Michael Greshko

This is honestly so satisfying. The obvious takeaway: read every XML file in every web page's HTML

Super cool story. Research a couple years ago by folks including me, @ernie.tedium.co, and @404media.co on the new owners of Deadspin helped bring about a good-news story on the ownership of a local California newspaper.

This is really cool to see! Amazing

I agree with you: nothing of enduring substance. My point is that when Disney ventured into NFTs, they didn't release on OpenSea, where anyone could buy and sell: They sold only within walled gardens (e.g., VeVe).

My point is, when they do these experiments, they control as much as they can.

The alternative here is that the Disney videos on Sora are *so* locked down, the whole exercise is essentially GPU-Intensive JibJab. Which would in turn frustrate maximalist Sora users.

Disney’s approach to web3 and NFTs here is instructive. They want control over the end-to-end experience.

Is This How The Voynich Manuscript Was Made? A New Cipher Offers Fascinating Clues It remains the “most mysterious manuscript in the world.”

Many thanks to @tommyhale.bsky.social for a nice story about my Voynich Manuscript paper in @iflscience.com: www.iflscience.com/is-this-how-...
The open-access paper can be read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🧪 🌠 @danclery.bsky.social did a terrific job reporting this out. A pretty eye-popping stat in here: If satellite launches thru the 2030s happen as planned, there'll be HALF A MILLION satellites orbiting Earth by 2040—enough to contaminate many space telescopes' images with the occasional streak.

It’s *very* hard to reconcile the statistics of Voynichese with those of known written languages. But treating those properties as constraints, it’s possible to find manual cipher families that jointly evade those constraints. Doesn’t mean that’s how the Voynich was made, but good to test.

Thank you!

This is the remarkable work of Michael (partly inspired by my Polygraphia III hypothesis) I gave a sneak preview of here in September – texperimentales.hypotheses.org/5898 🎉

Thank you, Jürgen! Your work played a really important role in inspiring this cipher.

Thank you!

This paper was a labor of love, scraped together from scraps of spare time over the past year. I have lots of people to thank. Of the folks I know are on Bluesky, a huge thank-you to @lisafdavis.bsky.social @chirila.bsky.social and @spinfocl.bsky.social!

YouTube video by Voynich Talk Voynich Manuscript Day 2025 Full Conference

If you want to watch a video describing the Naibbe cipher, I gave a talk on it back in August:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByAR...

The Naibbe cipher is more elaborate than known 15th-century ciphers, but its basic design principles were used in 15th-century Italian homophonic ciphers. And, again, it's totally doable by hand while also mimicking the VMS surprisingly well.

The cipher—fully described in the paper—basically takes a Latin text, breaks it up into 1- and 2-letter chunks, and then disguises each chunk as a Voynichese word using a series of 6 tables on a letter-by-letter basis.

How do you choose the tables? Playing cards!

This began for me over a year ago as simply a personal art project. But the more I tested an early cipher I had created, the more I began to see a path toward an "eerily good" cipher that could mimic lots of properties of the VMS at once. Naibbe represents that cipher.

This started with a simple question:
Is it possible to design a substitution cipher—the type of cipher that would have been found in Europe at the time the VMS was created in the early 1400s—that can mimic the statistical weirdness of "Voynichese"?
Turns out, the answer is "yes."

Scholars have debated whether the VMS is:
• an unknown language
• meaningless gibberish
• an encrypted language like Latin
Naibbe is a cipher, fully doable by hand with 15th-century materials, that can encrypt Latin as text that behaves a lot like the weird "language" of the VMS.

🧪🧵: For years, the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript (VMS) has puzzled medievalists, linguists & codebreakers.
Today, I’m publishing a peer-reviewed paper describing a new model for how it may have been written. Presenting the Naibbe cipher:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408

🧪 ✏️ Apply for the 2026 Diverse Voices in Science Journalism Internship with @science.org! 🧪 ✏️

This could be for you if you're a student from a community historically underrepresented in #journalism who's interested in in covering science for general audiences: recruiting.ultipro.com/AME1123ASEM/...

Exclusive: CDC to end all monkey research Studies related to HIV and other infectious diseases will be phased out, sources say; fate of the agency's animals remains unclear

EXCLUSIVE: CDC to end all monkey studies. Decision handed down by recent college grad and former DOGE employee who is now deputy chief of staff at the agency. Animals were being used in studies of HIV prevention. Some may be euthanized. My latest for @science.org

Jeffrey Epstein funded and hobnobbed with elite scientists, and he fancied himself an inquiring scientific mind. These are two pieces of his "radical breakthrough":
- "nose test. telepathy."
- "music [...] can it be looked at to reengineer the brain. harmony FFT. symphonic learning."

What kind of researcher did sex offender Jeffrey Epstein like to fund? He told Science before he died Felon said he liked “rebels” and “rarefied air” in 2017 interview

For context, I have been looking through the Epstein emails today because Epstein was a prolific—and notorious—funder of the sciences. See my colleague @policyhound.bsky.social's 2019 article for more: www.science.org/content/arti...

The email is HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019871.txt, viewable here: drive.google.com/file/d/1i2EL...

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> > Date: Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 2:19 PM Subject: Fwd: radical breakthrough To: jeffrey epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> > 1 beards and long hair , are meant to catch and hold smells. ? 2. visiual system cohernant image. . fft . equivament. . for sound. making a coherentt sound. . ? does it make a coeherent concept.? 3. a mental object ie mobject. . action on mental objects. . ? 4. hope opposite of despair. . bias internal system . accesing reserves. . 5. writing is unnatural. assymentrc speed. . not good for eveeryone. linear. slow. rule based. . 6. nose test. telepathy. . . 7 skin as part of brain? . memebrane. ? 8. ideas or brain connections as knots. slices. tangles links loops. is space knottted. and the speed of light simply mean one time around . obviously a constant. 9 . . intelltignce on surface , needs larger surface area. hence replication. . 10. does the eye tranmsit information. 11/ fear is pain in the future. . 12. music is horizontal and vertical inforamtion ? melody prosgy harmony , all amials. can it be looked at to reengineer the brain. harmony FFT. symphonic learning. 13 individulal vs the group ? ? 14. all senses act in a narrow band. survival. fitness. . 15. drive motivation. goal?

16. deception and its role in biollogy. 17 power. financail. physical mental. . 18. power lawws and probabality. gravity.? 19. plants. communication. surface area. similairy tohumnas. . do we get plant diseases. ? 20. biolgy , np complete? 21 sense calculation matrix. , sound receiver and transionni . gesture. . . tounch . temp.pressure. location. . sight. frequnecey. ( temp_. location. movement. , smell. transmit. recieve. . volatile. amplitude. . disgust? is location a sense. near food? direction. to food. ? 22 . derivation of the power llaws. 23 power of words . 24. questions = AI to the minus 1 25. belief , survival. meachinsim for some. . placebo. . 26. taste? food? kissing? 27 . mortaltiy tables. why. points on the distribution. wittegenstein. . . 26. money. agreements. debt . pwer. value wealth. cost. 27 dreaming all day long 28 only 6 senses? 29. micro bioome anti biotics. recall smell. ? psyche. memory etc. 30 / eye transmission 31. numbers , not good for many things 32. luck what is it . mortality tables 33 signal processing. . noise. excription gromov deepak. church. martin. hopkins.danny, joscha watson, chomsky. . . thiel.hoffman, sinofsky . . terje. ehud. bannon. barrak. ruemmler. reid. karp. . woody, blaine. cavett. sultan jabor raafat. anas . joi, reid. wolf. lang. . \ deepakbarnaby ben masha. , melz eva mosc. bernie. rony , merill. attia, chen, farkas leon . membrane computing. FFT. energy to deconstruct. . harmony. . . knots. . the explainer. ( survival ) . matrix algebra, - senses. face /image recogniton. / focus, accupnutre presure massage. pain. placebo illusions, visula aurel. . honest signals. evolution. resource. rate of loss. . payoff matrix. . cooperation. stochastic games.

From: jeevacation@gmail.com To: jeffrey epstein jeevacation@gmail.com; Subject: Fwd: radical breakthrough Sent: 1/8/2018 7:47:20 PM kashoggi, bunker hunt. george mitchell . wayne owens. prince andrew. princess mette . princes sophie, princess alexandra princess melusine. . bill richardson. bill clinton. hamad bun jasem. donalad trup. gov mapp. governoe young. governoe king. . woody allen . morgain fairchild. mike ovitz. . marvin davis, herb segal. jimmy cyane, jes staleyk , rothchild. agnelli. . karim. prince mbs, mbr, sultan. anas. . jabor, general clarke. , watson minsky church , hillis. . ramascharn, golenbrg, hauser, kosslym, dan gilbert. larry summers. henry rosvsky, steven j gould, . murray gemman, gerffrey west. . haley berry, joan severane. , tom pritzker, leon balck, m.. woody allen, jacuwe lang. , miro. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: jeffrey E. <jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> > Date: Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 2:19 PM Subject: Fwd: radical breakthrough To: jeffrey epstein <jeevacation@gmail.com <mailto:jeevacation@gmail.com> > 1 beards and long hair , are meant to catch and hold smells. ?

🧪🧵 In the Epstein documents released today, there's a "radical breakthrough" email Epstein sent himself in 2018, containing musings such as the idea that beards "are meant to catch and hold smells."

Then he replied to himself with an unusual list of people including Donald Trump ("donalad trup").

Australia’s red rocks hold mysteriously detailed fossils. We finally know how they formed Chemical analysis could help predict locations of other ancient sites with impeccable fossils

McGraths Flat is an incredible fossil site in New South Wales that reveals Australia’s rich tropical past.

In a new study, scientists discover what caused the area’s exceptional fossilization—and where similar fossil sites might be unearthed.

#Paleontology #Lagerstatte

🧪🏺

New for @science.org

Thank you @spinfocl.bsky.social for the kind words about my research on the Voynich Manuscript, which I’m pleased to announce has been accepted for publication in Cryptologia following peer review. Read more about my work and the previous research that motivated it in Hermes’s blog post:

5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan Former Wondery exec Jeanine Wright is leading a new firm, Inception Point AI, that's betting on flooding the zone with audio content: “I think that people who are still referring to all AI-generated c...

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this company's AI podcast on the Gilded Age has a thumbnail misspelling it "Guilded Age." Somewhat ironic. www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-...

www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

*typo: magic THROUGH the millennia. A huge thanks to the book's fact-checker and proofreader, too!