Double pirate book recommendation…

by ⋅ 2 Comments

A bit of an unusual double-header review today, because I recently read a pair of pirate-history-related books one after the other, and they complemented each other in such a satisfying way that I thought I had to recommend you get yourself a copy of both, if you even remotely like pirate stuff.

The first half of this brace is Colin Woodard’s (2007) The Republic of Pirates, ‘Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down’ – i.e. Woodes Rogers. As you may know, the Golden Age of Piracy (well… in the Caribbean, at least) ran from 1715 to 1725, and was the extraordinary time when Bellamy, Blackbeard, Vane, Hornigold and even the faintly ridiculous Stede Bonnet were all in play. Woodard tells their stories well and with reference to a generous boatload of near-primary evidence.

Just about all you could criticize him for is perhaps throwing too many pirates at you all at once – there’s a point about halfway through when the reader almost inevitably gets pirate fatigue. But give yourself a good slug of rum (with plenty of lime, sugar and ice) and persist, it’s well worth the effort.

The second half of the twosome is something that’s both wonderfully edgy and crazily sophisticated all at the same time. You may have heard that Tim Powers’ (1987) On Stranger Tides was used – sort of – as a plot backbone for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film (which was hugely successful, even if it got mixed-to-poor reviews).

But Powers’ book is really much better than the big-budget film schtick loosely ‘inspired’ by it: and it sets up its darkly magical twists and turns without having to resort to the kind of special effect extravaganza the PotC film goes all-in for. In fact, Powers is often described as writing a kind of “gonzo history”, because he comes across (perhaps a little surprisingly) as a bit of a history obsessive, trying extremely hard to fit his story around the very real history of the pirates, as later documented by Colin Woodard.

For me, what is truly epic is this: read these two books back to back (Woodard first, then Powers) and at the end of it, it’s as if you’ve been immersed in a fantastically detailed, near-immersive pirate fantasy world. Much better than 3D! 🙂

Jutta Kellner proposes Voynich theory, asks for money…

by ⋅ 36 Comments

How many more Voynich Manuscript theories does 2014 plan to dump in my inbox? Hot on the heels of Tucker & Talbert, Fallacara & Occhinegro, and indeed Stephen Bax (who I recently banned from commenting on Cipher Mysteries) as well as several others whose theories I’m patiently working through (please forgive the delay, but e.g. it takes time to learn Nahuatl well enough to comment on it), comes yet another new Voynich theory, this time courtesy of Jutta Kellner of Dransfeld.

Kellner has historical mystery ‘form’, in that she previously self-published a (2011) book 2012 + 4,3 Die Lösung des Mayakalenders und mehr… (i.e. a 2012 Mayan calendar theory book). And just so you know, her company JKdesign also sells a range of curiously beautiful neck-warmers as well as loads and loads of zips.

But what of her Voynich Manuscript theory, I hear you asak? Well, she claims to have first begun to solve the puzzle over an intensive five day period in February 2007, and to have been supported in her extensive secondary research by a family member ever since. Now she is looking for some kind of ‘crowdfunding’ to help her complete the last stage – translating the body of the text – by the end of 2014: she’s looking for somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 euros. Which is, of course, a lot of zips.

But rather than laying to claim nine wonky words or one wobbly diagram, Kellner has actually published some fragments of her decryption. She claims that the plaintext is in Latin, dates from the 13th and 14th centuries, and “was written as a kind of adventure novel”: specifically, “it’s all about battles, assaults, quarrels, togetherness, voyages, captureing ships and much, much more…” So why can’t we just read it all straight off? Her good reason is that:

No computer program in the world can do this translation work, because you first need to extract the meaning from a “speech cloud”, but in the end there is always a unique solution. You never know in advance how long a sentence is. It’s like solveing a two-sided crossword in the head.

Of course I will not exposure the key. That would be just like you publish an ingenious invention without patent application. There were many inventors or explorers in the past who were cheated, exploited and ignored.

All the same, I think we can get pretty close to what (she thinks) she’s doing to decrypt our mysterious manuscript’s text. Let’s look at one of her examples (decrypted from Voynichese into Latin, and then translated into German and English), the top line of f28v (though she has the first word as EVA “tshol” when it should clearly be “kshol”):-

Voynichese: tshol qooiiin shor pchoiiin shepchy qoty dy shory

German: Zum Vierten Male Wasser zu holen ist mit Mühe verbunden. Wir sind sauer, weil wir nicht in den Hafen können, da dieser natürlich nicht die Tiefe hat. Demzufolge müssen wir jetzt außerhalb vor Anker liegen.

English: A fourth time to fetch water requires effort. We are angry because we can not in the harbor, because it certainly does not have the depth. Accordingly, we now have to be at anchor outside.

(Incidentally, Kellner dates this page to “10/12/1245”.)

For a Voynich researcher, the top line of f28v presents lots of classic Voynichese ‘motifs’ (one might even call them ‘leitmotifs’):
* it has a gallows character as the first letter of the line, paragraph, and page (just as you’d expect)
* it has a horizontal “Neal key” (a pair of single-leg gallows half-to-two-thirds of the way across the topmost line of the paragraph)
* it has a double ‘o’ in the second word (qooiiin), as a result of which looks to me as though it may well have been miscopied from ‘qoaiin’
* it has a jarring e-gallows pair, that (again) looks like it may have been miscopied (‘shepchy’ as written, when I would have instead expected ‘shcphey’)

Perhaps the most visually obvious thing about this short line is that it contains about eight words, and many of those are built up out of extremely common patterns: ol, or, qo, aiin, dy. But while I would broadly agree with the late Mark Perakh’s conclusion that the Voynich Manuscript’s text is probably abbreviated in some way, I somehow doubt that it could have been abbreviated to the degree that Kellner’s claimed decryption would appear to have been.

What’s going on here? I suspect that Kellner is translating the “4”-shape in the first “qo” pair to “A fourth time”: but this would make no sense for a 13th century or even a 14th century text, because the digit “4” wasn’t written in that way until very late in the 15th century. As for the rest, I have the strong suspicion that she is largely reading the rest as a Latin acrostic – i.e. building up phrases based on the first letter of the words only.

Perhaps Cipher Mysteries readers will do better than me at working out precisely what she’s doing with all this. But really, whatever it happens to be, right now I honestly don’t think it will turn out to be anything much to do with either cryptology or linguistics.

As always, you are entirely free to do with your own money whatsoever you will. But so far I’m failling to find any reason at all to direct any of my own crowd-of-one’s money in the direction of Dransfeld.

Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 2)

by ⋅ 5 Comments

( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 2.

— Day Two, 9am —

“Hold the door, Max!”, Joey calls good-naturedly from just behind me, and heavily jogs up the steps into the tiny ante-room we amuse ourselves by calling a ‘foyer’. “Was that…?”

“Yes, it was indeed our purple-haired encyclopedia girl Germaine.” I reply, putting the office kettle on and corralling four coffee mugs onto a small tray. “Though she says we should call her ‘Mayne’.”

“Ah, as in The Spanish”, Joey nods conspiratorially, slowly backing his ample frame onto the less-than-entirely-new office sofa. “So… how do you think this is going to play out, young Mr Harmer?” He’s called me ‘young’ ever since college, when he was in the year above: it’s sometimes hard to believe that was fifteen years ago.

“Well…”, I muse, reaching for the coffee jar, “half of me thinks we’re completely doomed: but the other half is looking at the money our man Charlie has already wired through, and liking it a lot.”

Light taps at the door herald Mayne’s return, along with two sizeable crates of Voynich-related books she’s wheeled along on a kind of powered carrying gadget. “Charlie said that you’ll be wanting these.”

Fortuitously, this is when Parker – the third (and fittest) member of our troika – skateboards in: and so the kettle is left to boil while he and I ferry the books up the steps and onto our war table.

By the time everything’s in its proper place, Joey has – slightly unusually, it has to be said – finished making coffee and has moved on to thumb through Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, though with what looks like a slightly sour look on his face.

I catch his eye. “Not quite to your legalistic taste, J-Man?”

He winces. “If this is as good as it gets, what we’re dealing with with this Voynich Manuscript thing isn’t ‘evidence‘ but ‘stuff that people think might one day become evidence‘. Really, it’s all a bit virtual for me – and you know how much I hate that word.”

“Along with every other word coined after Shakespeare”, chimes in Parker. He’s not wrong there.

I turn to Mayne, who by now is happily sniffing the coffee fumes from her mug. “What’s the low hanging fruit?” I ask her.

“Yes. Ah.”, she stutters. “That would be ‘The most easily achieved of a set of tasks, measures, goals, etc.‘”

A silence falls on the room. Mayne looks around slightly puzzled.

“Oh, and a 2012 track by Tenacious D. ‘She wears the beekeeper suit‘. Is that the answer you wanted?”

I perhaps should have instead started the day by telling Joey and Parker about Mayne’s tendency towards extreme literalism.

“Ohhhh kayyyy…”, I interject, “let’s try asking you about the low hanging fruit of the set of Voynich theories we might reasonably consider disproving.”

“That’s also a good question”, she frowns. “Perhaps Gordon Rugg’s grille-text?”

“Hey – isn’t that the one from Scientific American way back when?” puzzled Parker.

“June 21st 2004, yes. Rugg famously claimed that, by using Cardan grilles randomly moving over a set of tables, a 16th century hoaxer could have produced a manuscript indistinguishable from the Voynich Manuscript.”

This has me puzzled. “But the Voynich’s radiocarbon dating was 15th century, right?”

“Yes, the same dating that a whole bunch of other internal evidence has.” She slurps her coffee unself-consciously. “Rugg therefore concludes that it must have been written on century-old vellum, while all those other features must similarly have been contrived by a sophisticated hoaxer to look as if they had been added in the 15th century.”

“But given that there are no 15th century books that look like it, Rugg has to be claiming that it’s a hoaxed copy of a book that never itself existed?”

“That’s correct.”

“How marvellously 1980s”, shrills Joey, “a Baudrillardian simulacrum!”

There’s an awkward, tumbleweedy silence as Parker and I stare at him blankly.

Germaine coughs politely. “Jean Baudrillard used the word ‘simulacrum’ to denote a thing which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever. Its earlier meaning was ‘an image without the substance or qualities of the original’.”

Parker, ever the mathematical logician, is shaking his head. “That’s all very well, but… come on – was Rugg actually able to prove any of this?”

We all look at Germaine. “In fact, no. Skeptical physicist Mark Perakh demonstrated that the Voynich-like text Rugg reconstructed had statistical properties much more like those of gibberish than those of the actual Voynich text.”

Parker shakes his head: “So all Rugg really proved was that a 16th century hoaxer could have produced something that superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript, as opposed to something that actually had the same statistical properties as the Voynich Manuscript.”

“That is correct,” Germaine nods.

“As a piece of computer science, it’s probably quite interesting”, Parker muses, “but as historical research, it seems worthless. Who really cares if a 16th century hoaxer could possibly have made something that only superficially resembled the Voynich Manuscript?”

“So have I got this right?”, I ask. “Rugg has no actual evidence, an hypothesis that doesn’t do what he says it does, and has spent the last decade dining out on the headline rather than fixing the problem. Meanwhile, all the actual Voynich evidence out there he dismisses, saying that reproducing anything that trivial should be well within the range of a sophisticated 16th century forger.”

Joey dejectedly sinks back into the far end of the sofa. “If anyone’s a hoaxer in that whole sorry saga, I’d have thought it was him.”

“But guys, guys”, I say, “- and Mayne, please consider yourself an honorary guy – whatever our opinion, how do we go about trying to disprove Rugg’s theory? You know, like we’ve been paid to?”

“Do we need to?” Parker asks. “That Mark Perakh guy has already cut it down to almost nothing. And if Rugg, with all the modern computing power at his disposal, hasn’t in a decade been able to use his grilles and tables to construct a replica of his supposed simulacrum with the same statistical properties, the chances of a supposed 16th century hoaxer doing the same must surely be basically zero.”

“Yeah”, says Joey, “if Rugg thinks it’s a fake replica but can’t replicate it using the approach that he claims was originally used to make it, why should anyone else think the same? Case closed, in my opinion.”

“Great work, guys”, I concur, “I’ll email this through to boss-man Charlie straightaway. Then shall we break for an early lunch?” I look out at a roomful of eagerly nodding heads. Proof is good, but lunch is better.

The Somerton Man – Australian radio documentary by Ruth Balint…

by ⋅ 145 Comments

Australia’s ABC National Radio recently (23rd Feb 2014) broadcast an episode of the history documentary series “Hindsight” that you may well enjoy: entitled The Somerton Man: A mystery in four acts, it was written and produced by Ruth Balint, a senior lecturer at the UNSW School of Humanities and Languages. (A tip of the Somerton Man’s missing hat to Shane M and Furphy for emailing me about this, much appreciated!)

ruth-balint

Cipher Mysteries regulars may well remember Balint’s name from her piece on the Somerton Man that was published in Cultural Studies Review in 2010, though its mentions of Carlo Ginzburg (who I’ve blogged about many times) may well have gone over many readers’ heads… nobody (apart from a certain imaginative kind of hardcore historian) seems much taken by him, which is a bit odd. Ah well!

However, it has to be said that – as you’d broadly expect, extrapolating forward from Balint’s CSR article – the Hindsight episode didn’t really break any new ground. In fact, most of it is comprised of her mooching good-naturedly around Somerton Man-related sites with Gerry Feltus, pretty much everybody’s favourite retired Aussie cold case copper. But all the same, I think it’s more than entertaining enough to be worth a listen if you have 40-odd minutes to spare.

As for whether we will ever move this forward, I have to say that I really don’t know. While I was guardedly optimistic about the Somerton Man at the beginning of this year (2014), the whole “Jestyn” angle has now gone particularly cold: so unless someone has a splendidly good idea about how to find out if a Mr “Styn” or “Stijn” was admitted to RNSH in about 1943, I suspect my bucket of leads is currently pretty much empty.

I also had some information from a reliable historical source recently that “when Robin and Kate were born, both Prosper and Jessica put their details on the official birth certificates and signed it as mother and father”. Of course, any self-respecting conspiracy theorist will respond to this by saying “well they would, wouldn’t they?“, which would probably just go to show that Somerton Man theorists love facts so much that they can’t resist also believing the 180-degree opposite of any given fact. And in such a dialectically neutral-balanced world, what chance do we stand of making any real progress?

Encyclopedia Girl. (Chapter 1)

by ⋅ 3 Comments

Chapter 1.

— Day One —

Today, like every day, the phone rings: I answer it, but for once I’m genuinely surprised by what I hear.

What usually happens here at the Epistemological Detective Agency is that a client calls: he or she has ended up in some kind of nebulous everyone-loses train wreck scenario, surrounded by people spinning ridiculous stories to save their sorry skins. But if that’s you and you’re rich and really want to get to the truth (or, at least, to disprove the manifestly false)… well, you call us. In a world of wonky knowledge pipes, we’re the 24-hour emergency plumbers. Not so much lawyers, but rather something closer to ‘industrial logicians’.

But this afternoon’s call is playing out to quite a different script. On the other end of the line is a well-known billionaire Yale benefactor – let’s call him “Charlie” – who wants to hire our specialist services, but not necessarily in a way we’re going to be comfortable with.

“So…”, I say, trying to recap where we’ve got to, “do I take it that you want us to prove what kind of thing this manuscript actually is?”

“No, that’s not it at all.” He pauses: but even over the phone, I can hear him still trembling with anger and annoyance. “I want to hire you Epistemological detective people for some proper Popperian disproof. These crazy-ass Voynich theories are making my alma mater a laughing stock, and I want you to stop them in their ridiculous tracks.”

He’s definitely got a point: for months now the Voynich Manuscript has been all over the media and Internet, with one broken theory after another loudly trumpeting itself as supposedly irrefutable fact. They can’t all be right at the same time: but they definitely might all be wrong.

“I can see what you’re trying to do”, I muse, “but history is something of a… high-risk area for us.” And the less said about that whole sorry Vinland Map episode the better, we both think to ourselves.

“Look, sixteen thousand bucks a week says your agency will take it on. My PA says that’s double your normal rate, but I don’t care, I know you can do this thing and I want you guys on board ASAP, even if History does make your toes curl.”

After a lifetime as a captain of industry, Charlie is plainly used to getting what he wants. Right now, I haven’t really got any objections that $16K a week can’t comfortably fix. And he knows it.

“I’ll take it from your silence that you’re on board”, he beams, yet another deal won by sheer force.

“Yes, we will take it on”, I reply, “though I’m sure you already know it normally takes us about a fortnight to assemble a dossier of rock-solid premises to build out from.”

“In this instance, I have a short cut for you”, he smirks. “I’ve taken the liberty of putting Encyclopedia Girl on a plane, she’ll be at your door first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Encyclo-who?”, I hear my voice say, though a touch more incredulously than I actually intended.

“Her name’s Germaine Zayfert; she’s from Long Island, and has spent the last two months filling her capacious photographic memory with everything to do with the Voynich Manuscript. She’s on my payroll until the summer, as a kind of intern: just keep feeding her bagels and coffee and she’ll tell you everything you want to know. I’ll wire a fortnight’s money in a minute. Goodbye!”

And with that the line goes dead. Whatever made Charlie his billions, I think to myself, it certainly wasn’t his phone manner. I call Parker and Joey to let them know to clear their diaries and to be in at 9am: we’re going to be busy for a good while.

— Day Two —

When I arrive to open up our Little Italy office at 8.30am, there’s a purple-haired girl already sat on the stone steps outside. Her eyes seem distant, yet raster back and forth as if she’s counting far-off cars only she can see: she looks about fifteen, but I know she’s older.

She springs to her feet and juts out a small white hand for me to shake. “You must be Maxten Harmer?” she asks with that superfluously upwardly-inflected final syllable that everyone under twenty-five seems to, like, like so much?

“Yes, I must”, I reply, shaking her hand lightly. “But call me Max. How should I introduce you to the others?”

At that, she recoils backwards, physically withdrawing into her coat. “I… don’t see anybody else here,” she mumbles into the fabric. “Who the heck are you talking about?”

“Joseph Serrani and Parker Hitt II, the Epistemological Detective Agency’s other two principals: they’ll be here in half an hour. I expect Charlie already told you about them.”

“Oh. Yes. That’s right.” I watch in curious fascination as her body language slowly winds from scared witless back down to merely tense as hell. “Sorry about that. I have a tendency to be quite… literal, sometimes. Call me ‘Mayne’. Can’t stand that whole ‘Encyclopedia Girl’ thing.”

“Yeah, that would bug me too,” I commiserate, opening the door and disabling the alarm. “‘Mayne’ is good. Coffee?”

“Perfecto”, she answers with what can only reasonably be described a homeopathic flicker of a half-smile. “I’ll fetch my bags.” And she turns, marches down the steps and then away down the street, without once looking back.

I can’t honestly see how this is going to work.

Dembski’s Archer and the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 36 Comments

I’ve been reading the late Mark Perakh‘s book Unintelligent Design on the train into work the last few days. His first chapter lands a long series of hard punches on William Dembski’s neo-creationist glass jaw: it’s a good read, even though pitting a properly sharp physicist against someone who merely mimes mathematics and logic does make for a fairly one-sided bout.

(Oh, and if you don’t know about Dembski, Behe, Johnson et al, they are “Intelligent Design” Christians aiming to ‘prove’ that DNA cannot have been formed by pure chance; that the biochemistry of life cannot have incrementally evolved into its current state; that Darwin and neo-Darwinians was/are all Just Plain Wrong; etc etc.)

In his books, Dembski uses a broad set of structural and logical arguments to try to categorise the kind of thing DNA is, in terms of probability and complexity.

Fairly unsurprisingly, Perakh rips these artificial categorization schemata apart, by demonstrating with numerous examples (particularly the Voynich Manuscript, nicely enough) how real life things fail to fit Dembski’s neatly-made (but false) pigeonholes, as well as how Dembski’s conceptions of probability and complexity simply don’t work the way he seems to think they do.

But for all Dembski’s (numerous) flaws, he does employ one particular analogy which amused the heck out of me, and yet also challenged me to properly think its implications through. (Though not about his hopeful brand of Intelligent Design, I hasten to add.)

Dembski’s Archer

One of Dembski’s tricksy categorization hacks involves trying to differentiate between genuine patterns (which he says are the result of what he calls “specification“) and fake patterns (which he says are the result of “fabrication“). His much-quoted example colourfully compares a true archer who causes his arrow to hit a genuinely pre-drawn target (specification) with a fake archer who shoots his arrow anywhere he pleases into a wide wall and then proceeds to paint a target around the landed arrow to retrospectively ‘prove’ his initial skilfulness (fabrication).

I like Dembski’s fabricating archer as an antipattern – a recurring pattern of wrong-headed and/or self-defeating behaviour that, once named, becomes painfully obvious all around you. I mean, haven’t we all met plenty of fabricating archers in our lives? By which I mean people who try to add imaginative ‘fabric’ to their otherwise substance-less and evidence-free arguments.

Perakh also uses the better-known phrase “just so stories” in his Chapter Two, but that’s actually a phrase for ad hoc narratives purporting to explain something that manifestly is the case, such as “how the elephant got his trunk”, or perhaps “how the wooden politician got his long nose”. What I’m talking about here is something slightly more virtual: plausible-sounding narratives concocted to try to justify improbable (or indeed impossible) claims.

Voynich Fabricators

The messily rubbish world of Voynich Manuscript theories has long had a glut of these fabricating archers, constructing their post hoc secondary narratives to support a badly chosen and/or emotionally-invested initial position. However you try to pass off this process (‘lateral thinking’, ‘abductive reasoning’, “Ockham’s Razor” or whatever), it really all boils down to nothing more than painting your made-up target on the wall after you’ve shot your little bolt.

Look, (they say), this constellation of secondary stories I made up clearly demonstrates how close I was to the mark in the first place. Oh, and don’t listen to all those other fabricating archers, their post hoc stories don’t have even half the explanatory power of my post hoc stories.

And how many overdressed little bolts masquerading as supposed big shots do you think I’ve seen, hmmm? Perhaps a more difficult challenge would be to list how many Voynich theories you can name that don’t fit this dismal pathology?

Of the recent wonky crop, Tucker and Talbert’s article certainly follows it, as does Stephen Bax’s theory (he seems eager to get into a rebuttal posting war, but what was that American phrase about not getting into a pissing contest with a fire-hose? Spare me from Voynichological fire-hoses, O Lord!) and indeed pretty much all of the others.

However, the disappointing truth is that for all these Voynich theorists’ wobbliness, excessive hopefulness and sparseness of evidence, they still remain rank outsiders in the fabrication department. They’ve been beaten by what can only be described as a class act…

The #1 Voynich Fabricator

Cipher Mysteries regulars will probably have already worked out which particular Colossus stands atop the list of Voynichological fabricating archers (and by a mile): Professor Gordon Rugg. Despite authoring a 2013 book about blind spots in reasoning and research, he manifestly leaped wholeheartedly (and unashamedly) into this foolish epistemological trap back in 2004 or so, and has resolutely stayed there ever since.

For me, Rugg’s hoax argument is nearly the ultimate example of fabricating archery, in that his entire Voynich ‘research programme’ isn’t even remotely about any critique (or indeed meta-critique) of internal or external evidence. Rather, it is about post hoc fabricating a conceptual Cardan grille-style mechanism whereby an existing hoax hypothesis (for, of course, Voynich hoax hypotheses long preceded his entry to the arena) can be ‘proved’ to have been more possible.

The first problem is that you can’t prove something is ‘more possible’. Broadly speaking, an hypothesis is either possible or impossible (issues of constructability aside), and as far as I know nobody ever claimed that an ultra-sophisticated Voynich hoax wasn’t possible. So if Rugg is talking about ‘possibility’, he’s just been kicking at an open door for the last decade. (So let’s assume that he’s better than that.)

The second problem is that Rugg also isn’t talking about probability, because his focus is purely on whether it would have been ‘practically possible’ for a 16th century hoaxer to have produced a simulacrum of a book with the same properties as the Voynich Manuscript’s text – and this focus consciously excludes consideration of all the (fairly obviously, I think) 15th century evidence (e.g. the radiocarbon dating, the art history, the palaeography, etc). Hoax theories are more like meta-theories, in that they try to ‘win’ by sidestepping all the awkward issues of historical probability: any pesky conflicting evidence gets filed away into the ever-fattening “must have been fabricated somehow” folder.

(Yet when Rugg’s computer-fabricated ‘Voynich-cheese’ was passed through Mark Perakh’s Letter Serial Correlation (LSC) tests, it yielded the same type of result that gibberish texts did. The Voynich Manuscript’s LSC test results resembled those of real languages, so even the statistics are against him.)

Possible is not plausible is not probable

But surely, Rugg claims, the existence of his fabricated narratives wrapped around the core claim of a hoax serve to make the whole idea of a hoax more plausible?

Here at last is what Rugg is actually talking about: plausibility. Now, if you have read Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahnemann’s exemplary (2012) Thinking Fast And Slow (which I highly recommend), you’ll know that many otherwise clever people confuse ‘probable’ with ‘plausible’. But they are far from the same thing.

Specifically, plausibility is a story-telling quality, not an evidential quality. A story can be highly plausible but still impossible when tested: a story can be highly plausible but still extremely improbable when tested. Really, you don’t have to read many court transcripts to see that plausibility is no guarantee of either possibility or probability. In fact, if I had tuppence for every plausible-sounding Voynich-related claim I’ve read or heard, I’d surely be able to give every Cipher Mysteries subscriber a 14″ pizza, and still have enough left to buy a helicopter. And a yacht.

For clarity, I’ll repeat that every single notion within Rugg’s palette of historical assertions is fashioned from the same fabricating clay, the same post hoc painted rings around his hoax arrow. Take away this fabric, his set of imaginative reconstructions and post hoc narratives, and there is nothing left: not a page, not a paragraph, not a line, not even a word. His plausible-sounding narrative about an historical fabricator is itself nothing more than a sustained present-day fabrication, with absolutely nothing to back it up beyond his desire for the fantasy to be true, perhaps for the sake of meta-theoretical neatness. Whatever this makes it, what he has done is not history and it is not science.

Hence all I can conclude is that what Rugg has done with the Voynich Manuscript has literally been a waste of a decade, both his own and that of many others.

The Man Maketh The Word, or The Word Maketh The Man?

In closing, I’ve long struggled to find a word or phrase that sums up the pointless anti-historicism (and indeed unhelpfulness) of Rugg’s work: and so I find myself curiously grateful to William Dembski for his fabricating archer antipattern – this has given me the tool I needed to scratch this particular itch.

Yet I can’t help but feel that perhaps Dembski himself is an even bigger fabricating archer than Rugg: the neo-creationist arrow Dembski lodged in the wall is transparent and visible for all to see; while Perakh was clearly in no doubt that all the maths-styled and logic-styled presentation of Dembski’s books was no more than a decoration or distraction to conceal the conceptual vacuum at the heart of his argumentation.

So we end up with a curious pair of ironies: not only of Gordon Rugg writing books about logical fallacies and yet trapped for a decade in Dembski’s fabricating archer antipattern, but also of William Dembski employing an analogy to make plain to the world the same core fallacy that he himself is stuck in.

“For ’tis the sport to have the engineer. Hoist with his own petard.“

Doctor Blake meets the Somerton Man (sort of)…

by ⋅ 22 Comments

Fans of Australia’s ABC TV channel’s “The Doctor Blake Mysteries” (that just started a new series) will doubtless have already seen Series 2 Episode 3 “A Foreign Field” (it aired yesterday, 21st February 2014).

The-Doctor-Blake-Mysteries-article

But if you haven’t, and fancy a bit of meanwhile-in-1959 retro-stylee forensic crime-solving period action, and with a storyline clearly based on the Somerton Man cold case, then there may still be time to catch up with it online on ABC’s iview website – though sadly (as I quickly found out) only if you happen to be in Australia.

Anyway, my mystery informant (OK, OK, it’s actually Bob, thanks Bob!) tells me that the episode has a “handsome stranger dying in a Ballarat park“, as well as poetry from the great Australian poet A. D. Hope (whose “The Wandering Islands” (1955) had only just been published), “codes, and Russian spies in the mix“. Sounds like fun, shame I can’t see it myself! 🙁

Some silly cryptograms for you to enjoy…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

As you can probably predict, I’m getting a tad tired of reviewing so many intensely po-faced Voynich theories one after the other. So I thought I’d instead post some silly puzzles to cheer myself up, hope you enjoy them!

(1) What links Burst Uvula and Chief Ghillie with Heroic Defiance, Solemn Operas, and Foxy Zappers? Feel free to suggest your own! 🙂

(2) J x AITKEN = SLEAZE. Can you solve Bill Hartston’s maths cryptogram?

(3) Of course, the most famous numeric cryptogram was composed by Henry Dudeney in 1924 for an article in Strand Magazine. SEND + MORE = MONEY. Can you work that out as well?

(4) A dog bitten by a snake fears sausages. True or false?

Stephen Bax and the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 197 Comments

A new day breaks here in the suburbs, bringing with it birdsong, A-road traffic noise, and yet another Voynich theory to bang my head against.

On paper, Professor Stephen Bax certainly has the combination of big brain, linguistic experience and personal ambition that you’d think would be needed to crack open the Voynich Manuscript’s crab-like shell. But… then again, so did poor old Professor William Romaine Newbold; and his Voynich non-decryption ended up enraging Charles Singer so much (justifiably, it has to be said) that he was still angry thirty years later.

All the same, Bax believes that he has tentatively identified a number of words in the Voynich Manuscript, and has posted a 62-page PDF on his website describing his findings. His initial press release has been picked up by BBC News, the Bedfordshire on Sunday, and the irrepressible Daily Grail amongst many others. He has a lecture arranged for 25th February 2014 in Luton (if you happen to be nearby and interested), and is even planning a small Voynich conference in London in June 2014 to try to get other academics involved in his Voynich research programme.

Yet as Rene Zandbergen likes to point out, the most difficult thing about Voynich research is developing chains of reasoning while avoiding big mistakes. And while I hate to be the one to unplug the sound system just as it’s starting to really get the party started, I’m quite certain that every single one of Stephen Bax’s conclusions to date have been built upon a long sequence of easily demonstrable mistakes.

In fact, even though he is trying to use a sensible sounding methodology to elicit his results, I can’t think of a single piece of Voynich Manuscript evidence or secondary historical evidence he uses that I’d agree is a sound starting point: and I’m not convinced that any of his conclusions could be right either. I’ll go through a whole load of points, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

1. “Initial Words On Herbal Pages Should Be Names”. Errrm…

As Bax rightly points out, you might reasonably expect the unique-looking first word on each of the Voynich Manuscript’s herbal pages to be the name of the plant depicted on that page, because that is indeed how many medieval herbals were laid out. This is not a new observation or idea: Leonell Strong assumed this as part of his Voynichese decryption in the 1940s (he thought the plaintext was written in English, but enciphered using a curious repeating offset into a local substitution alphabet).

But there’s an immediate problem: almost all the Voynich’s Herbal A pages start with one of the four gallows letters: EVA ‘p’ (53 times), EVA ‘t’ (24 times), EVA ‘k’ (21 times) or EVA ‘f’ (10 times). Which for simple substitution ciphers, broadly as John Tiltman pointed out roughly 50 years ago, would mean that the name of pretty much every plant in the Herbal section must start with one of three or four letters. Which would be nonsensical. (Leonell Strong was fine with this, because he thought the cipher scrambled all that stuff up a little: basically, he didn’t think it was a straightforward language.)

Yet Bax persists, and asserts that all of these gallows glyphs simultaneously map to plaintext C or K (in order to keep his ‘oror’ mapping intact, see [3] below), and as a result almost all of the plant names he considers start with the letter C – Centaurea, Cotton, Kaur, Crocus, etc. I’m sorry, but this whole notion is directly contradicted by the immediate statistical evidence. This isn’t something to build on, it’s something to abandon and leave far behind while you find some genuinely useful historical evidence to work with.

2. Bax’s proposed Voynichese alphabet has three letter R’s

This too flies in the face of supposed common sense. The Voynich Manuscript has a limited and compact alphabet, with roughly 18-22 characters occurring with particular frequency: and yet Bax concludes from his multi-language linguistic analysis that three of these (EVA r, EVA m, and EVA n) encipher the letter ‘R’. Come on: this is surely close to as unsystematic a system as could be constructed, a giant Red Flag of Non-Believability being waved in front of his train of reasoning.

3. The Voynichese word “oror” = the Hebrew word “arar”, meaning ‘juniper’

f15v not only has “oror” on, it has “oror or” and “or or oro r” immediately above each other on the first two lines. Did Bax not notice this when he picked this out? This is terribly selective and unconvincing. Moreover, “arar” itself is twice as common in the Voynich Manuscript than “oror”: while Bax himself points out good reasons why it shouldn’t be “oror”.

So… why does he persist with “oror” == juniper? “oror” appears throughout the Voynich Manuscript, while “or” appears extraordinarily frequently. This just seems a hopeful (and unsystematic) stab in the dark in exactly the wrong kind of way.

4. Bax thinks that EVA “kydain” = ‘centaur’ – but has he not noticed “dain” everywhere?

Now this is just ridiculous. One of the genuine mysteries of the Voynich Manuscript is the repeated presence of what look extraordinarily like medieval page references (EVA “aiin”): and here’s one apparently embedded in a word right at the top of f2r. So is there any real chance this also happens to encipher “kentaur” in the way he thinks? No, none whatsoever, I think.

5. “doary” = Taurus. Oh, really?

The reason people have in the past suspected the label by the “Pleiades”-like group on f68r might be “Taurus” was because of the late-medieval “-9” style Tironian nota at its end, preceded by a letter that looks like “r”. But both those correspondences remain a bit of a stretch, and so this seems basically unworkable in the way he hopes.

6. Reading EVA “keerodal” as “coriander”.

Ask people who have been working with the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” language for a few years and they’ll probably tell you (as I’m saying now) that this word is almost certainly a copying error by the Voynich Manuscript’s scribe. It is extremely rare to see “eer” (while “ar” and “or” are both extremely common), so I’m confident that this should instead have been written “karodal”, which closely matches how the Voynich Manuscript’s “labelese” often parses out in pairs, i.e. “k.ar.od.al”. Hence I have practically zero faith that this word could be a natural language version of “coriander” in the way Bax suspects – he has misparsed and miscategorised it.

7. Relying on Edith Sherwood’s hopeful plant identifications.

Oh, come on. Edith tries hard to do her thing, but remember that we’ve had real herbal authorities (such as the fantastic Karen Reeds) look closely at the Voynich’s herbal drawings, and they haven’t seen even 10% of what Edith Sherwood thinks she has seen.

So, in summary: of the nine words Bax claims (in his Appendix 1) to have identified, I disagree with the evidence, reasoning, and linguistic rationale for every single one. I am also sure that his letter assignments are fatally flawed. Contrary to the title of his paper, I honestly don’t believe that through his efforts he has yet identified a single “plausible” word in the Voynich Manuscript.

For me, this isn’t even a matter for Ockham’s blessed Razor: to be even remotely workable, a hypothesis needs to have a single example of evidence that chimes with it in a way that can actually be seen to work. And on the above showing of evidence, what he has presented so far is not yet a workable hypothesis in any obvious way, sorry.

The Castel del Monte Voynich theory, reviewed…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

Over the past week or so, I’ve spent some time patiently going over Fallacara & Occhinegro’s book which tries to connect the Castel del Monte with the Voynich Manuscript. The two guys are clearly intelligent, hard-working architecture historians who have spent several years trying not only to understand the Castel del Monte’s physical construction, but also to reconstruct how it was built and the purposes for which it was designed. But they have additionally posited a connection between the building’s design and numerous key design features found within the Voynich Manuscript, and have made lots of follow-on claims yada-yada-yada.

Hence what I’ll do here is look at their architecture bit first, and then move on to the Voynich layer perched atop their architectonic stuff. OK? Let’s go.

A River Ran Through It

The Castel del Monte in Puglia has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and over the years its unusual physical configuration has attracted numerous fringe theories claiming to explain its many odd features. To what degree have these two authors succeeded in looking past the façade of history and documentation to the actual building underneath?

Actually, I think their architectural research project has been a great success. What emerges from the (admittedly carefully chosen, but nonetheless strongly relevant) fragments of evidence presented in their book is that, contrary to its modern appearance, the site originally was very probably home to a natural spring thought at the time to have health-giving properties. A river even ran close by in previous centuries, as evidenced by the way the area is represented in the Tabula Peutingeriana.

On this location, Frederick II had a curious octagonal edifice built, one too small to be a proper castle but also not really functionally suitable for being a hunting lodge. Fallacara & Occhinegro have picked up on suggestions made by previous architectural historians as well as on numerous physical and archival clues, and have pieced together a reading of the Castel del Monte as a hamam – a restorative Turkish bath complex of the type that at that time was just starting to become fashionable in Europe.

This all aligns with what we find in Pietro da Eboli’s bath-praising poem De Balneis Puteolanis, which has been mentioned on Cipher Mysteries a fair few times, and which arguably helped to start the whole balneological ‘craze’. So up to this point, I don’t see anything at all wrong with the two authors’ reading of the Castel del Monte.

But are they justified in also reading the evidence as of an alchemical obsession by Frederick II? Their evidence in this regard seems to be no more than some circular-shaped stains on the floor, from which they somehow infer alchemical activity on the site. This seems decidedly thin: and I’m fairly certain that the idea of alchemy as promoting eternal life is something that came in many centuries later – in Frederick II’s Europe, chrysopoeia (‘gold-making’) was alchemists’ almost total focus.

This whole idea extends further to spagyria (herb-based alchemy, or herbal medicine made using alchemical-style processes), which as both a term and a practice dates to Paracelsus (much later in the 16th century). I therefore don’t see a way to accept their argument that Frederick II would have designed a building focused on spagyric alchemy with the purpose of retardatio senectutis, because that would simply be anachronistic.

Finally, the authors try to make some play about the 8-sided structure, but I personally see the likelihood of there having been some kind of Platonic or numerological basis for this as basically zero. So-called “sacred geometry” is one of those secret history things that sounds nice in an airport novel, but in almost every case disappears when you look for it in the cold light of day. The Castel del Monte has a nice little design, sure, but… anything beyond that is just too much hand-waving for me to bear.

So, in summary, I like the chain of inference that leads to the Castel del Monte’s being a hamam, at the forefront of the whole balneological fever: but extending this claim to include alchemical or numerological significance seems speculative at best, if not just plain wrong-headed.

All That, And The Voynich Manuscript Too?

Well… no, not really. Given that I don’t accept the link they claim between the Castel del Monte and alchemy or spagyria of any sort, the evidence they present in their book attempting to link the Castel to the Voynich Manuscript is a thin, unnourishing soup indeed.

For example, the image from the book’s cover tries to conflate the (apparently) hexagonal-bodied, round-turreted magic circle page in the Voynich Manuscript with the Castel del Monte’s (very definitely) octagonal-bodied, octagonal-turreted design. Personally, this looks to me no different to other super-selective Voynich theories: really, you have to do better than one partially suggestive image match to back up a claim of a systematic “philological” match between these two very different things.

And similarly for the plants: a palmful of comparisons with carefully selected individual drawings plucked from a broad set of medieval herbals really isn’t methodologically good enough. The bigger problem with comparing the Voynich Manuscript with medieval herbals is that quite a few of its drawings are apparently drawn from life, a practice which happened before and after the Middle Ages (if after, say 1425 or so), but not really during them.

The authors are also aware that it is a long way back from the (early 15th century) radiocarbon dating to the (early 13th century) court of Frederick II (the Castel’s Decretio Regis dates from 1240), and so conclude, unsurprisingly, that it must have been copied by a later dumb copyist etc etc. There are indeed a number of codicological features that suggest that the Voynich Manuscript was in some way a copy.

But there are many problems with a 13th century dating for its original content, which is why nobody has seriously re-proposed Roger Bacon as its author for several decades now. Never mind the 15th century stuff I keep going on about, the crossbow technology depicted in the Sagittarius archer’s hunting crossbow points to “the first half of the 14th century”: while Erwin Panofsky famously opined “as he came to the female figures (in conjunction with the colors used in the manuscript) he came to the conclusion that it could not be earlier than the 15th century“. The hair-styles and clothes (such as they are) are all thought to be 15th century (or possibly later) – which is an inexact method of dating, sure, but it really should be good for the nearest century.

I also don’t buy into their ideas about “proto-toilets”: having read numerous earnest-sounding books on the secret history of toilets over the last decade (I kid you not, and recommend Lawrence Wright’s (1960) “Clean and Decent”), I really don’t think 13th century engineers were even remotely close to getting that nailing that tricky jelly to the garderobe wall. Yes, they did have limited water engineering and hypocausts: but my own reading is that toilets only became a plumbing possibility once Vitrivius had been revived in the 15th century. So that suggestion doesn’t work for me either.

Hence I think it’s going to take a lot of saving hypotheses (mainly around embellishing copyists, rather than time-travelling Gallifreyans) to pull a 13th century dating back from the cliff-edge sheer drop its feet are pedalling rapidly over, Wile E. Coyote-style. And while that’s still possible, it’s not very likely on this showing.

I don’t know, really. Fallacara and Occhinegro were very kind to send me a copy of their book, and I do wish them luck with their ongoing research into the Castel del Monte, which offers a reasonably solid hamam-based angle on a nice and genuinely mysterious piece of Puglian tourist history. But I can’t even remotely endorse the 13th century Voynich story they want to tell (which will probably come as no great surprise to them): unfortunately, it mars what is otherwise a perfectly nice (if fairly specific) piece of architectural / balneological history.

I think the simple truth – or as close as we can get to it without going excessively TL;DR – is that the Castel del Monte was on the leading edge of European nobility’s obsession with thermal baths, while the Voynich Manuscript was far closer to its trailing edge. Fifty or a hundred years yet further on, baths were thought (wrongly) to be the cause of syphilis and all kinds of other STDs: and so the whole craze abruptly stopped, with baths (and books about baths, which flourished in the 15th century) falling rapidly into disrepair. Perhaps the last century’s craze for unsupportable Voynich theories will abruptly stop some time in the future too? Well… I can dream, can’t I?