Cipher Mysteries

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 "...

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 ...

Some days I wonder if I should forget all about cipher mysteries - which are, quite frankly, far too much like hard work - and instead start up a news feed that promises subscribers one thing and one thing only: a freshly hatched cracked Leonardo da Vinci theory every day. But even if such a tragic nadir of historical non-journalism ...

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 ...

Once again, Leonardo da Vinci has been in the news. Firstly, a local journalist found a fragment of Leonardo's writing in Nantes library, which had received it in 1872 along with 5,000 other documents (including an unknown Mozart score) from "wealthy collector Pierre-Antoine Labouchère". It hasn't yet been transcribed or translated, so I couldn't possibly comment on whether it ...

For a while, I've had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn't work out how to scratch. You see... about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of ...

Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 - Klaus' VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich ...

You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby's withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first 'official' photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so "based on the letter 'W' that – ...

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 ...