"The Curse" approacheth...

So many tasks, so little time. I always thought that writing a book would be a lot like writing a computer game - and in many ways, the two are indeed a mixture of creativity, technical attentitivity, and burning-the-candle-at-both-ends-ity ("late-night-ivity"?)

Yet in other ways, with a computer game you already have an appreciative audience (computer gamers) before you start, so your game is almost pre-accepted. Yet writing a book that only a few people can understand or enjoy would be a bit of a cop-out: much more of a challenge to write a book that is clear without being dumbed-down - detailed without being labyrinthine - interesting without being fake.

With "The Curse of the Voynich", I've tried my best: and (before very long) we'll see how people respond.

Of course, it's not too hard to see language as a kind of game... but if you like the sound of that, I'm sure there are plenty of Philosophy blogs out there... :-)

The flower in the corner...

On page f17r, there's a faint flower (or seed-pod) drawn in the top right corner, coloured in by a few remnants of blue paint. Reminds me of the decorative feature in the balneological section (in much the same place on the page on f84v). That seems to tie the two together... don't know what it means, though.

Perhaps there are lots more faded drawings on the VMs - sounds like a job for a non-specific UV scan to me...

Kangaroo / trampoline / etc

One for the physicists out there: how high could a kangaroo on a trampoline jump?

I know it's a stupid question, but I've had this email through from the Blogger Trade Union, saying that blogs with too much content are a threat to the delicate balance of the www's ecology, and so I must post less sense. Or else.

Voynich and Linux...

In his book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric Raymond said (with more than a conscious nod to Linus Torvalds) "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - and in fact, this elegant quote has come to be known as Linus's Law.

Is it really so strange to think that this is what we (on the VMs-list) are doing in our own way in the Voynich world? Think of it as open-source history, and you're surely not far off...

Fine tooth comb (and the moving hyphen)...

When you listen - and I mean really listen - to what people say (and how they say it), some phrases just jump out at you, grab you by the throat, slap you around, laugh at you, before running away giggling. One such phrase I just love is "fine-tooth comb", as in the cliche "going over something with a fine-tooth comb".

Except that no-one ever says it like that.

What they actually say is "going over something with a fine tooth-comb" (stressing the TOOTH bit). O...K... - so you're talking about a "tooth-comb, are you"? And that would be a comb for your teeth, would it? Not, errrrrrrm, a comb with fine teeth?

*siiiiiiiigh*

Oh well... what do I know about the English language anyway? Perhaps I should brush up my Latin (after all, I've even got my grandmother studying it, so why shouldn't I do it myself?) and make fun of Caesar's Gallic Wars instead? Oh puh-lease...

"Security breeches", one size fits all...

Am I the only person who finds unintentional misspellings like "security breeches" quite hilarious? As of today, this gets over 9,500 Google hits (admittedly "security breaches" itself gets over 453,000 hits - but where's the fun in that?)

Someone ought to collect these... :-)

Lorem Ipsum (revisited)...

Found a nice little site on the history of "Lorem Ipsum...": which says that, according to some linguistic detective work by Professor Richard McClintock...

Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC.

Part I of a full Latin version is here (search the page for the rare word "consectetur", and you should see "dolorem ipsum" a few words before it).

However... I wonder whether anyone has tried to identify which particular incunabulum this came from? According to this listing of pre-1472 incunabula, there was one published in Venice by "Vindelinus de Spira, for Johannes de Colonia, not after 9 Nov. 1471."

Could it be that Venetian printers used Lorem Ipsum right from the start?

Esoteric joke (yes, really)

Why does Hermes Trismegistus always fart when he burps, and always burp when he farts?



* * * * * * * * *

An hour after posting the above, I was reading about Tristram Shandy in Chapter Three of Carlo Ginzburg's "No Island Is an Island" (pp.49-50). There, Ginzburg quotes Sterne's narrator (Yorick) as claiming: "Wit and judgment in this world never go together; inasmuch as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west. -- So, says Locke, -- so are farting and hickuping, say I". [pp.202-203 in the original].

What are the chances of that, eh?

Gender & language...

Over lunch at Camden Wagamamas, Goth Richard commented that Ancient Greeks had three classes of people - men, women, and slaves - and that the three genders in their language (male, female, neuter) presumably developed as a reflection of their society. IIRC, Fernand Braudel (among many others) noted that society often acts as a key metaphor in the construction of our language, so this can't be too radical an proposition.

However, it strikes me that, in these days of rampant political correctness, we're rapidly losing male and female. If language does mirror society, does that mean that we're now all slaves?