that, and the ten thousand other cul-de-sacs to park your car in for a day he’d one day hope to read.

But the important point about f55r was that it was plainly unfinished. If red lead had been used to sketch out the shapes, then this was probably one of the last pages added: yet why would the author, so meticulous and rational in so many other ways, have left this one page in this state? Perhaps he/she had died (or had just given up, as Graydon had wanted to do so many times) before completing it?

Hold on, he thought – given the first page and the last page, perhaps we can use the changes in handwriting and in the cipher system between them to try to reorder the pages inbetween, to reconstruct the document’s construction order, and its flow of meaning… For the first time in perhaps even a year, his mind felt on fire, alive with the possibilities: he felt he was glimpsing something extraordinary, subtle and deep…

And that was when he saw Emm for the very first time, as she walked over to his desk to kick him out of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the night. She was extraordinary, like a long-haired Halle Berry but with piercing, intense eyes, eyes that could slice watermelons.

“That’s odd”, he said, “I didn’t know supermodels worked in libraries”.

“That’s odd”, she deadpanned, parroting his tone, “I didn’t know they let bears handle manuscripts.”

“Oh, the beard thing? Yeah, my barber died and I never found a replacement.”

“Woah, the ’90s must have been a really tough decade for you. Anyhoo, it’s time to kick your bear ass out of the library.”

Graydon blinked. He didn’t know if this conversation was going really well or really badly. “Hi, I’m Graydon Harvitz”, he said, “I’m…”

“…’the eternal Voynich grad’, Mrs Kurtz told me already. Is it true they’re hoping to get rid of you next week?”

“Well, they’re certainly going to try – perhaps it’ll be third time lucky.”

She paused, looking him up and down in the way a butcher would look at a freshly-hung carcass. “That would be a shame – Mrs Kurtz would miss you”, she said with half a smile, turning to walk away. “Though not your pencil sucking.”

“And your name is…?”

“Call me Emm – I’m the new cleaner.”

She was a cleaner? Errm… what? “Do cleaners like to eat lunch?”

“We’re always starving. Tomorrow should be good, because they’ll be kicking you out at noon – a French film crew will have your precious manuscript for the afternoon.”

A French film crew?

* * * * * * * *

Update: the story continues with Chapter 2 (“Game On”)…

Indus script & Markov models…

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According to this recent Wired article, Rajesh Rao, a computer scientist from the University of Washington, has run a Markov chain finder on the 1500-odd fragments of (the as-yet-undeciphered) Indus script – and has ‘discovered’ that it is “moderately ordered, just like spoken languages“.

Well, ain’t that something.

In a depressingly familiar echo of the ‘hoax’ debate over the Voynich Manuscript, the most important result is that it argues against Steve Farmer’s (2004) case that the Indus fragments were merely “political and religious symbols“, i.e. not a language at all, but just odd visual propaganda of some sort.

Language is a tricky, evolving, misunderstood, dynamic artefact that typically only has meaning within a very specific local context. The failure of linguists to “crack” the Indus fragments (all of which are very short) is no failure at all – we are massively disadvantaged by the passing millennia, and cannot easily trace the structure within the flow of ideas (the perennial intellectual historian hammer).

Having said that, what I read as Farmer’s basic idea – that researchers have for too long looked for a definitive script grammar as an indicator of advanced literacy – is an excellent point. And so the notion that Indus script analysts should perhaps be instead looking for some kind of arbitrary / non-formalized explanation (a confused model, rather than a complex one) is sensible. My opinion is that Farmer is overplaying his skeptical hand, and that the script is very probably communication (as opposed to mere decoration) – but is it written in something we would recognize as a language? Apparently not, I would say.

Incidentally, Indus script uses roughly 300-400 symbols (depending on how you count them), with the most frequent four symbols making up about 21% of the texts: inscriptions (many on potsherds, also known as ostraca) are all short, with an average length of only 4.6 symbols. All of which makes the script completely unlike known languages – but all the same, what is it?

Perhaps Rajesh Rao’s Markov models will reveal some kind of pointers towards its hidden structure, towards the truth – but as to Rao’s suggestion that they may well yield a “grammar”… I suspect not.

PS: Farmer cites Gabriel Landini & Rene Zandbergen’s paper (funny, that), though points out that Zipf’s Law is an ineffective tool for differentiating language-based texts from non-language-based texts. Just so you know…

4th Bellaso cipher toppled, Tony Gaffney strikes again!

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That man Tony Gaffney has been at it again, shooting yet another cryptographic tin can down off Giovan Battista Bellaso’s fence: this time, it was Bellaso’s 1564 challenge cipher #7’s turn to fall.

What was particularly sweet about #7 was that it was a completely different type of cipher to the others Tony had previously broken: rather than being some kind of reciprocal rotating cipher (i.e. reciprocal = a cipher that both encodes and decodes, and rotating = a cipher alphabet whose order rotates every letter, every plaintext word, or every ciphertext word), this one was a fairly fiendish digram table (i.e. a table of pairs of letters).

Of course, you’d need a really substantial piece of ciphertext to stand any chance of filling out the contents of any such table: but because Bellaso wasn’t that sadistic, he used the same table he included in his book. The difficulty was therefore not so much of reconstructing the table, but of reconstructing the ksyphrase driving the table (i.e., the phrase permuting the rows and columns).

As regular Cipher Mysteries readers should know by know, classical (i.e. puzzle-based rather than statistics-based) code-breakers such as Tony look for words in the ciphertext with unusual properties, and see if they can use those to lever their way in. Here, the fact that nearly every word has an even number of letters is a strong indication that this is a digram-based cipher: and in Bellaso’s table (where each row of digrams is horizontally offset by one place relative to the row above it) the group CMYLDLELRL in line 4 of the ciphertext would appear to fall mostly along a diagonal.

Assuming that Y was “unlikely to be in the keyword or in the message“, Tony then “compared each of the 10 digrams in its row with those in their diagonals” – this let him hunt for candidate words to fit this basic kind of consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. “cifra” matched the first three pairs; “fantasie” matched the first four pairs; but by far the best 5-digram match for the group was “altramente“.

“This gave me a few rows and columns – the rest was a lot of trial & error & cups of tea & cigarettes!”

Post-caffeine and post-tobacco, here’s the resulting Italian cleartext that Tony ended up with – it appears to be explaining how to aim your cannon so that it hits the target:-

serom pera ilfestcon doi  sopresetireve  c onlavite perpe tova ilcanone
QMOSDAHSOM CULRMENEESFMBT QUXRQBRHORRGIA NTEECFTLRL HSXOIARETT CUNOEGED
postoasegnn ousire delapaia faretirar e ilchanoneil quale sedeveretirar
HDXMPTQMXGES TBQEOE FOCFHUBG LAOERMOMODIACUNSEOEEIOCDMDCMIA QMFOTOOERMOMOD
inproporti onesetutiri inalto stsognache nel retirasecali chonlacoda
EMXRHLOTRM EEQBRHRRORBF EMCMRE MUQUXGNGSB EDCROERMOMQMNOCH NSEECFNEFT
altramente dariaeo to d alsegnosetutirai baso bis na* elacoda retiran do
CMYLDLELRL FTOUPEGURE FRCMQMXGQRRHRRORPU ALQU AEQCECYECENGFBPL OERMOMEB FM
siassen ?da viran doperdrito bisognaseretiripesdritto etintutitreiquesuicasi
QEQHQMESTFT TLOMESFMHSZBOURE AEQUXGQHOARHORHOQBXFRBRE RHEMRURMYLBUMDQBTLNOQE
leretebisognache sesttiri noequal menteperchhe calan dounarotada rialap
CGOERLAEQUXGNGSB QMMURMOU EGMRPOCDDFYHHTOANSSB NOCFESFMEUOBRAFFPLOUCMHR
ladaquellaban da
CFFTMDCECFALESFT

* YE = Il Signor Iddie, “The Lord God” (as per the table below – so almost certainly an error)
? An odd number of letters in this group (so almost certainly a typesetting error).

If you then insert plausible-looking spaces, you end up with text looking like this:-

Se rompera il fest con doi sopre se tireve con la vite perpetoua il canone
posto a segnn ousire della paia fare tirare il chanone il quale se devere tirar
in proportione se tutiri in alto st sogna che nel retira se cali chon la coda
altramente dariaeo to d'al segno se tutirai baso bis na ? el a coda retiran do
si assen ? da virando per drito bisogna se retire pes dritto et intuit tre I que
sui casi le rete bisogna che sesttiri no equalmente perchhe calando una rota dari
alap lada quella banda

As you can see from the final table (below), the keyphrase driving the row and column permutations appears to be “BARTOLOMEUS / PAN FILIUS”.

   B  A  R  T  O  L  M  E  U  S  C  D  F         G         H
P  pb pa pr pt po pl pm pe pu ps pc pd pf        pg        Ph
   aa ea ia oa ua A  aa ae ai ao au A  accio     altra     ancore
A  ah ab aa ar at ao al am ae au as ac ad        af        ag
   ab eb ib ob ub B  ba be bi bo bu B  benche    che       che
N  ng nh nb na nr nt no nl nm ne nu ns nc        nd        nf
   ac ec ic oc uc C  ca ce ci co cu Ch cosa      como      della
F  ff fg fh fb fa fr ft fo fl fm fe fu fs        fc        fd
   ad ed id od ud D  da de di do du D  debba     detto     doppe
I  id if ig ih ib ia ir it io il im ie iu        is        ic
   ae ee ie oe ue E  ea ee ei eo eu E  esso      essendo   essere
L  lc ld lf lg lh lb la lr lt lo ll lm le        lu        ls
   af ef if of uf F  fa fe fi fo fu F  forsi     fusse     finche
U  us uc ud uf ug uh ub ua ur ut uo ul um        ue        uu
   ag eg ig og ug G  ga ge gi go gu G  gratia    grave     grato
S  su ss sc sd sf sg sh sb sa sr st so sl        sm        se
   ah eh ih oh uh H  ha he hi ho hu H  abaiamo   avunto    hanno
B  be bu bs bc bd bf bg bh bb ba br bt bo        bl        bm
   ai ei ii oi ui I  ia ie ii io iu I  imperio   impo      impoche
C  cm ce cu cs cc cd cf cg ch cb ca cr ct        co        cl
   al el il ol ul L  la le li lo lu L  leqli     liquali   lettera
D  DL dm de du ds dc dd df dg dh db da dr        dt        do
   am em im om um M  ma me mi mo mu M  molto     modo      mondo
E  eo EL em ee eu es ec ed ef eg eh eb ea        er        et
   an en in on un N  na ne ni no nu N  non       nostra    nella
G  gt go gl gm ge gu gs gc gd gf gg gh gb        ga        gr
   ao eo io oo uo O  oa oe oi oo ou O  oltra     ogni      ognicosa
H  hr ht ho hl hm he hu hs hc hd hf hg hh        hb        ha
   ap ep ip op up P  pa pe pi po pu P  per       pero      perche
M  ma mr mt mo ml mm me mu ms mc md mf mg        mh        mb
   aq eq iq oq uq Q  st st st st qu Q  quali     quella    questa
O  ob oa or ot oo ol om oe ou os oc od of        og        oh
   ar er ir or ur R  ra re ri ro ru R  quato     quando    qualche
Q  qh qb qa qr qt qo ql qm qe qu qs qc qd        qf        qg
   as es is os us S  sa se si so su S  signor    signoria  scritto
R  rg rh rb ra rr rt ro RL rm re ru rs rc        rd        rf
   at et it ot ut T  ta te ti to tu T  scrisse   tutto     tanto
T  tf tg th tb ta tr tt to tl tm te tu ts        tc        td
   au eu iu ou uu V  ua ue iu uo uu V  vostro    vero      una
X  xd xf xg xh xb xa xr xt xo xl xm xe xu        xs        xc
   br dr gn lt nq X  pr rl rp rt st X  vostra    le vostra lquate piu
                                        Sig       lettere   presto
Y  yc yd yf yg yh yb ya yr yt yo YL ym ye        yu        ys
   ch fr gr mn nt Y  rc rm rs sc tr Y  Il Signor Le cose   Me
                                        Iddio     passano   racemande
Z  zs zc zd zf zg zh zb za zr zt zo zl zm        ze        zu
   cr gl lm nc pn Z  rd rn rt sp tr Z  habiamo   havemo    fatime
                                        recevute  apiacer   raccom.

All in all, I think this was another excellent result for Tony G., cracking an altogether harder challenge cipher than the previous ones – classy stuff, very well done! 🙂

Edith Rickert’s & Margaret Rickert’s papers…

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As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post on Edith Rickert, I wondered whether her papers might be in the University of Chicago archives – and indeed here they are. For any Voynich researcher who just happens to be passing by, you might consider looking through Box 1 Folder 8 (for correspondence) and Box 10 Folder 13 (for photographs of her family – not important, but nice to see all the same).

The U. of C. also holds the papers of her younger sister Margaret Rickert: she specialised in medieval illuminated manuscripts (there’s a 10-page paper on her in the 2005 book “Women Medievalists and the Academy“) and worked as a code-breaker in WWII, just as her older sister had done in WWI. She’s briefly mentioned in the First Study Group minutes – one from 1944 that notes she “accompanied WFF [William Friedman] at Phila[delphia] in 1923 to hear Newbold. Cannot add anything else“; and another that notes she attended a 31 August 1945 FSG meeting. Box 1 holds her notes on various manuscripts: might she have taken notes on the Voynich Manuscript? My guess is no, that the small range of poor quality reproductions of Voynich Manuscript pages available at that time probably dissuaded her from getting interested in it as an art history puzzle. But you never know until you look!

Of course, John Matthews Manly’s papers are there too (the link has a nice summary of his life, including his famous “cigar” story) – I’ve summarized the Voynich-related ones here already, but would also note here that his Series II of folders related purely to cryptographic correspondence.