A Voynich “breakthrough”? Hmmm…

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Maldon-based David N Guy recently posted some pictures to the n3ta.com “Misfits” forum, to show everybody there what the Voynich Manuscript really says. Somewhat surprisingly:-

And I said to mother that she need not
cry but she could not stop her
tears because of what she had seen.
“Bryan of The Crossing Sea! His face will
haunt me until I die” she cried. And
then she died. I laid her body between
the lilies and watched her sink beneath
the waters of the lake. I vowed revenge

You know, apart from being written in biro in modern English above some Voynich-y plants (oh, and aside from being crap), this really does have quite a lot to commend it as a Voynich theory. It even has the obligatory made-up-word-that-springs-naturally-from-the-decryption (“ubb”, but perhaps best not to speculate too much on what that means) you see so frequently in Voynich theories.

Hmmm… too bad I haven’t got a spare lifetime to read through DNG’s other 56,295 posts to the n3ta.com forum, I’m sure there would be some other gems in there. Oh well! 🙂

Update: David has also posted a copy of this to his goaste.cx website. And why not?

Voynich Quire 8… what happened?

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I’ve just had a nice email from my old friend GC, asking what I think happened with Quire 8 (“Q8”). You see, the problem is that Q8 contains a whole heap of codicological oddities, all of which fail to join together in a satisfactory way:-

  • f57v has a bottom-right piece of marginalia that (I think) looks rather like “ij” with a bar above it – yet it’s not one of the quire numbers, and doesn’t appear on the back of a quire.
  • f66r has some bottom-left marginalia (the “mus del” nymph): yet unlike most similar Voynich Ms marginalia doesn’t appear on the front or back of a quire.
  • The first (f57 + f66) bifolio contains both circular diagrams and plants
  • The second (f58 + f65) bifolio contains two text-only pages and two herbal pages
  • f58r and f58v have stars linked to most of the paragraphs: but these have no tails, and hence are more like the “starfish” and “stars” found in Quire 9 (Q9) than the paragraph stars used in the recipe section at the end.
  • The page numbers on f65, f66, and f67 all appear to have been emended by a later owner (you can still see the old faint 67 to the right of the new 67)
  • And don’t even get me started about the circular diagram on f57v (with the repeated sequence on one of the rings). Put simply, I think it’s not a magic circle, but rather something else completely masquerading as a magic circle.
  • But sure: at the very least, f57v’s circular diagram would seem to have much more in common with the circular diagrams in Q9 than with herbal quires 1-7.

Generally speaking, though, Q8 seems to be broadly in the right kind of place within the manuscript as a whole. Because its bifolios contain both herbal and diagrammatic stuff, it seems to “belong” between the herbal section and the astronomical section. However, the bifolios’ contents (as we now see them) appear to be rather back-to-front – the circular diagram and the stars are at the front (next to the herbal section), while the herbal drawings are at the back (next to the astronomical section).

This does suggest that the pages are out of order. And if you also look for continuity in the handwriting between originally consecutive pages, I think that only one original page order makes proper sense: f65-f66-f57-f58. When you try this out, the content becomes:

herbal, herbal, text, herbal, herbal, // circle, stars + text, star + text

Where I’ve put the two slashes is where I think the first (herbal) book stops and the second (astronomical) book begins: and I believe the “ij-bar” piece of marginalia on the circle page is one owner’s note that this is the start of “book ij” (book #2).

So, I strongly suspect that what happened to Q8 was a sequence very much like this:-
1. The original page order was f65-f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58
2. The bottom right piece of marginalia was added to f57v (start of book “ij”, I believe)
3. The pages were mis-/re-bound to f66-f65-x-x-x-x-x-x-f58-f57 -OR- (more likely) the front folio (f65) simply got folded over to the back of the quire, leaving f66r at the front: f66-x-x-x-x-x-x-f57-f58-f65
4. The nymph & text marginalia were added to f66r.
5. The pages were mis-/re-bound to f57-f58-x-x-x-x-x-x-f65-f66.
6. The quire numbers were added to f66v.
7. The page numbers were added to all the pages.
8. The central three bifolios were removed / lost.

But what happened to pages 59 to 64, which apparently got lost along the way?

Currently, my best guess is that these were never actually there to be lost: there is practically no difference in quill or handwriting between f58v and f65r, which suggests to me that they originally sat adjacent to each other… that is to say, that Q8 probably only ever contained two bifolios. And so, the proper page numbers added (at 7 above) were probably 57-58-59-60, which would make perfect sense.

So… why were they later emended to 57-58-65-66?

My suspicion is that, temporarily bound between Q8 and Q9, there was an extra tricky set of pages, which the page-numberer skipped past before continuing with 67 (in the astronomical section). But what tricky block might that be?

Could it have been the nine-rosette fold-out section? Might the page-numberer have skipped past that, before subsequently noticing that an earlier owner had given it a higher quire number, and so moving it forward to its proper place? It’s a bit of a tricky one to argue for, but I do strongly suspect that something in someone’s system broke down right around here, causing more confusion than we can easily sort out.

However, I’ll leave the nine-rosette section for later: that’s quite enough codicology for one day! 🙂

Correspondence Projects page…

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For a while, I’ve been idly compiling a list of early modern correspondence projects, inspired by Adam Mosley’s book “Bearing the Heavens” (for which Tycho Brahe’s correspondence was a key resource). Tonight, though, I finally decided to get round to finishing it up and publishing it as a static page on the blog: and so here is my list of correspondence projects.

…but just as I was doing this, I stumbled across a wonderful epistolary bibliography posted up by the Scaliger Project at the Warburg Institute, which made my own effort look remarkably puny and useless. It was as if, well, my car was looking at a “Pimp My Ride” version of itself from a future which would never actually happen. That is: awesome, but also depressing.

Still, since the two lists have a non-zero amount of non-overlap, I’ve left mine up anyway. Oh well… enjoy! 🙂

Ongoing WordPress hackery…

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Writing a WordPress blog should be easy – but it genuinely takes about ten or so plugins to start actually doing things in a SEO-sensible way. A basic list I’d recommend would look like:-

  • Akismet
  • All In One SEO Pack
  • CSS Compress
  • Google XML Sitemaps
  • Robots Meta
  • SEO Friendly Images
  • WordPress Tweaks
  • WordPress Automatic Upgrade
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Security Scan 

…though I have to admit I have a further 17 plugins currently active (far too many to list).

For a programming junkie technophile such as myself, the temptation to start twiddling with PHP source code is hard to resist. The dinky little ‘Edit‘ button beside each plugin seems to magnetically pull my mouse pointer towards it, particularly strongly for those ones which haven’t been updated in over a year and don’t quite do what I originally hoped they would.

What’s more, Wordpress ‘themes’ (backgrounds) are more often driven by eye-candiness than SEO-friendliness – dwindlingly few of them have a variable-width three-column layout, which I think is the absolute minimum standard. Though I’ve already twiddled Sajith M.’s “Zen In Grey” theme a thousand times (to use CSS sprites, new graphics, etc etc), I’m still not 100% happy with it: and I probably never will be. But maybe that’s how it works.

Right now, I’m in the middle of coding up a load of small changes to the infrastructure, such as removing the post-category links on list-pages, and the whole new drop-down “[Page 1]” page-selection boxes on multi-page lists (such as on the Cipher Mysteries front-page). This was driven by the shock of finding out that I had ended up with over 130 links on the front page (Google allegedly penalizes pages with more than 100 links), and so needed stripping back.

Incidentally, I don’t really understand why Cipher Mysteries dropped from 10th in Google (in searches for “Voynich”) to about 130th a while back: though it has now clawed its way back to about 20th, the whole thing remains a bit of a mystery to me. Google Blogsearch also temporarily dropped my blog like a hot stone a few weeks ago: this seems to have been triggered by my “cryptography vs -ology vs -analysis” post, which presumably triggered some kind of dictionary-based spam test, purely on the title. Oh well!

Enough of the Internet minutiae – time to crawl back under my rock! 🙂

New Dorabella Cipher page…

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Spurred on by a blog comment left here earlier today by musician / piano teacher (and Elgar buff, no doubt) Liz May, who very kindly noted that…

Dora Penny’s favourite song at the time of the Dorabella Code in 1897 would possibly have been “Lullaby” from the six choral songs by Elgar, entitled “From the Bavarian Highlands” (1896).  […] Dora describes in her book “Memories of a variation” how she enjoyed dancing to the Lullaby while Elgar played it on the piano. 

…, I decided to post (finally!) the Dorabella Cipher page I’ve been twiddling with for a while. It’s a bit of an historian’s take on the cipher (how comes I’ve never cited Marc Bloch before?), but it’s a nice little piece all the same, hope you enjoy it! 🙂

All about the Chaocipher…

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I’m getting a bit cheesed off with the Internet: every time I do a search for anything Cipher Mysteries-ish, it seems that half Google’s hits are for ghastly sites listing “Top 10 Unsolved Mysteries” or “10 Most Bizarre Uncracked Codes“. Still, perhaps I should be more grateful to the GooglePlex that I’m not getting “Top 10 Paris Hilton Modesty Tips” and its tawdry ilk.

Realistically, there is only one uncracked code/cipher listing on the web from which all the rest get cut-and-pasted: Elonka’s list of famous unsolved codes and ciphers. But Elonka Dunin has long since moved on (coincidentally, she went from cryptography into computer game production at about the same time that I made the reverse journey), which is perhaps why all of these lists look a bit dated. Perhaps I should do my own list soon (maybe, if I had the time).

Happily, Elonka did manage to nail most of the usual suspects: the Beale Papers, the Voynich Manuscript, Dorabella, Zodiac Killer, d’Agapeyeff, Phaistos Disk, and so on… each typically a piece of ciphertext which we would like to decipher in order to crack a historical mystery. However, one of the items on her list stands out as something of an exception.

For John F. Byrne’s 1918 “Chaocipher”, we have a description of his device (the prototype fitted in a cigar box, and allegedly contained two wheels with scrambled letters), and a fair few examples of both Chaocipher ciphertext and the matching plaintext. So, the mystery isn’t so much a whodunnit as a howdunnit. Though a small number of people are in on the secret mechanism (Lou Kruh, for one), Byrne himself is long dead: and the details of how his box of tricks worked have never been released into the public domain.

Was Byrne’s Chaocipher truly as unbreakable as he believed, or was it no more than the grand delusion of an inspired cryptographic outsider? This, really, is the mystery here – the everything-or-nothing “hero-or-zero” dramatic tension that makes it a good story. Yet hardly anybody knows about it: whereas “Voynich” gets 242,000 hits, “Chaocipher” only merits 546 hits (i.e. 0.0022% as much).

Well, now you know as well: and if you want to know a little more about its cryptography, I’ve added a Chaocipher page here. But the real site to go to is Moshe Rubin’s “The Chaocipher Clearing House“, which is so new that even Google hasn’t yet found it (Moshe emailed me to tell me about it, thanks!) Exemplary, fascinating, splendid – highly recommended. 🙂

OK, enough of the raw factuality, time for the obligatory historical riff. 🙂

I’m struck by the parallels between John Byrne’s device and Leon Battista Alberti’s cipher wheel. Both men seem to have caught the leading edge of a wave and tried to harness its power for cryptography, and made high-falutin’ claims as to their respective cipher systems’ unbreakability: whereas Alberti’s wave was mathematical abstraction, Byrne’s wave was (very probably) algorithmic computing.

Circa 1920, this was very much in the air: when J. Lyons & Co. hired the mathematician J.R.M. Simmons in 1923, the company was thinking about machines, systems, and operational management: mathematical calculators were absolutely de rigeur for them. The first Enigma machines were constructed in the early 1920s (and used in a commercial environment), and there were doubtless many other broadly similar machines being invented at the same time.

Do I think that there was anything unbreakable in Byrne’s box? No, not really: the real magic in there was most likely a programmatic mindset that was cutting-edge in 1918, but might well look somewhat simplistic nearly a century later. But I could be wrong! 😉

Tycho Brahe’s handkerchief…?

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Following up the recent post here on Tycho Brahe’s moustache, Jan Hurych emails in to point out that a team of Czech researchers has also been forensically analyzing Brahe’s handkerchief. Disturbingly, their interim results indicate that he may have been addicted to Brasso.

(OK, OK, so it’s a joke: but as it made me laugh, onto the blog it goes.)

For more on Brahe’s silver/gold (or very probably copper) nose and the adhesive gunk he used to stick it to his duel-scarred face, here are links to a short 2004 article from the Annals of Improbable Research and to an entertaining (though not entirely reliable) 1998 Q&A from the Straight Dope.

(Incidentally, the first handkerchief was used in Europe in 1503, according to this timeline: while Brasso first went on sale in Australia circa 1904. Brand-wise, “Silvo” would have been more accurate, but less funny. Oh, suit yourself.)

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts…

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Finding online medieval manuscripts has long been a patchy, slow and fragmented affair, with each set of scans isolated and typically accessible only at the third or fourth remove (if you’re lucky). Luckily for us all, this situation so annoyed a UCLA assistant English professor called Matthew Fisher that he decided to do something about it.

A couple of years ago, Fisher started building up a web-resource listing every fully digitized pre-1500 manuscript he could find: and last December (2008), his group launched its Catalogue of (currently 1101-strong!) Digitized Medieval Manuscripts.

Of course, it’s not perfect: for instance, though you can search the database in a number of ways, “by date” (or even “by probable century“) – which I would have thought would be the first way most researchers would like to narrow their search down – is sadly not one of them (yet). Also, Cipher Mysteries’ favourite pre-1500 online manuscript (Beinecke Ms 408, as if you couldn’t guess) isn’t yet listed, but my guess is that 1100 is no more than 50% of the current achievable total.

But all the same, in many ways these are just ridiculously carping pot-shots at a truly epic project which has managed to transform a large set of bits into a substantial (and unified) resource. Right now, I’ve just used it to claw my way through St Gallen’s large set of mss:  but I’ve still got many hundreds of others more to go. Hmmm… it might end up one of those nightmare scenarios where new entries get added at the rate you work through existing entries. Still, that would be a nice problem to have, relatively speaking. 🙂

For more background on the whole project, here’s a nice little article on Science Daily (thanks to John McMahon on HAstro-L).

Brahe’s moustache: murder, it wrote?

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Enciphered diaries & a murdered famous astronomer? No, it’s not Enrique Joven’s book out unexpectedly early, but this gem of a story from Der Spiegel: it describes how enciphered / encoded sections of the 400-year-old diary of Tycho’s distant cousin Erik Brahe seem to allude to Brahe’s murder. Brahe’s body is about to be exhumed to find out the truth, though the cyanide (at 100x the toxic level) already found in his moustache seems fairly slamdunk to me.
Details remain fairly sketchy: but of course, I’ll pass on more of the story as it emerges… I can barely wait! 😉

Monsters and the abyss…

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I’m off for a few days now, so I’ll leave you with a thought from Chapter IV of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”:-

146. He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.

The little-mentioned thing about this well-known quotation is that the sayings around it are primarily to do with women: so what is Woman to Nietzsche, a monster or an abyss? And is he advising us not fight with or gaze into Her, lest we become Her or She meets our gaze?

The Voynich Manuscript is no monster to fight with: and it is only an abyss for those who are trying to read Hungarian with a French dictionary. Now look to your bookshelf!

Later!