You know, I was planning on decoding the Voynich Manuscript this weekend. I guess I won't have to now.
Just a little something entertaining for a Friday: The Voynich Manuscript, a strangely encoded Renaissance-era herbarium of sorts, has been unsuccessfully attacked with the aid of computer programs, leading many to the conclusion that it's pure nonsense. The best codebreakers of World War II couldn't make a dent.
And then along comes Edith Sherwood to steal my thunder–she seems to have made the most successful stab yet, and all by thinking about anagrams. Makes an awful lot of sense to think about old-fashioned methods in such a project–to bring a computer to bear on a code that old seems to have been rather like attacking a cavalry division with a nuclear bomb.
If you like high strangeness, Sherwood's article is a lot of fun to check out. I'm not convinced she's got the key to the whole thing, but she's been more successful than pretty much anyone else. She also has claimed a young Da Vinci is the most likely author of the strange manuscript in another article.
And to think that all this time I figured it was the mysterious dictionary used by one of our frequent commenters.
