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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

As I mentioned here recently, I've been trying to grasp the structure of the humanist community of astronomers / mathematicians orbiting around Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome... but so far haven't found any definitively useful books on the subject. Thony Christie has a nice article here, and there's a book on 15th century Viennese ...

The Internet is a strange thing, a virtual photographer's jacket crammed with countless pockets of enthusiasts. For example, you beautiful cipher mysteries fans circulate within one bijou (but nicely-appointed) pocket, while the massed legions of Slashdot fans have a Tardis-style hyperzoom lens pocket all of their own. But... what would happen if these two worlds collided? A chance to find out came in December 2009, when ...

I recently blogged here about the difference between skepticism (which has at its heart both a guarded optimism and a realistic take on the practical difficulties involved in gaining knowledge) and cynicism (which by way of contrast is a denialist position, that says it is safer to believe nothing rather than get hurt by believing something that will turn out to ...

Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched 'vertical' books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the ...

If you combine the thoughts I posted yesterday (suggesting that the "o[r]aiiv" word in the top line of f67r1 might encipher "luna") with the "or oro ror" sequence on line #2 of f15v (which would appear to be a verbosely enciphered Roman numeral, probably "CCCC"), the two would superficially seem to be incompatible. How can the Voynichese "or"-pair encipher ...

In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my "The Curse of the Voynich" Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]'s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of ...

Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things ...