In the somewhat 2d world of anime fandom, fans (whether Weeaboo or Wapanese) express their like / preference / undying love for a specific female character within a given anime / show / political party / whatever by describing them as their ‘best girl‘, e.g. “Kim Pine = Totally. Best. Girl. Ever.”, or “Angela Merkel … Read More → The post Who is your Voynich best girl / nymph? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

To summarize, we have a 1716 treasure map from Philadelphia that leads to a particular small brick building in Cherry Garden, leading downwards from the southeastern corner of Society Hill to the Delaware River. In the early 18th century, Cherry Garden was (as its name suggests) gardens, apart from a single building: while in the … Read More → The post The Franklin Sugar Refinery… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Thanks to the help of commenter Thomas, we now have an excellent online source for the brick-built Cherry Garden cottage, courtesy of the American Philosophical Society Museum and the Ghost Gardens, Lost Landscapes? exhibition put together by Erin McLeary. The cottage in Cherry Garden This contained not only John Fanning Watson’s drawing of the cottage … Read More → The post How to find the Cherry Garden cottage… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Before revealing the precise modern equivalent of the location near Cherry Garden where the Society Hill treasure was allegedly buried ?? , I think we need to take a brief detour into the world of Philadelphia’s pirate treasure lore. Our guide is the ever-detailed (and not infrequently skeptical) (1830) “Annals of Philadelphia, being a collection … Read More → The post John Fanning Watson on Philadelphia’s pirate treasure… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Following on from the 1716 treasure map letter I posted about a few days ago, it’s now time for a Cipher Mysteries historical saunter through Philadelphia. And why not? The Blue Anchor Inn “…at the South End of the town of Philadelphia is a Gutt of water with a few Planks Layd over it which … Read More → The post A saunter through Philadelphia’s Society Hill to Cherry Garden… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I know, I know: this is the same Mental Floss that also publishes articles like 10 Things You Might Not Know About Jeff Goldblum (sample fact: “My first wife and I would bring our juicer on planes, and we’d do a carrot cleanse for a week, until I’d turn orange and all my poop would … Read More → The post Mental Floss does the Beale Ciphers… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Hot off the Cryptologia presses comes news of Levente Zoltán Király & Gábor Tokai’s (2018) paper “Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex” (Cryptologia, 42:4, 285-315, DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2018.1449147). This is part of a long series of papers and articles the two authors have been putting out that try to explain different technical aspects of the … Read More → The post Király and Tokai’s Rohonc Codex decryption… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Jenny Kile has recently turned up an interesting item on her blog: a 1716 letter describing the location of buried treasure in Philadelphia, originally uncovered by Historical Society of Pennsylvania historian Daniel Rolph in around 1996 or so. According to her commenter Buckeye Bob, though Jenny probably found it in a 2016 Philly Voice article, … Read More → The post The Society Hill Treasure Map… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

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A few days ago, German cryptoblogger Klaus Schmeh mentioned a recent paper by Tom Juzek on the unsolved Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher. This first appeared in March/April 2018, but I was not aware of it before Klaus flagged it. Juzek’s MSD metric The metric Juzek uses to drive much of his argumentation is what he … Read More → The post Tom Juzek on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Just a short note to let you know that Cipher Mysteries’ website’ comment facility is (hopefully) now working again. I had configured it to use an anti-spam WordPress plugin called Mollom, which had its support withdrawn on 2nd April 2018: and so since then all comments to the site had been mysteriously rejected. Thanks to … Read More → The post Cipher Mysteries comments now online, plus Pameo Pose Voynich apparel… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Here’s the challenge: explaining what the Voynich Manuscript is usually involves explaining what it isn’t. However, this is so boring that anyone listening would rather disembowel themselves and eat their own entrails. But perhaps Internet memes will be able to achieve the impossible… The post The Voynich Manuscript Explained, by Doggos… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I’ve written before about Grove Words and what they might be, and also about the curious patterns that occur at the start of lines. There’s an obvious, but unanswered question of how these two phenomena—which both affect the first glyph in a line—might interact. I want to present here, very shortly, partial answer to this […]

Thanks to a nice post on Marco Ponzi’s website, a new block paradigm candidate has presented itself: the short “Liber de Angelis”, the first eleven paragraphs of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.xi.45. As Marco notes, this was transcribed and translated by Juris G. Lidaka in a chapter in Claire Fanger’s (1998) “Conjuring Spirits: Texts and … Read More → The post The “Liber de Angelis” and the Voynich Manuscript’s planet sequence… ....

Following on from the Oxford Mail’s brief article I covered here a few days ago, here’s yer akshual Wagamama press release, courtesy of those upstart challenger funsters at Talker Tailor Trouble Maker who put the competition together for their Japanese/Asian food-selling clients: Mark Knowles has also sent me through A4 scans of the A3-sized entry … Read More → The post Wagamama “Edamam(e) = mc2” cipher competition deadline fast approaching… appeared first ....

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Until such time as the sun burns out and/or the Kardashians are no longer celebrities, the Internet will continue to be littered by clickbait gosh-wow pages claiming to list the top [insert number here] cipher mysteries. And of the unsolved ciphers these typically include, probably the least known is the Rohonc Codex. And so I … Read More → The post Perhaps the worst Rohonc Codex book ever written… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

If you like cold case documentaries with only a mere frisson of cryptography, “Cold Case Files 1: The Zodiac” (which was recently uploaded to the TagTele site) could well be for you. While it’s an oldie (first released way back in 2003), it doesn’t try to impose any theories, but concentrates on interviewing people who … Read More → The post “Cold Case Files 1: The Zodiac” (2003)… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

I’ve just watched a sort-of-mostly-interesting voynich.ninja interview with Adam Lewis, whose senior thesis at Puget Sound I mentioned here a few days ago. However, one particular part of his argument (as presented in the interview, at least) made no real sense to me at all: that even though the Voynich offers (Lewis says) a decent-sized … Read More → The post A possible internal Voynichese text match…? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

If a device could be constructed to reclaim the effort – by which I mean purely physical effort – put into constructing Voynich decryption non-theories, I reckon it could probably power Grimsby (population “88,243 in 2011”, according to Wikipedia) indefinitely. Add in the additional effort expended to construct ad hominems against people who are deemed … Read More → The post More Voynich theories to throw onto the (already blazing) hearth… appeared first ....

Given that most Voynich furrows have been heavily overploughed over the last two decades, it has become rare for something novel to pop up on my Voynich radar. On those rare occasions such a thing does happen (e.g. the Sagittarius crossbowman, etc), I do try to use my posts to communicate a sense of enthusiasm … Read More → The post “An Anatomy of Failure: Analysis Attempts to Decode the Voynich Manuscript”… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Just in passing: I’m planning a trip to Rome in the near future, and so have been wondering what Cipher Mysteries-related things there might be to see or do there. Armando al Pantheon The Armando al Pantheon restaurant (with its Luigi Serafini-designed alchemical crockery, complete with miniature Pantheon) is obviously on the list. I note … Read More → The post Cipher Mysteries and Rome… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Beyond the ivory-towered coterie of the late twentieth century academic world, few people cared to try to understand postmodernism, let alone wield it: even now, few mourn its death. Attempts to define what postmodernism actually was tend to come across almost as effete and self-referential as the worst postmodernist works themselves: all that can comfortably … Read More → The post On postmodernism, History, Truth, and the X-Files… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Incidental news: Cipher Mysteries recently had its 25,000th comment, while it has now also had close to three million page views. Which is nice. (Just thought I’d mention it in passing.) The remainder of the post is for tying up various Voynich threads that aren’t each enough for a whole post of their own. Edith … Read More → The post Yet another Voynich round-up post… appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

(Please excuse the impersonality of what follows, but so many linguistic Voynich theories are popping up at the moment that responding to them all individually would be an even greater waste of my life than trawling through their sad attempts at ‘research’: sorry, hope you understand, etc.) Dear linguistic Voynich theorist, Thank you so much … Read More → The post An open letter to pretty much every linguistic Voynich theorist ever appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

Thanks to Newsweek, Fox News, The Daily Mail and The Independent [*sigh*], some techy Canadian Voynich research is currently enjoying its day in the media sun. (Hint to authors: sorry, but based on recent evidence, it would seem that you have ~48 hours to get your next funding request submitted and approved before everyone currently … Read More → The post Have Kondrak and Hauer finally revealed the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets? (Errrm… no, not really, sorry. But…) appeared ....

Because last year’s Voynich research brought me a step closer to German calendars, I finally got round to reading Ernst Zinner’s epic “Regiomontanus: His Life and Works” (or, rather, to Ezra Brown’s 1990 translation of the same). On the one hand, Zinner is crushingly magisterial, in both tone and deep attention to detail (though the … Read More → The post Might Voynich f57v depict a nocturnal? appeared first on Cipher Mysteries.

The character [e] is one of only two characters in the Voynich script which is regularly found repeated. Both [ee] and [eee] occur enough times to be valid sequences. As all three typically occur in the same position within words, they can be generically thought of as ‘[e] sequences’ filling a specific structural slot. Although […]

I want to quickly sum up my last three posts to give my opinion on [q]. We already know that it doesn’t often occur in labels, but does so in the main text. We also know that it occurs almost always at the start of a word and before [o]. I think what I have […]

My last two posts were about the relative frequencies of words prefixed with [o] and [qo]. Although there is some interesting information in those posts I don’t feel that it is well presented. After having examined and sorted the statistics again I want to propose a neater way of thinking about these words. The core […]