The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

in Books, History | May 16th, 2019

Humanity will remember the name of James Joyce for generations to come, not least because, as he once wrote about his best-known novel Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.” If Joyce was right, then the author of the mysterious Voynich manuscript (about which you can see an animated introduction here) has set a kind of standard for immortality. Filled with odd, not especially explanatory illustrations and written in a script not seen anywhere else, the early 15th-century text has perplexed scholars for at least 400 or so years of its existence.

But recent years have seen a few claims of having cracked the Voynich manuscript’s code: one effort made use of artificial intelligence, another concludes that the text was written in phonetic Old Turkish, and the latest declares the Voynich manuscript to have been composed in “the only known example of proto-Romance language.” University of Bristol Research Associate Gerard Cheshire, the man behind this new decoding, describes that language as “ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government.”

And what, pray tell, is the Voynich manuscript actually about? Cheshire has revealed little about its content thus far, though he has described the text as “compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon.” Though he has claimed to determine the nature of its unusual language — one without punctuation but with “diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components” — deciphering its more than 200 pages of content stands as another task altogether. In the meantime, you can read his paper “The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained,” originally published in the journal Romance Studies.

Although Cheshire’s discovery has produced headlines like the Express’ “Voynich Manuscript SOLVED: World’s Most Mysterious Book Deciphered After 600 Years,” others include Ars Techhnica’s “No, Someone Hasn’t Cracked the Code of the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript.” That article quotes Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America (and vocal Voynich-translation skeptic), criticizing the foundation of Cheshire’s claim: “He starts with a theory about what a particular series of glyphs might mean, usually because of the word’s proximity to an image that he believes he can interpret. He then investigates any number of medieval Romance-language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-language word that fits his hypothesis, his hypothesis must be right.”

Fagin Davis adds that Cheshire’s “ ‘translations’ from what is essentially gibberish, an amalgam of multiple languages, are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations,” and that “the fundamental underlying argument — that there is such a thing as one ‘proto-Romance language’ — is completely unsubstantiated and at odds with paleolinguistics.” Fagin Davis’ criticism doesn’t even stop there, and if she’s right, Cheshire’s approach will be unlikely to produce a coherent translation of the entire text. And so, at least for the moment, the Voynich manuscript’s life as a mystery continues, keeping busy not just professors but enthusiasts, technologists, Research Associates, and many others besides.

An Animated Introduction to “the World’s Most Mysterious Book,” the 15th-Century Voynich Manuscript

Behold the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript: The 15th-Century Text That Linguists & Code-Breakers Can’t Understand

Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voynich Manuscript: Has Modern Technology Finally Solved a Medieval Mystery?

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Colorized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

in Film, History | May 15th, 2019

Cities have long provided a rich environment for photography, at least to photographers not interested exclusively in nature. But only with the advent of the motion picture camera did the subject of cities find a photographic form that truly suited it. Hence the popularity in the 1920s of “city symphony” films, each of which sought to capture and present the real life of a different bustling industrial metropolis. But while city symphonies certainly hold up as works of art, they do make modern-day viewers wonder: what would all these capitals look like if I could gaze backward in time, looking not through the jittery, colorless medium of early motion-picture film, but with my own eyes?

Youtuber Ignacio López-Francos offers a step closer to the answer in the form of these four videos, each of which takes historical footage of a city, then corrects its speed and adds color to make it more lifelike.

At the top of the post we have “a collection of high quality remastered prints from the dawn of film taken in Belle Époque-era Paris, France from 1896–1900.” Shot by the Lumière company (which was founded by Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors of the projected motion picture), the sights captured by the film include the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Tuileries Garden, the then-new Eiffel Tower, and the now-soon-to-be-rehabilitated but then-intact Notre Dame cathedral.

The Paris footage was colorized using DeOldify, “a deep learning-based project for colorizing and restoring old images.” So was the footage just above, which shows New York City in 1911 as shot by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern and released publicly by the Museum of Modern Art. “Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here — street traffic, people going about their business — has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films,” say the accompanying notes. “Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.”

Shot twenty years later, these clips of New York’s Theater District have also undergone the DeOldify treatment, which gets the bright lights (and numerous ballyhooing signs) of the big city a little closer to the stunning quality they must have had on a new arrival in the 1930s. The streets of Havana were seemingly quieter during that same decade, at least if the colorized footage below is to be believed. But then, the history of tourism in Cuba remembers the 1930s as something of a dull stretch after the high-living 1920s that came before, during the United States’ days of Prohibition — let alone the even more daiquiri- and mojito-soaked 1950s that would come later, speaking of eras one dreams of seeing for oneself.

via Twisted Sifter

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Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Would You Go Back to 1889 and Take Out Baby Hitler?: Time-Travel Expert James Gleick Answers the Philosophical Question

in History, Sci Fi | May 14th, 2019

The vast majority of us have no inclination to kill anyone, much less a small child. But what if we had the chance to kill baby Adolf Hitler, preventing the Holocaust and indeed the Second World War? That hypothetical question has endured for a variety of reasons, touching as it does on the concepts of genocide and infant murder in forms even more highly charged than usual. It also presents, in the words of Time Travel: A History author James Gleick, “two problems at once. There’s a scientific problem — you can set your mind to work imagining, ‘Could such a thing be possible and how would that work?’ And then there’s an ethical problem. ‘If I could, would I, should I?’ ”

By the simplest analysis, writes Vox’s Dylan Matthews, the question comes down to, “Is it ethical to kill one person to save 40-plus million people?” But time-travel fiction has been around long enough that we’ve all internalized the message that it’s not quite so simple. We can even question the assumption that killing baby Hitler would prevent the Holocaust and World War II in the first place.

Maybe those terrible events happen on any timeline, regardless of whether Hitler lives or dies: that would align with the Novikov self-consistency principle, which holds that “time travel could be possible, but must be consistent with the past as it has already taken place,” and which has been dramatized in time-travel stories from La Jetée to The Terminator.

Gleick doesn’t have a straight answer in the Vox video on the killing-baby-hitler question above as to whether he himself would go back to 1889 and put baby Hitler out of action. “When you change history,” he says of the moral of the countless many time travel stories he’s read, “you don’t get the result you’re looking for. Every day, everything we do is a turning point in history, whether it’s obvious to us or not.” This in contrast to former Florida governor and United States presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who, when he had the big baby-Hitler question put to him by the Huffington Post, returned a hearty “Hell yea I would.” But given time to reflect, even he concluded that such an act “could have a dangerous effect on everything else.” It appears that some of the lessons of time-travel stories have been learned, but as for what humanity will do if it actually develops time-travel technology — maybe we’d rather not peer into the future to find out.

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Professor Ronald Mallett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Century … and He’s Not Kidding

Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)

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The New York Times’ First Profile of Hitler: His Anti-Semitism Is Not as “Genuine or Violent” as It Sounds (1922)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

A Mesmerizing Trip Across the Brooklyn Bridge: Watch Footage from 1899

in Film, History | May 9th, 2019

It’s hardly original advice but bears repeating anyway: no one visiting New York should leave, if they can help it, before they cross the Brooklyn Bridge—preferably on foot, if possible, and at a reverential pace that lets them soak up all the Neo-gothic structure’s storied history. Walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn, then back again, or the other away around, since that’s what the bridge was built for—the commutes of a nineteenth century bridge-but-not-yet-tunnel crowd (the first NYC subway tunnel didn’t open until 1908).

In 1899, filmmakers from American Mutoscope and Biograph elected for a mode of travel for a New York century, putting a camera at “the front end of a third rail car running at high speed,” notes a 1902 American Mutoscope catalogue. They accelerated the tour to the pace of a modern machine, chosing the Manhattan to Brooklyn route. “The entire trip consumes three minutes of time, during which abundant opportunity is given to observe all the structural wonders of the bridge, and far distant river panorama below.” (See one-third of the trip just below.)

Filmmaker Bill Morrison looped excerpts of those three New York minutes and extended them to nine in his short, stereoscopic journey “Outerborough,” at the top, commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and scored with original music by Todd Reynolds. Taking the 1899 footage as its source material, the film turns a rapid transit tour into a moving mandala, a fractal repetition at frighteningly faster and faster speeds, of the bridge’s most mechanical vistas—the views of its looming, vaulted arches and of the steel cage surrounding the tracks.

One of the engineering wonders of the world, the Brooklyn Bridge opened 136 years ago this month, on May 24th, 1883. The first person to walk across it was the woman who oversaw its construction for 11 of the 14 years it took to build the bridge. After designer John Roebling died of tetanus, his son Washington took over, only to succumb to the bends during the sinking of the caissons and spend the rest of his life bedridden. Emily, his wife, “took on the challenge,” notes the blog 6sqft, consulting with her husband while actively supervising the project.

She “studied mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, strengths of materials and the intricacies of cable construction.” On its opening day, Emily walked the bridge’s 1,595 feet, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, “her long skirt billowing in the wind as she showed [the crowd] details of the construction,” writes David McCullough in The Great Bridge. Six days later, an accident caused a panic and a stampede that killed twelve people. Some months later, P.T. Barnum’s Jumbo led a parade of 21 elephants over the bridge in a stunt to prove its safety.

Barnum’s theatrics were surprisingly honest—the bridge may have needed selling to skeptical commuters, but it needed no hype. It outlived most of its contemporaries, despite the fact that it was built before engineers understood the aerodynamic properties of bridges. The Roeblings designed and built the bridge to be six times stronger than it needed to be, but no one could have foreseen just how durable the structure would prove.

It elicited a fascination that never waned for its palpable strength and beauty, yet fewer of its admirers chose to document the journey that has taken millions of Brooklynites over the river to lower Manhattan, by foot, bike, car, and yes, by train. Leave it to that futurist for the common man, Thomas Edison, to film the trip. See his 1899 footage of Brooklyn to Manhattan by train just above.

via Aeon

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Shifting Power of the World’s Largest Cities Visualized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

in History | May 6th, 2019

“When Rome fell….” The expression seems designed to conjure the Tarot card Tower that illustrates it, a sudden attack, a reckoning. “Fell,” in the case of most ancient empires, means declined, changed, and transformed over centuries. As all great cities do, Rome suffered many violent shocks during its fall, as it transitioned from a pagan to a Christian empire. The sacking of Rome in 410 left Romans reeling, trying to make meaning from upheaval. They found it in the pagan religion of their ancestors.

To which the defender of the one true faith—by his lights—Augustine of Hippo, answered with a rather odd defense of the new order. Rather than write a theological treatise or a fire-and-brimstone sermon, though it is these things as well, he wrote a book about cities: the City of God, pitted against the Earthly City (which is, you guessed it, aligned with the Devil). The medieval idea of cities as vehicles for the grudge matches of princes must have derived from this strange text, as well as from the emergent feudal order that turned dismembered empires into uneasy patchworks of cities. Rome didn’t fall, it decentralized, diversified, and propagated.

Augustine saw the city not only as a metaphor but also as the height of human power: doomed to fall in the final analysis, yet built to pose a formidable challenge to divine rule. But what is a city? Is it merely a stronghold for corruption and commerce or something more righteous? Is it an expression of class power, the worker bees who run it or just cogs in a machine, a la Metropolis? Is it an “assemblage,” defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogenous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns”?

In our post-post-modern moment, we find all of these ideas—the hierarchical and the horizontal—operating. Popular books like Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now seem to spring from an impulse common to apologists and secularists alike—the will to linear certainty. There is a sense in which 21st century thought has turned back to theology, stripped of the trappings of belief, to make sense of the rise and decline of the West. This faith demands not blind allegiance, but data, more and more and more data—to answer the burning question of 2001’s Planet of the Apes: “How’d these apes get like this?”

Then there’s the internet—a space for sharing gifs, a functional assemblage, and maybe someday, a city. Global circumstances seem to warrant reflection. Like the Romans, we want a story about how it came to pass, and we want to make and share animated infographic gifs about it. The gif at the top of the post is such a gif. Drawing on the sweeping, several-thousand-year historical argument of Morris’s book, and data from the UN Population Division, its creator whisks us through a visual narrative of supremacy-by-city over the course of roughly four-thousand years.

Sheer size, in this visual account, determines the winners—a simplistic criteria, but the model here is simplified for effect. It dramatizes arguments made and data gathered elsewhere. To get the full effect, you’d probably do well to read Morris’s book and, while you’re reaching for your wallet, the original article, behind a paywall at The Australian, for which this gif was made. Its title? “Why Rome is the World’s Best City.” The gif’s designer admits in a Reddit post, “We are dealing with historic demographic data here which are always debated among scholars…. I acknowledge that other scholars would add or delete certain cities that pop up in my map.”

For more on the idea of the city as assemblage, see European Graduate School professor Manuel DeLanda’s lecture “A Materialist History of Cities” and his book Assemblage Theory. Augustine insisted we view the city through the eye of faith—his faith. In the 21st century, DeLanda’s intellectual gestures, like Morris’s, are as grand, but he suggests throwing out Western schematics in a return to earlier religious practices. To understand a city, he suggests, we might need “tools to manipulate these intensities… in the form of a growing variety of psychoactive chemicals that can be deployed to go beyond the actual world, and produce at least a descriptive phenomenology of the virtual.”

Watch the History of the World Unfold on an Animated Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Rise and Fall of Western Empires Visualized Through the Artful Metaphor of Cell Division

in Animation, History | May 6th, 2019

We can hardly understand how the modern world arrived at its current shape without understanding the history of colonial empire. But how best to understand the history of colonial empire? In animation above, visualization designers Pedro M. Cruz and Penousal Machado portray it through a biological lens, rendering the four most powerful empires in the Western world of the 18th and 19th centuries as cells. The years pass, and at first these four cells grow in size, but we all know the story must end with their division into dozens and dozens of the countries we see on the world map today — a geopolitical process for which mitosis provides an effective visual analogy.

Cruz and Machado happen to hail from Portugal, a nation that commanded one of those four empires and, in Aeon’s words, “controlled vast territories across the globe through a combination of seapower, economic control and brute force.” We may now regard Portugal as a small and pleasant European country, but it once held territory all around the world, from Mozambique to Macau to the somewhat larger land known as Brazil.

And the other three empires, French, Spanish, and British, grow even larger in their respective heydays. That’s especially true of the British Empire, whose dominance in cell form becomes starkly obvious by the time the animation reaches the 1840s, even though the United States of America has at that point long since drifted beyond its walls and floated away.

Wouldn’t the U.S. now be the biggest cell of all? Not under the strict definition of empire used a few centuries ago, when one country taking over and directly ruling over a remote land was considered standard operating procedure (and even, in some quarters, a glorious and necessary mission). But attempts have also been made to more clearly understand international relations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by redefining the very term “empire” to include the kind of influence the U.S. exerts all around the world. It makes a kind of sense to do that, but as Cruz and Machado’s animation may remind us, we also still live very much in the cultural, linguistic, political, and economic world — or rather, petri dish — that those four mighty empires created.

via Aeon

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Make a Medieval Manuscript: An Introduction in 7 Videos

in Books, History | May 3rd, 2019

All of us came of age in the era of mass-market books, bundles of text on paper printed quickly, cheaply, and in large quantities. Nothing about that would have been conceivable to the many varieties of artisan involved in the creation of just one manuscript in the Middle Ages. Even here in the 21st century we marvel at the beauty of medieval manuscripts, but we should also marvel at the sheer amount of specialized labor that went into making them.

We might best appreciate that labor by seeing it performed up close before our eyes, and a new video series allows us to do just that. “The British Library has released a set of seven videos to look at the process of creating medieval manuscripts,” says Medievalists.net.

“Patricia Lovett, a professional calligrapher and illuminator, hosts these 2–3 minute videos, which follow the process from the tools used to the techniques employed in designing an illuminated page.”

Lovett covers every step in the making of a medieval book: “how to make quill pens from bird feathers”; “the complex process behind making ink for writing in manuscripts” (which involves wasps); “how animal skins were selected and prepared for use in medieval manuscripts”; “the tools for ruling and line marking in medieval books”; “the variety of pigments that were in use in the Middle Ages” to apply vivid color to the pages; “how medieval artists painted the beautiful illustrations in their books”; and “the work behind painting and embellishing manuscripts and reproducing a lavishly illuminated page.”

“The word ‘manuscript’ derives from the Latin for written (scriptus) by hand (manu),” writes Lovett and British Library illuminated manuscript curator Kathleen Doyle, and who among us will forget that, after we’ve witnessed the careful manual labor on display in these videos? For further insight into the medieval manuscript-making process, have a look at the Getty Museum’s series of videos on the subject featured last year here on Open Culture.

We’ve also featured the alchemy of the pigments used to color the pages of medieval manuscripts; the pages of a medieval monk’s sketchbook that shows what went into the designs for these manuscripts’ illumination; and a look into the making of The Book of Kells, the Irish cultural treasure that stands as one of the very finest surviving examples of the illuminated manuscript form. (And since you’ll surely get curious about it sooner or later, we’ve also put up an explanation of why so many marginal drawings in medieval manuscripts include killer rabbits.)

Just as the books we read today — whether the aforementioned mass-market products or the relatively artisanal small-press creations or even the e‑books — reveal important qualities about the world we live in, so medieval manuscripts have much to say about the beliefs, the technology, and societal structures of the times that produced them. But for those who actually developed the skills for and dedicated the time and effort to that production, these manuscripts also showed something else. As Lovett and Doyle quote the 12th-century scribe Eadwine as proclaiming about his Eadwine Psalter, “The beauty of this book displays my genius.”

via Medievalists.net

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

in History | May 2nd, 2019

Another man insults your honor, leaving you no choice but to challenge him to a highly formalized fight to the death: in the 21st century, the very idea strikes us as almost incomprehensibly of the past. And dueling is indeed dead, at least in all the lands that historically had the most enthusiasm for it, but it hasn’t been dead for as long as we might assume. The last recorded duel performed not with pistols but swords (specifically épées, the largest type of swords used in fencing) took place in France in 1967 — the year of the Saturn V and the Boeing 737, the Detroit riots and the Six-Day War, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love.

The duelists were Marseilles mayor Gaston Defferre and another politician names Rene Ribière. “After a clash in the National Assembly, Defferre yelled ‘Taisez-vous, abruti!’ at Ribiere and refused to apologize,” writes professional stage-and-screen fight coordinator Jared Kirby. “Ribière challenged and Defferre accepted. The duel took place with épées in a private residence in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and it was officiated by Jean de Lipkowskiin.”

Heightening the drama, Ribière was to be married the following day, though he could expect to live to see his own wedding, Defferre having vowed not to kill him but “wound him in such a way as to spoil his wedding night very considerably.”

You can see the subsequent action of this relatively modern-day duel in the newsreel footage at the top of the post. Defferre did indeed land a couple of touches on Ribière, both in the arm. Ribière, the younger man by twelve years, seems to have taken the event even more seriously than Defferre: he insisted not only on using sharper épées than the ones Defferre originally offered, but on continuing the duel after Defferre first struck him. Lipkowskiin put an end to the combat after the second time, and both Defferre and Ribière went on to live full lives, the former into the 1980s and the latter into the 1990s. Just how considerable an effect Ribière’s dueling injuries had on his wedding night, however, history has not recorded.

via Messy Nessy

Drunk History: An Intoxicated Look at the Famous Alexander Hamilton – Aaron Burr Duel

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Colorized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

Would You Go Back to 1889 and Take Out Baby Hitler?: Time-Travel Expert James Gleick Answers the Philosophical Question

A Mesmerizing Trip Across the Brooklyn Bridge: Watch Footage from 1899

The Shifting Power of the World’s Largest Cities Visualized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)

The Rise and Fall of Western Empires Visualized Through the Artful Metaphor of Cell Division

How to Make a Medieval Manuscript: An Introduction in 7 Videos

The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film

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