Cipher Mysteries
ciphermysteries.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Cipher Mysteries is Nick Pelling's blog on historical ciphers and unsolved codes such as the Voynich Manuscript, the Somerton Man and the Chaocipher.
What HN saysHN commenters link it for skeptical reviews of claimed Voynich decipherments, including a 2017 rebuttal of Gerard Cheshire, and for Roswell cipher posts.
22HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
10stories submitted
87story points
3 years agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Gerard cheshire vulgar latin siren call polyglot3 people · first shared 2019
- 2This week a talk at stanford on the voynich manuscript2 people · first shared 2015
- 3Dead pigeon sparks ww2 cipher mystery2 people · first shared 2012
- 4Voynich Manuscripts Problematic Pipes (2018)1 people · 38 points · first shared 2019 · 15 comments on HN
- 5The Chaocipher revealed1 people · 17 points · first shared 2010 · 7 comments on HN
- 6Seventy Years of the Somerton Man Mystery (2018)1 people · 12 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7The Book of Soyga, Now Translated and Online (2015)1 people · 10 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 8Was the Roswell Incident a cipher mystery?1 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · 4 comments on HN
- 9Le Mystère Champollion à Plougastel-Daoulas1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 10The Usenet “Markovian Parallax Denigrate” Mystery (2018)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Pirate Treasure Crowdfunding Update: The Press Release1 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12A digital forensics analysis of Isaac/CARET's alien language webpages1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 13Feynman Ciphers #2 and #3 broken1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 14Brand new new world nahuatl voynich manuscript theory1 people · first shared 2014
- 15Edith sherwoods anagram cipher1 people · first shared 2009
What HN people wrote when they linked it
kencausey · 2023-07-02
I'm not sure why this was posted. Perhaps it was due to recent blogging by Nick Pelling on the subject at https://www.ciphermysteries.com/ ? There are quite a few entries now over a period of months that started from a reported cipher at Roswell.
dane-pgp · 2020-09-10
If the sequence of symbols was completely random (biased only by a human desire to make it look like a language, and human inability to be perfectly random) wouldn't that show up in a statistical analysis?
According to [0], "A long succession of (actually pretty good) past statistical studies has revealed that Voynichese has an abundance of mechanisms that give it internal structure, not only in terms of letter adjacency and within words generally, but also within lines, paragraphs, and pages."
Whatever process generated that structure, it seems like it required more work than is necessary to achieve the aim you suggest the writer(s) had.
[0] https://ciphermysteries.com/2016/01/21/voynich-statistics-and-why-voyn…
bloak · 2019-05-15
"Published online: 29 Apr 2019", says that page, and the article itself says "May 15, 2019", but it looks like Gerard Cheshire published his theory in 2017, because here's a plausible-sounding rebuttal from November 2017:
https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulgar-latin-si…
zazen · 2019-03-26
There is sober discussion of the purported deciphering at these two links:
https://www.voynich.ninja/archive/index.php/thread-2175.html
https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulgar-latin-si…
Headline is lacking a [2017], and also appears to be entirely untrue.
bunderbunder · 2019-03-26
Another post from the same blog trashes another hypothesis: https://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/08/voynichese-abjad
In it, way down at the bottom, the author drops a fairly concise argument for what I think is the most compelling hypothesis of all: That it's a covertext for a cipher. The idea that it's a message written in the clear is hard to reconcile with how the text doesn't behave at all like a natural language. The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. The idea that it's a legitimate book, but one where only a relatively small fraction of the text contains any semantic content, is relatively easy to reconcile with both.
bhaak · 2019-03-26
Don't get your hopes up too much.
This blog post from 2017 looks at a draft of the document: https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulgar-latin-si…
It's not really a favorable review.
baby · 2017-09-06
We were reading the uncensored version of Robinson Crusoe when were kids for giggles (fucking trees, fucking goats, lots of fucking things).
Or the George Sand letter: http://ciphermysteries.com/2010/05/16/george-sands-cryptography
DonaldFisk · 2016-12-04
http://ciphermysteries.com/2014/02/21/stephen-bax-voynich-manuscript is critical of the approach taken by Stehen Bax.
haddr · 2016-01-18
Very interesting approach, but I would say this is just a scratch. There are several factors that might really limit statistical analysis of this manuscript [1].
[1] http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2013/03/09/this-week-a-talk-at-stanford…
leoc · 2014-02-08
Here's someone else taking a http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2014/01/21/brand-new-new-world-nahuatl-… go at the paper, too.
SuperChihuahua · 2012-11-23
More reading here: http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2012/11/02/dead-pigeon-sparks-ww2-ciphe…
andyjohnson0 · 2012-11-23
@SuperChihuahua posted a link to http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2012/11/02/dead-pigeon-sparks-ww2-ciphe… According to the author of that document it may have been Sergeant William Leslie Stott (508080 in the RAF, died in 1945 aged 35, buried in Chester’s Overleigh Cemetery) [1]. The spelling of "Sergeant" matches.
[1] http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/2928300/STOTT,%20WILLIAM%20…
pvg · 2009-12-14
Not really, at least, not this time and not by this person.
If it was a set of anagrams, frequency analysis would have matched medieval Italian. See:
http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-ciph…