Vox piece on the Voynich Manuscript…
Here’s a link to a nice little piece on the Voynich Manuscript that came out today in classy American online magazine Vox. Though clearly triggered by Nicholas Gibbs’ recent TLS non-theory, the article...
View ArticleZodiac Killer Z340, letter skips, and a three-way line dance?
I’ve had the Zodiac Killer Z340 cipher on my mind for the last few days. Though I’m still finding it hard not to draw the conclusion that its top and bottom halves are two different ciphertexts (joined...
View ArticleReading (and translating!) RSS feeds…
For a while, I got into the habit of picking up Voynich-related blog updates via voynich.ninja’s convenient Blogosphere Reader. However, I always knew that this was icing rather than cake (i.e. it...
View ArticleZodiac Killer Z340, transposition patterns, and homophone cycles…
When talking about the Zodiac Killer Z340 cipher, FBI cryptanalyst Dan Olson once pointed out that: Statistical tests indicate a higher level of randomness by row, than by column. This indicates that...
View ArticleA cabinet book to die for (literally)…
I thought I’d share this online article on a curious 17th century cabinet book. Though it contains no cipher, its secret contents would definitely have been a surprise: The (almost all poisonous)...
View ArticleThe Pathology of Voynich Priority…
Diane O’Donovan has recently commented (here and elsewhere) and posted a number of times (on her own blog) about the priority of various Voynich ideas. For any given Voynich idea, who was first to...
View ArticleEarly look at Siloe’s Voynich facsimile [VIDEO]…
If you want an early sneak peek at Siloe’s funky (but insanely expensive, naturally) Voynich facsimile, well… here it is: Enjoy! 🙂 The post Early look at Siloe’s Voynich facsimile [VIDEO]… appeared...
View ArticleBNF Français 565, Nicole Oresme, and Jean de Berry’s library…
Back in 2014, Voynich blogger Ellie Velinska found what is surely one of the most stunning parallels yet with any of the Voynich Manuscript’s illustrations: a splendidly detailed T-O map surrounded by...
View ArticleThe rather strange-looking BAV MSS P.I.O.6…
Rene Zandbergen today very kindly passed me a link to a curious-looking document in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana that goes by the name of MSS P.I.O.6. PIO6’s Greek writing is apparently...
View ArticleArticle request: “Marie de Berry et les livres”…?
In response to my post on BNF Français 565, Helmut Winkler very helpfully left a comment pointing to 565’s full catalogue description, which I had previously managed to miss. (D’oh!) The relevant part...
View ArticleOn Nicole Oresme, Aristotle, and footprints…
Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter ‘p’ (in response to my request for the article), I’ve just read Beaune and Lequain’s (2007) “Marie de Berry et les livres” from sci-hub.io (a vastly useful pirate...
View ArticleGlenelg and Somerton circa 1948…
Here are some photographs of Glenelg and Somerton circa 1948 I’ve found along the way, that I thought some of you might like. Glenelg Pier On a post on his travel blog, John Pedler included three nice...
View ArticleNicole Oresme’s “Treatise of the Sphere”…
Having gone away and read (most of) Millard Meiss’s splendidly comprehensive “French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry”, and having also gone through Menut’s 1966 bibliography of Oresme’s works, I...
View ArticleNicole Oresme’s reception outside France…
The problem with proposing BNF Franc. MS 565 itself as the source of the Voynich Manuscript’s inverted T-O figure is that we know that it stayed put in France (in the Dukes of Bourbon’s library, to be...
View ArticleA linguist, an epigrapher, and an ethnologist are in a bar…
A linguist, an epigrapher, and an ethnologist are in a bar, waiting to be served. The linguist says, “Did you know that Mele Kalikimaka by Bing Crosby is the most popular song featuring indigenous...
View ArticleOf Dalek ex-termination letters and steganography…
The biggest cipher news of the week (apart from learning that David Hamer’s splendid M4 4-rotor Kreigsmarine Enigma s/n M7772 is to be sold by Sotheby’s New York on 12th December 2017) is a sad story...
View ArticleSome pirate rum for your cup of tea, sir?
There’s a big controversy at the moment about bloggers and vloggers who get paid to promote products but who do not declare it (or, perhaps more often, do declare it but in what can easily be perceived...
View ArticleGerard Cheshire, Vulgar Latin, and the siren call of the polyglot…
Writer (and University of Bristol PhD student) Gerard Cheshire has recently been asking people to look at his paper “Linguistic missing links: instruction in decrypting, translating and transliterating...
View ArticleEnigma parade float from Poznan…
Thanks to a top tip from the Cryptocollectors mailing list, here’s what the Stwórzmy Enigma Museum in Poznań posted on Facebook today: 11 listopada w Poznaniu to nie tylko Dzień Niepodległości, ale tak...
View ArticleRequest for help: an illustrated copy of Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera online?
A week or more ago, I started writing up a fairly hefty post on John of Sacrobosco’s famous “De Sphaera” (which is one of the books Nicole Oresme translated into French, adding his commentary). I was...
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