In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the ”Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university [...] Read more »
A German Voynich article by Klaus Schmeh just pinged on the Cipher Mysteries radar screen: the ten-second summary is that in an interesting mix of observations and opinions, Schmeh clearly enjoys playing the skeptic trump card whenever he can (though he still fails to win the hand).
In some ways, Schmeh’s bias is no bad thing at all: authors like Rugg [...] Read more »
On the one hand, “Linus’ Law” asserts that if enough people collaborate to solve a problem, it becomes simple - hence open source software. On the other, even though more people have eyeballed the Voynich Manuscript in the last two years (thanks to the Beinecke Library’s scans posted on the Internet) than in the previous four centuries, [...] Read more »
It used to be the case that Google could find hardly anything connecting Dan Burisch and the Voynich Manuscript apart from my postings here: but now there are over 50 hits.
Some of these, such as this one, are from people on the inside of the labyrinth/RPG: these tend to throw yet more sand in the [...] Read more »
It’s a sad (but true) observation that most webpages (and particularly blog posts) on the VMs are serious, dull, dry, high-minded, conceptual guff, at best offering up a semi-quirky restatement of either the Wikipedia page, Rene Zandbergen’s page, or of Gordon Rugg’s hypothesis-of-possibility. You would scarce believe, dear reader, what oceans of cack I have [...] Read more »
John Sweat’s “The Anthropogene” is a nice ‘lost history’ blog I recently stumbled upon: what caught my eye was a post of his that mentioned the Voynich Manuscript and tried out Gordon Rugg’s seven-step “Verifier Method”. As this is what Rugg allegedly used when he made his famous “VMS is a hoax” claims in 2003/2004, [...] Read more »
Here’s a nice bit of craft by someone called “iisaw” (Eric Coyote Elliott), who’s made a fabulous astrolabe-like instrument and posted a couple of pictures of it on the DeviantArt website - click on the picture there for a detailed view. As you should be able to see, Eric used Voynich lettering (probably the EVA [...] Read more »
Browsing idly through the few Google search results for Voynich above Voynich News a few days ago, I wondered how voynich dot org, a parked domain with no content and no inward links could rank so highly out of 225,000 hits. Now that is a mystery: whatever SEO ayahuasca they’re using, I want some.
Following that [...] Read more »
At an upcoming skeptical conference in Darmstadt from 1-3 May 2008 (with a loosely Creationist / Intelligent Design / paranormal theme), the “scientist [and] author” Klaus Schmeh will be giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript. There’s a German blog entry here, in which Schmeh sets out his stall: which is that, basically, the VMs [...] Read more »
I just stumbled across part 1 and part 2 of a long-ish Dutch blog entry on hoax theories of the Voynich Manuscript, specifically Gordon Rugg’s Cardan grille nonsense. If, like me, you don’t speak Dutch, note that Google Translate’s Dutch-to-English translation appears not to be working, and so use FreeTranslation.com instead (which does work fine).
Actually, [...] Read more »
