Cipher Mysteries

Just so you know, I'll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants' exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted ...

To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory. Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese 'word' super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: "fachys ykal ar ytaiin ...

In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two "dry migraine" attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps ...

A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research! As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the "ugly duckling" artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in ...

A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I've called them "The Blitz Ciphers", but they're probably much older than the 1940s... They were handed down to ...

I don't quite know how I manage it but I do keep on tripping over odd stuff, not unlike Christine Jins' sensitively made peppermill, something definitely not to be sneezed at. So here's this week's microdose of historical weirdness for you, the supernatural Victorian fiction of "engaged feminist" lesbian Vernon Lee (the pen-name of Violet Paget), such as "...

I recently found an old email from Sander Manche mentioning his Voynich blog: going through its pages just now, one particular post on letters hidden in Voynich plants jumped out at me. To be precise, it discussed a single symbol that appears to have been hidden in the middle of the plant drawings on both f20r......

Having just weakened your will to live by exposing you to the word heteroscedasticity :-) , I thought I'd now throw some more paraffin onto your wordy fires. Is the Voynich Manuscript... ...an "ergodic text"? According to Espen Aarseth [as discussed on the Grand Text Auto website], ergodic literature is where "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to ...

Cipher Mysteries readers in the US may well have watched Brad Meltzer's recent "Decoded" episode on the Declaration of Independence. Though you might well think that the description listed below doesn't sound particularly promising... The Declaration of Independence is the founding document of American Democracy. Could it contain hidden messages from our nation's forefathers intended to be discovered years later? ...

The NSA's 2011 Cryptologic History Symposium (held in Johns Hopkins) ran yesterday and today, and had plenty of names long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless recognize in a flash:- * Dr. Jim Reeds, Institute for Defense Analyses: “Editing the ‘General Report on TUNNY’” * Dr. Benedek Lang, Budapest University of Technology and Economics: “Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography” * ...