‘21st Century’ category posts - « Cipher Mysteries »



161 posts in 17 Pages. ...

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 30th, 2012 - 9 comments.
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 ...

Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 19th, 2012 - 30 comments.
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 ...

Happy Voynich New Year 2012!

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 10th, 2012 - 9 comments.
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 ...

Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

Posted by nickpelling on Dec 22nd, 2011 - 22 comments.
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 ...

Letters hidden in Voynich plants (yet again)…

Posted by nickpelling on Nov 10th, 2011 - 14 comments.
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......

A brief history of generated texts…

Posted by nickpelling on Nov 4th, 2011 - 8 comments.
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 ...

Brad Meltzer and the Beale Papers…

Posted by nickpelling on Oct 21st, 2011 - 2 comments.
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? ...

Oops, that was a nice conference I just missed… :-(

Posted by nickpelling on Oct 7th, 2011 - 7 comments.
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” * ...

Apologies for three missing posts!

Posted by nickpelling on Sep 25th, 2011 - 2 comments.
A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I'm very sorry to say that you've missed out on three recent updates to the site. They were (in ...

Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp…

Posted by nickpelling on Sep 15th, 2011 - 2 comments.
Here's an upcoming talk at Cambridge's Sidney Sainsbury's Sussex College on 12th October 2011 at 5pm which might be of interest to Voynich researchers. Harvard Professor George Grabowicz promises an interesting couple of hours with his lecture "The Eternal Return of National Mystifications: the Voynich Manuscript, the Book of Vles and the Igor Tale". (It seems to be ...