peripathetic

Voynich Manuscript Decoded
Imagine a handwritten book, hundreds of years old. It looks to have been written in English. You look more closely, and you find that the letters are unreadable.

So, you call on your librarian, academic, typo and art history friends, and they say "Aha, that's the Voynich Manuscript. Nobody's been able to decode that yet. Completely uncrackable code. Haha, what."

If you want more on the manuscript, try here and here. There's a mailing list (which should turn pretty interesting right now!) here.

However, the Voynich Manuscript has now been translated. (It's wonderfully typical of the Guardian arts people to include a story like this.) And the result?

Deliberate nonsense, intended to fool the world. A code which was unbreakable precisely because it wasn't a code at all.

But hang on. If it wasn't a code at all, how were they able to.... I mean....? *sigh*