The long slow PageRank haul…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

When I migrated this blog from Blogger to WordPress, all the accumulated Google PageRank “goodwill” got lost too: and so even though Cipher Mysteries has exactly the same text as Voynich News (but better categorized etc), it has a rather meagre PR2 (“PageRank 2”) rather than PR3. And so all the Google search-engine traffic to the blog disappeared overnight.

However, things might now be on the mend, and PR3 might just be within reach again. Google Blogsearch now rates Cipher Mysteries as the #1 blog for “Voynich” (which is a pretty good start), and rates it highly enough for a pre-list mention for “cipher”. And if you Google the web for “voynich”, Cipher Mysteries now pops up at #97 – pretty awful, agreed, but not bad considering that it was at #350 not so very long ago. 😮

The point here for all Googlers is that PageRank is a non-semantic algorithm that relies on the wisdom of the crowd of web content writers, and their supposed eagerness to link to authoritative content. Yet there’s a flaw: bloggers are not encyclopedists, but more like jackdaws with ADD, passing on links to that-which-sparkles 20x more than to that-which-is-of-use.

Moreover, sidebar lists of links (i.e. repeated across multiple pages with the same text) to external sites tend to yield practically zero weight in Google’s schema.

Put it together this way, and it should be brutally apparent that our perception of what is to be found with Google has become largely conditioned not by authority but rather by fashion. Google’s reliance on PageRank has therefore become a curiously double-edged sword, one singularly unable to help us cut through the swathe of semantic dross out there (such as, I don’t know, the 50+ million pages on “Paris Hilton”).

In short, I think the web may now be at the point where PageRank hinders Google’s ability to be useful – “the end of Google 1.0”, you might say. Not that a MegaCorp like that would stay still: perhaps it will split into two to cover the two very different types of searches – say, “Google Surface” (for superficial, faddy, fashionista searches, biased towards YouTube and blogs) and “Google Content” (for semantic searching, valuing original content over copied content).

To a certain degree, you can see this at play already: the more words you include in a search string, the more Google veers away from the PageRank-dominated Google Surface sphere towards the semantic-based Google Content zone. As it stands, Google functions as an uneasy alchemical marriage of these two: but I’m increasingly finding myself dissatisfied by its search results, and I can’t be alone in this.

Really, I’m not anti-Google at all (just imagine a world where we only had a Microsoft-branded search engine): but I do wonder whether we’re now close to (or even past!) the time for Google to reinvent its core search algorithms.

“Ancient Cryptography” forum…

by ⋅ 14 Comments

Tony Gaffney, a chess player / tournament organizer I knew back in the early 1980s when playing for Hackney Chess Club, made some fascinating comments to my recent blog post on The Subtelty of Witches and Eric Sams’ attempted solution to the Dorabella Cipher.

Firstly: having spent a looong time in the British Library looking at ciphers (you’ll see why shortly), Tony was happy to tell me that it in fact has three encrypted books, all using simple monoalphabetic ciphers:
(1) MS Add. 10035 “The Subtelty of Witches” (Latin plaintext),
(2) Shelfmark 4783.a.30. “Ebpob es byo Utlub, Umgjoml Nýflobjof, etc. (Order of the Altar, Ancient Mysteries to which females were alone admissible: being part the first of the Secrets preserved in the Association of Maiden Unity and Attachment.)” London, 1835. (English plaintext)
(3) Shelfmark 944.c.19. “Nyflobjof es Woflu” (Mysteries of Vesta), pp.61, London 1850 (?). (English plaintext).

Secondly: without realising it, I had already seen an early version of Tony’s own proposed Dorabella decipherment in the comments to the Elgar article on the BBC Proms website, attributed to one “Jean Palmer”. You see, back in 2006, this was the pseudonum Tony used to write (and POD publish through authorsonline) a book containing a thousand (!) furtively ciphered messages that were placed in (mainly Victorian) newspapers’ personal columns: I shall (of course) post a review of this “Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” here once my freshly-printed copy arrives.

It turns out that Tony is also a frequent poster (under the name “Tony Baloney”) to an online code/cipher cracking forum called Ancient Cryptography I was previously unaware of (probably because its definition of “ancient” seems to extend only as far back as 1450, Bible Codes [pah!] excepted). The forum has specific threads devoted to the d’Agapeyeff Cipher, the Beale Papers, Zodiac Killer Ciphers, and the Kryptos Sculpture (for example), as well as some delightful oddities such as a link to recordings of shortwave Numbers Station broadcasts (coded intelligence messaging). If you want a friendly online forum for discussing attempts to break these historical ciphers, this seems like a sensible place to go.

But back to Tony Gaffney: given that he deciphered a thousand (admittedly mainly monoalphabetic substitution) messages, it should be clear that he is no slouch on the decrypting front. Which is why it is interesting to lookat the latest version of his proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher. As far as I can tell, this involves simply using exactly the same cipher crib as appears in Elgar’s notebook (?), but interpreting the text that comes out as having been written in a kind of phonetic-style backslang. Here are the two stages (note that the hyphens are inserted as part of the interpretation, not part of the transcription):-

Deciphered:  B-ltac-ei-a-rw-unis-nf-nnellhs-yw-ydou
Anagrammed:  B-lcat-ie-a-wr-usin-fn-nshllen-wy-youd
Plaintext:   B hellcat i.e. a war using effin' henshells(en)? why your
 
Deciphered:  inieyarqatn-nte-dminuneho-m-syrr-yuo
Anagrammed:  intaqraycin-net-dminuenho-m-srry-you
Plaintext:   antiquarian net diminuendo?? am sorry you
 
Deciphered:  toeh-o-tsh-gdo-tneh-m-so-la-doe-ad-ya
Anagrammed:  theo-o-ths-god-then-m-so-la-deo-da-ay
Plaintext:   theo o' tis god then me so la deo da aye

On the one hand, I’d say it is more plausible than Eric Sams’ proposed solution: but on the (inevitably negative) other hand, it doesn’t quite manage to summon the kind of aha-ness (AKA “smoking-gunitude“) you’d generally hope for – as Tony’s book no doubt amply demonstrates, the point of a secret love note (which is surely what Elgar seems to have sent Dora Penny?) is to be both secret and to convey something which could not openly be said. But is this really it?

Some people like to say that the real point of tackling apparently unbreakable ciphers is to be found in the travelling rather than in the arriving – that the real prize is what we learn about ourselves from butting our horns against that which is impossible. To which I say: gvdl zpv, bttipmf.

Big Voynich Codicology article…

by ⋅ 3 Comments

For a good while now, I’ve been writing up a whistle-stop guide to the codicology of the Voynich Manuscript. I’ve tried to include the kind of colour pictures that were too expensive to put in my book, and to strip the arguments back to suit the medium of the web.

For me, the most important thing is that this deals not with possible theories (which, frankly, I’m not that interested in), but with actual evidence – solid stuff that we should be building upon, not knocking down.

Longer-term, I plan to write up some other similar guides (Voynich Palaeography, Voynich Art History, etc) to try to improve the level of debate there too: but please don’t hold your breath, these things take time.

Also: please feel free to send in comments (on-blog or off-blog), I’d be delighted to receive your suggestions for clarifying, improving and extending this.

Archives, archives, everywhere…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

..and not a drop of ink to spare. A quick digression about some unexpected UK archives…

I’ve long been a fan of the M25 Consortium: no, it’s not some wryly-named Croydon-based arts collective, but a searchable multi-library catalogue, a bit like a WorldCat for Londonista academics. However, until today I didn’t know that there are other parallel meta-catalogues under broadly the same geographical aegis.

For example, the fairly unsnappily-titled Masc25 (short for “Mapping Access to Special Collections in the London Region”) is a work-in-progress über-catalogue of special collections around London (though quite how the University of Brighton fits in to the scheme is anyone’s guess).

Also, the (slightly more amusingly named) AIM25 (“Archives In London and the M25 area”) is designed to help you find archive collections (the correct term is actually a [singular] “fonds“) in the London area.

On a slightly grander level, the Manchester-based Archives Hub tries to do much the same kind of thing… but for the whole UK. There are some gems, such as the National Fairground Archive, and the Upware Republic Society (an independent state founded in a Cambridge pub): though I’m not nearly so sure about the collection of sheep ear-marks, nor the Algal memoirs (but perhaps they’ll grow on me). Overall, what is particularly good is the very detailed level of information that often appears here – so hooray for that!

By way of comparison, the grand-daddy of UK fonds finding aids is simply the National Register of Archives: though search results from this do occasionally really hit the mark, it has to be said that they often fall short – simply because it has such wide coverage (as opposed to deep). But what can you do?

Philip Neal strikes again…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Not content with having given us fantastic English translations of all the key 17th century VMs-related documents, my old friend Philip Neal has found a new VMs-related letter.

Sensibly, he was looking in the Kircher correspondence archives when he found a new letter by Godefridus Kinner to Kircher [recto and verso]: more usefully, here are links to his transcription, translation and notes.

I think Philip’s translation skillfully keeps the charm of the letter (and the wheeziness of the letter-writer) intact. The direct linking of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (and its apparent duplication by the king’s Royal Society) with the new societies in Germany, and the comparisons with the follies of alchemy and judicial astrology left me with a curious sensation of speed, as though someone had just opened the door to a dusty medieval room for a modern breeze to sweep rapidly through it. It was even clear to Kinner that the times certainly were a-changing.
 
As a nice aside, Philip points out that “one problem [this letter[ solves is the date of the Beinecke letter: 1665 and not 1666“. As always, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step: even something as tiny like this may ultimately yield a surprisingly fine result, who knows?

Voynich Manuscript and David Hockney…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

Reading through the revised (2006) edition of David Hockney’s “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters“, I was a little surprised to come across (p. 235) a brief mention of the Voynich Manuscript.

In his section on “Secrecy” textual sources, Hockney quotes the introductory passage from William Romaine Newbold’s (1928) “The Cipher of Roger Bacon” where Newbold asserts that during the years 1237-1257, Roger Bacon “made what he regarded as scientific discoveries of the utmost importance, and it is extremely probable that the telescope and the microscope, in some form, were among them.”

Rereading Newbold’s wishful twaddle out of its normal context, I found myself suddenly feeling rather sad for him: “The solitary scholar who succeeds in lifting a corner of the veil has, [Bacon] believed, been admitted by God to His confidence, and is thereby placed under the most solemn obligation conceivable to make no use of his knowledge which God would not approve.” For me, this conjured up a vision of Newbold feverishly peering at the craquelure of the Voynichese handwriting, desperately trying to get closer to pure knowledge, hoping almost to commune with God Himself: but with the fatal flaw that he was relying on the dark and twisted mirror of the Voynich Manuscript as the means to carry him there.

Overall, Hockney’s book is interesting (if flaky in places), though I completely commend him for what he is trying to do: but I’ll leave a full  review of it for another day entirely…

Hunt for the Crown of Aleppo…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

But it’s not a crown of gold, nor a crown of thorns: also known as the Aleppo Codex, it was transcribed around 930AD on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, before being seized by Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099. From there, it travelled to Cairo, and then onwards to Aleppo in Syria where it remained for centuries.

What is it? Though not a cipher manuscript (unless you happen to believe in the Bible Code, yada yada yada), to Jews it contains the authoritative version of the Old Testament. The problem is that, in all the post-WW2 chaos in Syria, the book was smuggled around the Middle East (allegedly in a washing machine at one point) to safeguard it, with about 40% of its 491 pages being somehow dispersed in the process.

So: where are the lost pages now? Though new fragments turn up every few years, nobody really knows – investigators get close, but then everyone keeps schtum. It’s a fascinating literary detective story: but will it have a happy ending?

Jesuit libraries and archives…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

Following on from Philip Neal’s translations, I wondered to myself: what might be lurking in Jesuit archives (specifically to do with Jacobus de Tepenecz / Sinapius)? And so I thought I’d have a quick snoop…

For Jesuitica in general, sjweb.info has a useful list of Jesuit archives, of which the big three are (1) Georgetown University’s numerous Special Collections [Maryland District of Columbia]; (2) Loyola University Archives [Chicago]; and (3) the Maurits Sabbe Library at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Belgium]. Incidentally, Georgetown has a very cool favicon, hats off to their web designer. 🙂

A slightly wider web-trawl yields more resources: an EBIB article on a giant Jesuit library in Poland (with an online catalogue), and the Library Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt am Main. Doubtless there are many more to be found, but that is at least a starting point.

As an aside, the Society of Jesus was born at the height of the Republic of Letters, with its missionary empire spanning the globe supported by extensive letters (I saw Matteo Ricci’s Lettere [1580-1609] flash past during my unproductive Jesuit catalogue searching), so in some ways one might expect that Sinapius might be plugged in to that whole network. Yet he emerged from the [presumably unlettered] kitchen staff at Krumlov, and may have not been primarily inclined to write as much as others. It may well be that there simply are no Sinapius letters out there to be found (probably a bit of Melnik-related decree signing, but not a great deal else).

Yet on the other (Paracelsian) side of Yates’ Rosicrucian divide, we see Georg Baresch’s 1637 letter to Athanasius Kircher which praised the latter’s “unprecedented efforts for the republic of letters”. Plainly the idea of the Republic of Letters was still very much alive in the pre-Kircher years: but the question inevitably remains, hanging awkwardly in the air – where have all those letters gone? Were they lost or destroyed, or are many simply lying uncatalogued in private archives?

Incidentally, Christopher Clavius is a famous letter-writing Jesuit mathematician: while François De Aguilon first used the word “stereographic” (for astrolabe-style projections), and his book on optics (Opticorum libri sex philosophis juxta ac mathematicis utiles ) had illustrations by Peter Paul Rubens.

For the voluminous scientific correspondence of Peiresc (1580-1637) who left about 3200 letters and Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) who left around 1100, you might try trawling through the “Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne”, 16 vols. (1932-1986) or Ismaël Boulliau’s (1605-1694) 5000 unpublished letters. Even though these may well all fall just past our particular time-frame of interest, you’ll never know if you don’t look. [For Boulliau, see Robert Hatch’s chapter 4 in The formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe].

I don’t know: basically, I experience alternating waves of optimism and pessimism about the Voynich Manuscript’s post-1600 history – there’s too little and too late. I get the feeling that Sinapius is a bit of a cul-de-sac, and that we should be looking earlier and towards Southern France for a brief flash of our mysterious herbal manuscript inside the correspondence of the day. But what letters are out there? How would we ever find them?

Bellaso’s challenge ciphers (updated)…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

After I recently mentioned Bellaso’s set of seven challenge ciphers from 1564 on this blog, Augusto Buonafalce very kindly emailed me with scans of Bellaso’s three challenge ciphers from 1555. I’ve now transcribed these (as best I can) and have added them to the existing Bellaso cipher transcriptions page.

I do acknowledge that the font that my theme currently uses for “preformatted” text is too small (thanks Dennis!), but the ciphertexts are only really there to be cut-and-pasted into whatever hacky cryptanalysis package you choose. Incidentally, one neat little online crypto cipher package is John’s Javascript Secret-Code Systems webpage, which has a number of unsolved ciphertexts, such as the three “Richard Feynman” challenge ciphertexts (copied onto a Cipher Mysteries page).

New translations…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Back in May this year, I suggested to my friend Philip Neal that a really useful Voynich research thing he could do would be to translate the passages relating to Jacobus Tepenecz (Sinapius) that Jorge Stolfi once copied from Schmidl’s (1754) Historiæ Societatis Jesu Provinciæ Bohemiæ (though Stolfi omitted to the section III 75 concerning Melnik) from Latin. The documentation around Sinapius is sketchy (to say the the least), yet he is arguably the earliest physically-confirmed owner of the Voynich Manuscript (even if Jan Hurych does suspect his signature might be a fake): and Schmidl’s “historical” account of the Jesuits in Prague is the main source of information we have on this Imperial Distiller.

So today, it was a delightful surprise to receive an email from Philip, pointing me at his spiffy new translations of all the primary 17th & 18th century Latin sources relating to the Voynich Manuscript – not just the passages from Schmidl, but also the Baresch, Marci and Kinner letters to Athanasius Kircher (the ones which Rene Zandbergen famously helped to uncover).

Just as I hoped, I learned plenty of new stuff from Philip’s translation of Schmidl: for example, that Sinapius was such a devout Catholic and supporter of the Jesuits in Prague that he even published his own Catholic Confession book in 1609 – though no copy has yet surfaced of this, it may well be that nobody has thought to look for it in religious libraries (it’s apparently not in WorldCat, for example). (Of course, the odds are that it will say nothing useful, but it would be interesting to see it nonetheless.) Sinapius was also buried in a marble tomb “next to the altar of the Annunciation” in Prague, which I presume is in the magnificent Church of Our Lady before Tyn where Tycho Brahe was buried in that same decade.

Interestingly, rather than try to produce the most technically accurate translation, Philip has tried to render both the text and the tone of each letter / passage within modern English usage, while removing all his technical translation notes to separate webpages. I think this was both a bold and a good decision, and found his notes just as fascinating as the translations themselves – but I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?

One thing Philip wasn’t aware of (which deserves mentioning independently) is Kircher’s “heliotrope”, mentioned in Marci’s 1640 letter to Kircher. The marvellous “heliotropic plant” which Kircher claimed to have swapped with an Arabic merchant in Marseille “for a watch so small that it was contained within a ring” (“Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything”, Paula Findlen (2004), p.13) was the talk of the day: this was a nightshade whose seeds allegedly “followed the motions of the sun when affixed to a cork bobbing in water”, in a kind of magnet-like way. This seems to have occupied the letters of natural philosophers even more than Galileo’s trial (from the same period). Yet to this day, nobody knows if Kircher was conning everyone with this heliotrope, or if he had been conned by someone else (but was perhaps unable to admit it to himself).

Then again, Kircher’s inclusion of the “cat piano” in his Musurgia Universalis might be a bit of a giveaway that he was a sucker for a tall tail tale. 🙂