Cipher Mysteries

Here's the hot-off-the-presses official trailer for "The Thomas Beale Cipher" animation I mentioned a short while back, coming to a film festival near you:- Looks pretty good, I'd say. If the video isn't embedded above, feel free to head over to the official site, courtesy of Polymix on Vimeo. Enjoy!

I think that there will always be films based around codes because they give screenwriters such an "easy in". Just saying "code" conjures up... Dark secrets (e.g. heresy undermining The Church, free energy undermining The Market, occult powers, any old stuff really) Powerful interests (usually multiple conspiracies fighting each other behind the scenes for control of 'The Secret') A central McGuffin that is ...

Artist Anna-Lise Horsley has a mini online art gallery of her work on the Saatchi Online gallery: inspired by all kinds of floral and herbal shapes and shadows, two works showcased are "Spode Voynich" and "Voynich Poppy" (both from 2008). I'd have to say that I prefer her "Pandemonium" (2009), but each to ...

I used to quite like Peanuts as a kid, though looking back I'd be hard-pressed to say which of the characters I particularly identified with. Perhaps identifying with characters is more of an adult way of relating to cultural objets d'art: I think I just liked the jokes. Of course, nothing in the following badly-hacked Peanuts cartoon is anything to do with ...

Most of the tenuous (yet culturally interesting) sideways links to cipher mysteries that ping on my 20-screen bank of monitors are to relatively low-brow stuff - airport novels, films, neat 3d renders using Voynichese fonts, etc. Furthermore, they tend (with only a few honourable exceptions) to be fairly po-faced (and unsexy) The-Mismatched-Protagonists-Must-Battle-Against-An-Infinitely-Resourced-Ancient-Conspiracy-To-Save-The-World-As-We-Know-It-By-Decoding-An-Even-More-Ancient-Ciphertext pap. Which is quite sad, really. So it is with a great ...

A few days back, two small book-shaped things arrived in the post: and I've been pondering what to say about them ever since. In fact, I've been struggling to work out what I think about them... you'll see what I mean in a moment. You might superficially compare them with, for example, Luigi Serafini's famously unreadable book: however, I have relatively ...

I've just got back from an enjoyable working holiday in Taiwan, marred only (courtesy of a certain Icelandic volcano) by a detour to Frankfurt and an insanely long coach/ferry journey back to the UK. During that time, my only exposure to ciphers was through China Airlines' numerous on-demand seat-back films and documentaries: but rather than bore you with my take on ...

A couple of days ago, an entrepreneurial Scot put out a call on Gumtree for... "...a Scottish historian, cryptographer or world class crossword puzzle solver. If you can do the Times Crossword in less than 10 minutes I want to speak to you. If Charles Babbage interests you, if you hang out at Rosslyn Chapel. Know who Fibonacci was ...

Ever heard of Palo Alto CARET Labs? Nope, neither had anyone else until "Isaac" posted about his experiences at "PACL" in the mid-1980s as part of a team trying to turn "extraterrestrial technology" taken from "crash sites" into consumer goodies (such as a personal anti-gravity machine, apparently) for our sated materialist society. So far, so mainstream UFO subculture: but what moves Isaac's ...

What can I say? If you want to be completely literal about it (like XKCD fans), it's a brand new theory about Voynichese being scallop language (with the top two lines of f15v translating as "I think you should stop browsing forums and get back to work"). Otherwise, you might want to riff on how the final space insertion cipher stage is particularly ...