Something new just pinged on Cipher Mysteries’ bank of cultural radar screens: “Voynich Volume 1″ by Hiromi Taihei (a manga artist who has previously published works in the young adult / science fiction genres) is due for release on 20 January 2009 - let me know if you see a copy.
Back in 2005, Elmar Vogt mentioned some [...] Read more »
Could the world ever really be ready for my enciphered sexy Jewish limerick? Having mulled over the punchline for this for a couple of months, I think I’ve finally nailed it. Happy deciphering! :-)
A randy professor from Haifa
Wrote all his love letters in cipher
“Ven I look in your eyes,”
He would rhapsodize,
“J’n tdiuvqqjoh uif lojti pgg Njdifmmf Qgfjggfs!“
addthis_url [...] Read more »
Here’s a tiny crypto puzzle for you from the award-winning Adrenalini Brothers cartoon series. There, the three eponymic death-defying stunt brothers (Xan, Enk, and Adi) speak a language called Réndøosîan (sample phrase: oofa vamy bakeesh = “you can’t get anything right“): of course, this is simply a trick animation companies use to avoid localization costs (as with Pingu). [...] Read more »
Readers of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” will doubtless remember (if you made it though to Chapter 12, *sigh*) the parallels I drew between physical architects (such as Antonio Averlino / Filarete, of course) and software/cipher architects: both achieve their design ends using a kind of “intellectual structuring” means. But might there be even closer links?
Concealment through architecture is [...] Read more »
Do you fancy a little personal journal with a front cover loosely inspired by the VMs (the plant at the top of page f18r, to be precise)? If you do, someone called “Black Pepper” has put her design on CafePress… just in case you have $14 to burn. Alternatively, here’s a Voynich Manuscript-themed screensaver from Amaranth Publishing [...] Read more »
I try to pick up on everything VMs-related out there, and I liked comics as a kid (Marvel not DC, if you’re askin’): so it came as a nice surprise to find the Voynich Manuscript popping up on the edges of the comics world.
According to this page on his own website, satirical graphics novel author [...] Read more »
Having spent many years in that industry, I always find it quite nice to see computer games people appropriating the Voynich Manuscript. But as games get more visually “realistic” (or, rather, foolishly detailed), their reliance on conceptual props ever diminishes: so I wondered whether Charles Cecil’s Broken Sword III - which comes over a bit [...] Read more »
If you haven’t seen Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus before, I heartily recommend stomping over to this 230-photo Flickr set and checking it out.
It’s now reasonably well-known that the book’s strange page-numbering system has been cracked (it’s a funny kind of base-21 counting, with various unlucky numbers removed), but the text itself remains enigmatic. Ivan Derzhanski [...] Read more »
The Voynich Manuscript meme continues to tap at our cultural windows, asking politely to be let in from the rain. And sometimes people do…
For example, here’s a knitted squid sitting on a copy of Gawsewitch’s “Le Code Voynich” (don’t be put off by the LiveJournal 14+ age warning, it really is a knitting page).
Over at [...] Read more »
Here’s a nice Voynich-themed oddity from the much-frayed edge between C.P.Snow’s “Two Cultures” of art and science.
A contemporary painter called Shardcore explores the history of science by painting famous scientists and historical scientific objects: and was so entertained by the notion that Ethel Lilian Boole - the daughter of the famous logician George Boole - [...] Read more »
