The Voynich Ninja

Fox what? Fox gnus?

Lol!

I wonder if journalism even exists any more.

I used to think Newsweek was pretty good. Now I have to revise my opinion. This is so bad it almost had me banging my forehead on the desk:

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Does anyone ever to read the white paper before reporting on it? Do they even know HOW to read a white paper? Or do they only know how to [badly] reword a press release?

Look at the comments on that one 

It's to much amusement to observe how Voynich news arrive to Russia with a lag of two-three days. After we have already discussed a new decoding on the forum, in two-three days I begin to be bombarded with messages from my friends who, knowing that I'm interested in the Voynich, nevertheless strangely assume that no news associated with it can ever reach me, so they very compassionately inform me of any new decodings reported in the Russian press.

Lenta.ru (kinda of online tabloid, very popular) today proudly proclaims (translation mine): "The beginning of the mysterious Voynich manuscript has been deciphered". Very funny, a nearby hyperlink to their article of September 2016 reads: "The mysterious Voynich manuscript turned to be a fake" (this refers to the recent paper of Gordon Rugg).

So one thing do the media firmly know - that the Voynich manuscript is "mysterious". Yes, not commonplace, by all means.

Haha Anton, I also get sent such links a few days after we find out and debunk the whole thing, though nowadays they mostly frame it like "this is nonsense again, right?" So I'm kind of spreading awareness about fake news.

(28-01-2018, 05:31 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Look at the comments on that one 

Since you mentioned it, I went back and looked.

LOL!!!!

People may be interested to read Klaus Schmeh's take on this article:

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This agrees quite closely with my view on this.

So it made it to IFLS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

While the title is somewhat misleading, the article itself is surprisingly balanced and careful.

Quote:Whatever the truth, it seems that the true meaning of the codex will continue to be a mystery. 

As ever, the first thing I looked at was the bibliography.  

Better than most, with a fair range of sources and  a good number of relevant references dated post-2010.

Some of the articles listed are a little curious, but why not -  good to include as much as might be useful to those reading the authors' paper.


Their omissions are more difficult to understand - Julian Bunn's statistical studies and Emma May Smith's  linguistic observations and statistics have been made available online, so it's not as if they're behind a paywall, or 'members only' access.

Admittedly to read Anton Alipov's studies takes a little more effort but not really too difficult, and his is another which I'd have thought essential reading, whether or not the papers' authors found themselves in agreement.

And surely as a courtesy, and to show they're aware of it - some reference to the first modern statistical studies of which I know, and by a professional linguist too - should really have been included.  I mean, of course, Jorge Stolfi's work.

Friedman I cannot consider a 'modern', though others may choose to.

What I'd love to see is a series of AI-generated 'book-reviews' of every previous effort at decryption.