Quire 20 folio ordering…

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Elmar Vogt’s blog has just thrown one of his interesting Voynich Thoughts into the air (or should I say “the aiiir”?).

Having patiently tabulated all the paragraph stars in Q20 back in 2006 (it’s a kind of Voynich researcher rite of passage, I did much the same thing in 2002), and classified them into “hollow” [-], “dotted” [o] and “massive” [x], Elmar now notes a repetitive pattern: that most star sequences simply alternate between hollow and dotted, i.e. o-o-o-o-o-o-o-.

Yet because the stars on f103r (which was very probably the original first page of the quire) are heavily embellished, he tentatively concludes that “the writer/painter started off somewhat artistically ambitious, but […] got bored and decided to simply take turns between hollow and dotted stars.”

Elmar then points out that “the only pages significantly deviating from this pattern are f103r, f104r and f108r“, and (the logical chap he is) suggests that this might have been caused by the bifolios within the quire being scrambled before the folio numbers were added, i.e. that f103 and f104 (currently the first two folios of the quire) could well have originally been immediately followed by f108 (currently the sixth folio of the quire). All very sensible – but this, just as with every other page ordering hack that’s been proposed over the years, would need additional corroboration from physical evidence, such as handwriting continuity, ink continuity, quill bluntness continuity, coding system continuity, contact transfers, vellum cuts and folds, vellum thickness mapping, etc.

In some ways, this gives me a bit of a weird feeling: I spent years working basically alone on precisely this kind of marginal codicology, but now Glen Claston and Elmar Vogt are both on pretty much the same case. Circa 2005, my point of departure was that the folio numbers and the quire numbers were just plain wrong, and that it simply has to be easier to try to decipher the VMs in its original page order than in its present “anagrammed” (or rather “folio-shuffled”) state.

Even so, we’re attempting to reconstruct the original page-order with our eyes nearly shut: we still need someone to take a huge lateral step sideways to amass a sufficient amount of physical evidence to make any significant progress – but unfortunately the painstaking process of debating one marginal blob at a time is all we currently have open to us. Oh well!

Robert Teague’s Voynich claim…

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Has Robert Teague found a sensational astronomical ‘crib’ into the Voynich Manuscript’s ciphertext? Several Voynicheros have asked me to have a look at his claim: normally, this is researcher code for “I think it’s nonsense but I’d like someone else to say it rather than me, because I quite like the guy“, but let’s see what he has to say…

Certainly, Robert’s best-known previous attempt at understanding Voynichese (Teague numbers) didn’t work out particularly well – as I recall, he used the table on f49v’s margin as a basis for linking glyphs to numbers, much as Robert Brumbaugh did back in the 1970s. However, given that there is a powerful palaeographic argument this table was added roughly a century after the VMs was originally made, this is a hugely unreliable thing to be basing anything substantive upon.

So, what of Teague’s 2009 assault? He starts out (in his “Cracks in the Ice I” document) by pointing out what he thinks are seven fuzzy matches to “Aldebaran” across several pages, and so links seven Voynichese letters with their Latin plaintext equivalents. The obvious problem with this is that this basic fuzzy template can also be matched throughout the entire text: and you’d have to admit that the notion of the whole of the VMs’ text’s being about Aldebaran is somewhat unlikely. But it’s possible, of course.

He moves on (in his “Cracks in the Ice II” document) to finding a secondary crib for the star Alcyone: however, because I’m pretty sure that Giovanni Battista Riccioli first named this in his (1665) “Astronomia Reformata“, this is probably not correct. Robert also suggests some anagrammatic cribs for HOLLAND, POLLAN (“Poland”), and LAPLAND, all of which seem historically anachronistic (for example, Holland wasn’t known by that name until the 17th century). He also makes extensive use of some letter substitutions suggested by Philip Neal, but almost certainly not in a way that Philip himself would feel particularly comfortable with. He finishes up with a suggested translation for the so-called “PM curve word” (EVA ‘oalcheol‘) as ‘COBBLED”: this is done by picking one out of 128 possible permutations and then anagramming the result, a kind of wobbly mid-ground between Brumbaugh and Newbold. Why he chose ‘cobbled’ and not (for example) the rather more august 13th century Anglo-Saxon ‘BOLLOCS’ you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Finally, in his “Cracks in the Ice III“, Robert moves on to try to work out the rest of the alphabet, but runs into trouble with the much-used ‘4o’ token, to which he assigns a rather arbitrary set of 14 possible letter pairs. At the end, Robert proposes a set of six 21-letter mappings, and presents them in a mysterious colour-coded table, which (frankly) doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Of course, this is the point in the post where I’m supposed to say something withering, dismissive and ironic to leave readers chortling into their morning cup of coffee: but that’s not even close to what’s going through my mind. Right now, I actually feel a huge sadness that for many people these days this kind of thing is what passes for credible research.

In many ways, the Internet has de-skilled historical research: I can quite imagine that many students would now be able to gain a history degree without ever entering an archive, without learning Latin, and without actually physically engaging with the subject. If you’re only one paltry mouse-click away from a plausible answer, why bother to look any further? Why, then, should we be cross with non-specialist historians who replicate this same behaviour?

What we have here, then, is simply misdirected cryptology built on top of poor history, with substantial similarities to Robert Brumbaugh’s attempts three decades ago. Though Brumbaugh was an extremely able and clever scholar, he nonetheless read the Voynich Manuscript just plain wrong – and this is the “same old same old”.

Voynich rendered art

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Here’s a nice piece of 3D art where the model’s face and corset are real, but everything else is rendered. The artist (‘jfrancis‘ from Los Angeles) has also included (in the post immediately following) a description of how he achieved the effect (with PhotoShop and Maxwell). For maximum Cipher Mystery brownie points, he also included some nonsense Voynichese (such as the EVA “Klobal” at top left and bottom right, though I doubt it means anything) around the edges (what do you mean, “I’m the only person looking at the edges”?)

apnea_knives_sfw_v02_200x300

Having said that, his ciphertext is only Voynichese-like (or “Ruggish”, to use the technical term): “b” is a very rare letter, and he hasn’t quite – even though he does use “or” a lot – got its internal word structure nailed (uppercase doesn’t help). Perhaps he ought to play Voynich Scrabble? =:-o

Don’t say I don’t try to broaden your mind. 🙂

PS: here’s some more Voynich writing used in an “enigmatic instrument” you might also like!

Voyn-ish video…

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Here’s the nice little video for David Byrne’s (2008) song “The People Tree”. It mashes up 1920s collage stylings (such as cloche hats) with a man in a black mask being interviewed while holding a mysterious book. Lots of Voynich-like bits (plants and trees, nymph-like people), but with a bit of a Codex Seraphinianus edge to it. Sure, I’m too big a fan of David Byrne’s music to be completely objective: but I enjoyed this vijjo & hope you do too!

PS: a big hat tip to the Xenophilius blog for picking up on this!

Voynich dreams…

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Given the amount of time cipher mystery researchers spend banging their heads against the limits of knowledge (read: brick walls), the fact that these mysteries sometimes invade their dreams should be no great shock. Here’s a fine recent example of a Voynich dream from an anonymous correspondent (and no, it’s not me being coy):-

“I received in the post a 3-inch-thick wodge of eccentric handwritten notes from a mysterious Voynich researcher who had given up after years of work. The notes were very odd and wild and rather disturbing in nature, as if the product of a mental patient or someone very close to the edge, with some pages containing wildly-scribbled bits of english and other writings in uncontrolled or child-like hands. This was interspersed with other pages of interesting diagrams that looked potentially meaningful or useful. Then I came across a page which had a crayoned self-portrait of the author, who turned out to be a famous hoaxer: the pages that followed seemed to detail how the hoax was done, including illustrations showing how a stylised signature and the date 2009 had been hidden inside a page of pure Voynichese in a sort of “join the dots to see the letters” way. After that it got really weird and there were pages detailing the author’s radical Christian beliefs and even some nutty religious T-shirts that were inside the stack of papers.”

This is far from the only one: Robert Firth’s dream of 2nd February 1992 has all the richly hallucinogenic texture of iconology, yet he still manages to see someone sifting salt and pepper as representing ” the consonants and vowels of the Voynich script”, which Robert interprets to mean that “we shall never be able to separate them.” More recently, Gloria Amendola blogged about a 2008 dream (and a poem) inspired by seeing the VMs at first hand.

As for my own Voynich dreams: though I not so long ago blogged about a Belinda Carlisle / Voynich dream, my single most lasting Voynich dream image is of walking around an ecclesiastical basement (something like a monastery), and suddenly finding  the design of the Voynich ‘t’ (with its distinctive symmetrical double-leg gallows) in a high-up pane of stained glass with the late afternoon sun behind it, in a vivid palette of reds, yellows, and black leading. Yes, I do dream in colour. 🙂

Are dreams able to cast useful light on what we are thinking about? Personally, I have woke up many times with insights and inventive solutions to problems that have been on my mind. But you may be surprised to know that in about 1887 a (still very young) William Romaine Newbold wrote an apparently still-cited article on how problem-solvers are sometimes able to devise answers in their dreams. Perhaps there is hope for us all, then – sweet dreams! 😉

Voynich Scrabble…?

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I recently bumped into a “Random Freebie” from blogger “Miss Black Pepper”: apropos of nothing much, she posted up a Voynich Manuscript Scrabble Tile Set, composed of nice little images clipped from the Voynich Manuscript (which she happens to rather like).

Of course, this set me wondering what a real Voynich Scrabble would look like. You see, the most appalling thing about this idea is that it is actually possible, in much the sameway that you don’t need to know what an ULVA is (don’t ask, but many people apparently eat it) to use it to score in Scrabble.

For Voynichese, the problem is that the alphabet used for most transcriptions (called EVA Hand 1) is a stroke-based alphabet, designed to capture what the letters look like (rather than what they are). Though elegant in its own linguistic way, this unfortunately led to a number of (frankly) rather odd design decisions, with a number of apparently unitary “glyphs” being split up into overlapping component bits. If you reassemble the most obviously glyph-like stroke groups back into glyphs, you could just about get a moderately workable set of Scrabble tiles. Note the four tall letters in the top-left row (these are called “gallows”) and the four “vowel-like” glyphs in the top-right row (these are transcribed as “a, e, i, o”).

voynich-scrabble-eva
Voynich Scrabble tiles (using the EVA transcription)

Voynich researchers have spent a lot of time working out abstract models for Voynichese, tiny generative grammars that attempt to predict what should (or indeed shouldn’t) be a valid Voynich word: Jorge Stolfi’s “core-mantle-crust” paradigm is one such model. But the awkward fact remains that none of these works massively well, either generating many more words than actually appear or generating far too few words of those that do appear in the ms.

(And anyway, the question remains what kind of vocab could ever be algorithmically generated… but let’s stay on track here).

You could use Voynichese tiles to play one of two basic types of Voynich Scrabble:

  1. You can only play words that actually appear in the Voynich Manuscript
  2. You can only play words as predicted by [Person X]’s generative grammar

(Quick hint: don’t play rule-set #1 against Philip Neal or Glen Claston, they’ll probably thrash the pants off you.)

Another factor that hasn’t been considered enough is the specific language differences that occur within the Voynich Manuscript. Prescott Currier identified ‘A’ and ‘B’ languages: but labels have a different usage pattern too, as do line-initial, paragraph-initial and word-initial letters. And so you might add a special kind of dialect ‘mode’ to your Voynich Scrabble, that only lets you play ‘A’-language words or ‘B’-language words (or label words) at certain times.

However, one problem I have is that I simply don’t trust the so-called ‘Voynich vowels’. For example, Voynichese ‘o’ functions in so many different ways within the text that I cannot easily believe it is a letter per se: rather, I would argue that it is a multi-function ‘trick’ token, that performs different jobs in different contexts. I’m also deeply suspicious about the ‘a’ and ‘i’ letters, particularly when they appear in ‘aiin’ groups: I argued in my book that these are used as a kind of visual framework to encode numbers using the backwards flourish of the “n” (which seems more like a ‘v’). And so I think the ‘vowels’ form a great big hole for linguists to jump willingly into (but that’s another story entirely).

Anyway, given that I have also long suggested that a small set of letter-pairs / letter-groups would form a more usable starting point for cryptanalysis than ‘raw’ EVA, here are the tiles I’d expect the original author to be most comfortable playing with (you’ll notice the absence of free-standing ‘a’, ‘i’ and ‘o’ from the set). Agree or disagree, here they are:-

voynich-scrabble-paired
Voynich Scrabble (using Nick Pelling’s verbose pairs)

Happy Voynich Scrabbling! 🙂

PS: OK, “ulva” is the name of the sea lettuce ulva lactuca, an edible algae / seaweed. Aren’t you glad you don’t play Scrabble competitively? 🙂

Nice Rohonc Codex summary…

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One fascinating (if hard to pin down) cipher mystery that I’ve been meaning to get to grips with is the Rohonc Codex. This is a vaguely Bible-like book, written on Venetian paper with a watermark dating it to circa 1529-1540, but looks like it ought to have been written centuries earlier. And (you’ll be unsurprised to hear) nobody can read it.

Well, until such time as I find some credible source on the statistical properties of the text (which is where I’d personally want to start from), here’s a nice Passing Strangeness blog entry that describes the Rohonc Codex pretty darn well. Enjoy! 😉

The Voynich Fugue

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Django furiously frisbee-ed his wireless mouse against the wall, but the outer shell somehow failed to shatter as it was supposed to. He kicked his oak desk: that, too, failed to break. For once, it seems he’d got lucky with eBay office furniture: and so he turned angrily back to the cryptographic fugue endlessly playing itself out on his laptop.

It was the guilt that was eating away at him: though his downloadable Voynich Manuscript mystery-cracking screensaver had started out as a half-baked idea in a bar, it had grown into a global monster with sixteen million PCs all hungrily evolving their own mad cryptological strategies, endlessly swapping and feuding over marginal etymological and historical notes.

In many ways, writing a desktop application to simulate mad conspiracy theorists had been the easy part: it was just a matter of working out an appropriate set of parameters for delusion, foolishness, distrust, and so on. However, Django had been most proud of the networking side, by which all his cryptological drones could form into mad communities – virtual bulletin boards, forums, mailing lists – and fight each other to the death. He’d always thought Nietzsche was onto something, and had relished the chance to put it into practice.

But now it had all gone bad, disastrously bad: after one particular accidental change to his infrastructure code, his army of screensaver drones had begun spilling out of the sandbox to invade the real world, posting their programmatic paranoid drivel everywhere, endlessly rewriting Wikipedia pages, sending acutely well-informed (but bizarre) letters to academics and papers, and even creating their own plausible-looking online journals.

And the big red off-button didn’t even work (yes, he’d tried).

Ever the budding ecomentalist, his five-year-old daughter had asked him how much energy the whole enterprise was wasting – how much CO2 Daddy’s ridiculous chimera was causing to be emitted every day. She was right, of course, it had to be stopped – but how? Whenever he tried to argue for the whole experiment to be shut down, he found himself being flamed beyond belief – and he couldn’t now tell whether all the abuse was coming from actual people or from his army of paranoiac screensaver drones.

But even that wasn’t the worst thing – not by a long way.

Terrifyingly, even though he hadn’t programmed the drones to agree, in the last few weeks they had begun to eliminate the worst theories – even mad drones could agree on Popperian falsification, it would seem. But nobody apart from Django knew this was happening: to uninformed eyes, the screensaver pattern he had written to show the status of the enterprise looked simply like strange pulsing, rippling, 3D eye-candy – but through it, he could visualize the internal ebbs and flows of opinion within the self-organizing communities.

To be precise, he alone could now see that a trillion trillion mad theories had somehow been whittled down to just two dominant positions – hoax theorists versus Leonardo da Vinci theorists: and with roughly eight million drones on each side of the argument, it couldn’t have been more polarized (or more bitter). What was acutely worrying was that, because the hoax drones were centred on the US while the Leonardo drones were centred in Europe, they were starting to physically mobilize against each other.

First to strike had been the hoax drones, knocking out several European Internet backbones, trying to disrupt the Leonardo drone communities’ lines of communications – but the Vinci-ites had then mounted a surprise attack on the GooglePlex, disrupting the hoax drones’ main information spigot. When Django tried to get the word out what was going on, both sides reduced his Internet access to a dribble – and even overrode the automatic locks on his doors. He and his family were trapped in their mid-town apartment, helplessly watching as Fox News told the world of the bizarre terrorist cyber-war going on, updated every fifteen minutes.

And with the Western world on the brink of a kind of cryptographic Armageddon, the pattern in his laptop was now changing again – but what would happen next? Django could see that the swirling clouds of pixels were morphing from a figure-eight arching around the two strange attractors into a single perfect loop of opinion – that the Voynich Manuscript was Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible hoax. Finally, the computers had spoken their collective mind – and as the sixteen million paranoid silicon bots agreed on a single, wretched, stupid theory, the whole project juddered to an awful, stagnant halt.

Once again, he tried shutting the project down: but this time round, it actually seemed to want to die, to embrace the silent darkness of non-existence. Django collapsed onto the carpet just as sixteen million screensavers all went black, as all the mad minds he had brought to life came to believe they had reach a tentative peace in their programmatic hearts, by somehow converging on a deeper truth.

(Never mind that it was a crock.)

Recent cipher challenges…

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Perhaps it’s some mysterious side-effect of the Da Vinci Code, but it seems that all of a sudden cipher challenges have become cool again (if they were ever cool before). I did a quick trawl of the Net and came up with this quicky little list, mostly from 2008:-

And so on: please don’t email me any others, this list should be plenty for most people!

Voynich Manuscript & X-Files… =:-o

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One evening a few weeks ago, I happened to see the pilot episode of the X-Files TV series once again. What struck me most (apart from all the achingly fresh faces) was how well the whole drama worked: within only a few minutes, the viewer was presented with the themes, cliques and tensions that got played out over the nine seasons the series eventually ran to. Very impressive, both as a piece of writing and planning.

So far, so inconsequential: but yesterday, it struck me just how similar this is to the Voynich Manuscript. There, the pilot episode was effectively the 1665 letter from Marci to Kircher: this laid out all the themes and tensions we have been dealing with for basically the last century (i.e. since 1912). Effectively, we’re currently in Season 97 of “The Voynich Files” – and even if The Truth Is In There, we remain blind to it.

Dramatically, what kept the X-Files in balance was the tug-of-war between Scully (Science) and Mulder (Belief) – there is no ambiguous phenomenon yet found that cannot be split down the middle and held in a kind of dynamic stasis between these two poles. In the end, though, this has a kind of sad, dismissive logic to it: that all phenomena are worthless, because we can draw two views on anything and watch them fight, like miniature robot sumo wrestlers.

So, will the Voynich Files ever be closed? Will there ever be a series finale, where all our old friends briefly surface only to be mown down by The Conspiracy? Or is it, in some kind of vapid Wikipedia-esque way, doomed to a slow-motion death by analysis-paralysis?