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At last, the secret history of that dead cipher pigeon…
I spent last Saturday at the National Archives in Kew, accompanied by fellow programmer Stu Rutter who is just as fascinated by the whole pigeon cipher mystery as I am. Between us we did a kind of...
View Article“The Roger Williams Code” cracked (the old-fashioned way)…
A fulsome hat-tip to Flavia H for bouncing this rather nice Slate article on in my direction. It tells the story of how Brown’s student Lucas Mason-Brown managed to crack a 17th century shorthand...
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2012 Advent Calendar Day #10: Book theft with climbing rope…
Earlier this year I found a true story about an obsessed book thief and a high-up monastery that I loved & wanted to share: all of which (in a funny sort of way) brought to mind Allison Hoover...
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Dead WW2 pigeon cipher cracked with WW1 codebook (says the Mail)… errr, really?
According to today’s Mail on Sunday, Canadian expert Gord Young has cracked most of the dead WW2′s pigeon’s cipher message using a WWI Royal Artillery codebook. It’s not a big old message, so let’s...
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“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back on sale…
Just a quick note to let you know that a freshly printed boxful of my book “The Curse of the Voynich” arrived here today, and with shinier covers than ever. It is, of course, a perfect last-minute...
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“Small explosion in Unicode factory, nobody hurt”… :-)
Well, that was what I thought when I first saw the ciphertext in Part 2 Chapter 8 of “The Fates Unwind Infinity“, an online book detailing the anonymous author’s thoughts on a whole load of...
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On irony, question marks, brackets, and the Voynich Manuscript…
It may surprise you a little, but sometimes I do like to think about things which aren’t to do with cipher mysteries at all. Today I stumbled upon a short video on situational irony that, just like...
View ArticleThe unfortunate life of the Army’s Cysquare cipher…
When I was trawling through WW2 pigeon / cipher-related documents at the National Archives, I found a brief mention of a medium grade Army cipher called “Cysquare”. I half-remembered the name and that...
View ArticleBigrams in the pigeon cipher…
I’ve been wondering whether the pigeon cipher might be based around bigrams, i.e. where you split the cipher into pairs. If you disregard what seems to be the ‘AOAKN’ key indicator at the start and...
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What lurks in the basement?
You don’t have to have the hundred eyes of Argus nor Watchman Ozymandias‘ wall of screens to notice that most stuff on the Internet is, errrm, a bit rubbish. And yet… every once in a while, something...
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The Voynich Manuscript, Voynich theorists, and professional historians…
In four words, the Voynich Manuscript is a puzzling old thing (and really, ain’t that the truth?). Filled with unknown plants, unrecognizable astrology & astronomy, and numerous drawings of small...
View ArticlePigeon bigram / Slidex update…
Having got hold of a WW2 Slidex manual, I’m starting to see what a travesty of a coding system it was – and how a smart German decrypter could (with a bit of practice) decipher it almost in real time....
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Cipher talk for kids in Kingston (3rd February 2013)…
Roughly once a month on a Sunday morning, I take my son Alex along to a local kids’ group called Surrey Explorers for what is almost always a fascinating and hands-on talk about something a little...
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Why so many open pigeony questions?
As far as just about any cipher I blog about goes, I have days when a solution seems so comically close I could almost accidentally breathe it in. But I also have days when one seems so tragically far...
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At last, some genuinely useful Voynich merchandise hits eBay…
A fulsome tip of the Cipher Mysteries hat to Luck Thief Luke Fitch for passing on a link to this (actually rather nice-looking, I think) Voynich-themed iPhone4 case shipped all the way from Hong Kong....
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Some of my pigeon questions answered…
A few days ago I posted a list of open questions about the dead cipher pigeon, really as a way of externalizing the annoyance I felt from knowing so few basic facts. To my great delight, Mike Moor from...
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The Massey twins’ Phaistos Disk decryption claim…
I don’t often cover the Phaistos Disk here, simply because it’s almost certainly more of a linguistic mystery than a cipher mystery as such. However, I was particularly taken by some aspects of the...
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Slovakian Voynich facsimile edition (2012)…
I found out today that Slovakian publisher CAD Press late last year brought out a new facsimile edition of the Voynich Manuscript, preceded by 176 pages reviewing its history, apparent contents, mad...
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Helen Fouché Gaines’ challenge cipher…
To add to our list of challenge ciphers (Bellaso’s, d’Agapeyeff’s, Feynman’s, etc), here’s one I hadn’t seen before from Helen Fouché Gaines’ (1956) “Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their...
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Mona Lisa, multimedia-style… ;-)
For over a year, I’ve been collecting links to modern versions of the Mona Lisa made of weird materials – leaves, make-up, chocolate, meat, Lego, coffee, toast, pasta, buttons, jelly beans, mushrooms,...
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