Cipher Mysteries

It's funny how two things can have all the same basic ingredients and yet end up wildly different. A Maclaren MP4-12C and a Fiat 500 are both cars: yet few would disagree that they're worlds apart. Similarly, even though Emery Borka has - in Steve Santa and the secret of the Last Parfait - succeeded in producing a novel that ...

What would it feel like to be a footballer with no goal? An actor with no stage? A projector with no screen? Or (finally getting to the point) a pseudohistorian with no infamous historical figure to attach his/her nutty theories onto? All of which is why I feel sorry for poor old Leonardo da Vinci. He barely counts as a genuine ...

OK, much as I deplore the relentless, adulatory stripmining of Leonardo da Vinci's works, I do rather enjoy seeing infra-red images of paintings, glimpsing the construction marks left beneath the surface. And so I have nothing but good things to say about Discovery News' series of infra-red images of Leonardo's "Adoration of the Magi". I like the detailing on the ...

The film Stigmata (1999) presses a whole lot of my buttons. At the time it was originally released, I had been researching my own novel built on broadly the same premise:  a globetrotting protagonist hunting down miraculous statues and people claiming to have duplicates of Christ's stigmata (though that's basically where the similarities ended). And so I was fascinated to see how the ...

What picture might outsiders paint of Cipher Mysteries in their mind? A mid-town apartment filled with books, box-files, printouts, and eBay-bought sofas filled with a continual stream of cipher groupies all surreptitiously hoping to pick up on some innocuous clue to fabulous buried treasure? Well... that's presumably fairly close to what the script-writer on The (all-new) Basil Brush Show (on the CBBC channel) sees ...

Perhaps it's some mysterious side-effect of the Da Vinci Code, but it seems that all of a sudden cipher challenges have become cool again (if they were ever cool before). I did a quick trawl of the Net and came up with this quicky little list, mostly from 2008:- Pretty as a picture is the MicroArray $1500 challenge, courtesy of ...

It's been a rollercoaster of a day for me at the Warburg Institute on the Early Modern Research Techniques course, like being given the keys to the world twice but having them taken away three times. I'll try to explain... Paul Taylor kicked Day Two's morning off in fine style, picking up the baton from Francois Quiviger's drily laconic ...