Cipher Mysteries

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 ...

"Weird or What?"'s Desperate Housewives Cocaine Mummies episode came and went in its own breathless, deathless way, a strangely mismatched mixture of gravelly voiceover (exuding Danikenesque enthusiasm) and static talking heads (with more than a frisson of frozen-in-the-headlights). Purely for review purposes, I grabbed my copy from a terrrrribly slow torrent (the 13-minute Voynich segment started at 19:45), but frankly you might ...

Here it is, the Austrian Voynich documentary we've been waiting so eagerly for - and you don't even need to have a satellite dish to watch it (as long as you hurry, it'll probably only be online for a few days). (Hint and tip: if you click on the diagonal arrow button just above the video, you can watch ...

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 ...

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 ...

Though (as was apparent from the rapid social media take-up of yesterday's XKCD webcomic) the Voynich Manuscript is now firmly wedged in the cultural mind, sadly the level of debate on it is still stuck circa 1977 - and if anything, Gordon Rugg's foolish "hoax" claims have helped to keep it there. But it is demonstrably written ...

I think you can split historical revisionists into two broad camps: (a) desperate mainstream historians looking outwards to fringe subjects for a reputation-making cash-cow book; and (b) clever writers on the fringes who appropriate the tropes and tools of history to construct a kind of literary outsider art that is (almost) indistinguishable from history. That is, revisionism is a church broad enough ...

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 in ...

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 ...

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, the overall level of discourse ...