Cipher Mysteries

A nice email arrived from Paul Ferguson, pinging me about Giovanni Antonio Panteo/Pantheo (i.e. not the Giovanni Agostino Panteo who wrote the Voarchadumia as mentioned here before) and his book on baths & spas that is listed in the STC as Annotationes ex trium dierum confabulationibus (printed in Venice 1505).  According to The Story of Verona ...

The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you'd expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as "Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues - by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf", and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples ...

Excitement surged loudly through Imperial College's Great Hall as the announcer belatedly bellowed those four terrifying words, signifying what for one side would be the beginning of the end: "Sssseconds out, Rrrrround One!" Danny grabbed Charles Hope's arm: "Am I going to be able to do this?", he asked. "Do you really think I've learnt enough to last five rounds... against him?" "Relax", said the ...

Just in case you thought my recent list of upcoming talks was too UK-centric, here's a nice one from the US... A while back on Cipher Mysteries, I mentioned the 200-year old challenge ciphertext sent to Thomas Jefferson by UPenn maths professor Robert Patterson. But in a PhysOrg.com article (linked from the Daily Grail), there's news of a lecture ...

While searching for things to do with the humanist minuscule hand, I stumbled across a reference in a short 2002 paper by Jessica Wilbur to an oversized 1981 hardback by Jacqueline Herald called "Renaissance Dress in Italy : 1400-1500". Now, I thought, that sounds like a book I'd really like to buy: only to find out from ...

Once again, it's time to roll out and dust off the Cipher Mysteries crystal skull crystal ball (no, I didn't buy it on eBay, nor did I nick it from the British Museum) to peer dimly ahead to 2010. What will it bring us all? Of course, 2009's big news was the radiocarbon dating of four slivers of the Voynich Manuscript's ...

For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what ...

Much as I enjoyed watching Micky Bet covering the Voynich Manuscript, I couldn't help but wonder how much better it would be had it had a slightly funkier script. So (courtesy of the kind people at Overstream) I added my own captions. Enjoy! :-) (If you can't see this in your browser or email client, here's a ...

As my plane reached New Haven in Chapter One, I began to realize that this "Voynich Manuscript" mystery was going to be a tough nut to crack. And when the first of my idealistic (but fruit-loop) cryptographic allies got ritualistically murdered by the end of Chapter Two, it was clear that the stakes were higher than an NBA star's dandruff. Yes, ...

A fascinating email just arrived at Cipher Mansions from Tony Gaffney, our virtual cryptologer-in-residence at the British Library. While looking at BL Add. MS 39660 recently, he noticed a set of dates for ten popes written in an unusual mixture of Roman numbers and Arabic numerals ("an9 pm9" = "annus primus", and "ufq3" = "usque"):-...