Cipher Mysteries

The Cipher Mysteries stats to date: 568 posts - 16 static pages - 100,155 visits - roughly 190,000 page loads - 1775 comments - 115 subscribers. Thank you all very much for your continued interest, support, comments (both appreciative and snarky), tweets, and off-line posts and notes (always interesting). Just so you know, most referrals continue to come from Google with only one Slashdot-style traffic ...

Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his "Voynich Thoughts" website of the Voynich Manuscript's teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger's notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I'm sure you want ...

As promised (though a little later than planned), here's the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy! [11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are [11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy [11:56:27] NP: :) [11:56:35] vc: We are. [11:56:35] NP: I ...

His eyes stinging from all the Google Translate hits popping up on his server logs (what did I tell you?), Elias Schwerdtfeger posted up an English translation of his Voynich Bullshit Index post from a couple of days ago, no doubt cursing me through gritted teeth as he typed. :-) By my reckoning, I reckon my Averlino theory in ...

Here's a Voynich page that made me laugh, and I hope it will do broadly the same for you too. :-) Elias Schwerdtfeger has posted a new meta-theoretical analysis tool to his blog, called VBI - short for the "Voynich Bullshit Index". By carefully testing your pet Voynich theory against his long checklist of questions (each with its own VBI point ...

For a couple of weeks, I've been meaning to post about German Voynich blogger Elias Schwerdtfeger and what he calls the VMs' "biological paradox". His question is simple: why is it that the Voynich's "biological" Quire 13 has both (a) complicated pictures of nymphs, tubes and baths, and (b) longwinded, redundant text? Surely, he asks, isn't this combination somewhat paradoxical? (To be ...

Apart from Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich blogosphere has been far too quiet of late. Even Elias Schwerdtfeger's "Das Voynich Blog" is, despite some intriguing posts in the past, fairly subdued. And so it is a breath of fresh air to see a new blog from an old friend: long-time Voynich mailing ...

A few errata and notes on the virtual pinboard, tacks don't have to be taxing... (1) Warburg librarian Francois Quiviger kindly points out that my description of the layout of the Warburg Institute (in the Day Two blog entry) wasn't totally precise: though the overall layout matches Warburg's arbitrary Mnemosyne plan, books within a section are arranged chronologically (or rather, ...

Incidentally, you've got to love Elias when he types (26th Jan 2007): "Ein Königreich für eine Zeitmaschine" - [my] kingdom for a time-machine. To me, these brief words speaks volumes for the frustration (and Renaissance-like itch for knowledge) Voynichologists suffer from (while deriving a vaguely masochistic mental enjoyment from the same thing). What keeps you awake at night, then? Too ...

Here's a link to Elias Schwerdtfeger's very interesting "Das Voynich Blog". Elias has worked really hard behind the scenes to find ways of visualising the statistics expressing what "old hand" Voynichologists (such as, say, Philip Neal & I) see when we look at the Voynich - you know, the highly bonded, multi-level internal structure that exists at the stroke, character, ...