The Voynich Ninja

Although trying the mirror was probably the first step for many of us on our Voynich exploration path, I like the approach. And fig. 12a is indeed interesting.

"The mysteries of life becoming clearer
Behind the mirror"

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The authors' conclusion is that the best option for decoding the manuscript is to identify meaningful words and sentences.

Yes, although they conclude that it's unlikely that the VMS was created using mirrors and lenses, I like the very idea of their approach - not stumbling over language mappings again & again.

I believe there's something damned simple in there, although perhaps quite elaborate, but not difficult in concept. We're just walking orthogonal to that.

I hope I don't hijack the thread by posting this, but it reminded me a bit of this post on the Voynich Subreddit: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I think this approach to simulate the effects of an iceland spar is actually pretty clever.

It's a pretty fun article.

I like seeing creative approaches. Obviously some will not yield anything directly relevant, but out of this kind of experimentation, you can sometimes trigger new ideas, new ways of attacking a problem.

Joben, I don't know if I kept the experiments (I used Photoshop), but I tried a few things years ago. I don't think I tried doubling the text as in the example you posted (which means I didn't try enough combinations), but I did try combining some of the different tokens and different glyphs upside-down to right-side-up or mirrored and overlaid to see if it yielded anything interesting.

With the VMS I always get the feeling something is missing, but maybe it's there and just needs to be put together in the right way.


I'll look around my files and see if I kept any of it. Sometimes I delete things so that I won't get too hung up on one way of looking at things.

Looking through my files, I just realized why I stopped manipulating the text like this. I started making the shapes into little animals (it's quite easy to get little dog-like shapes by flipping tokens around and joining them). My brain always wants to turn them into objects.

(06-09-2020, 09:15 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Joben, I don't know if I kept the experiments (I used Photoshop), but I tried a few things years ago. I don't think I tried doubling the text as in the example you posted (which means I didn't try enough combinations), but I did try combining some of the different tokens and different glyphs upside-down to right-side-up or mirrored and overlaid to see if it yielded anything interesting.

With the VMS I always get the feeling something is missing, but maybe it's there and just needs to be put together in the right way.


I'll look around my files and see if I kept any of it. Sometimes I delete things so that I won't get too hung up on one way of looking at things.

Experimenting with optical effects that could have been used at the time of the VMs seems like a reasonable thing to do imo. So many research hours has been spent attacking the manuscript from other angles without bearing much fruit, so why not, right?

I wonder how a mirror could change the statistical issues we face though. Entropy problems don't go away when mirrored, right?