So, my Voynich experience was quite neat. The filming took place at Hart House at U of T on Saturday afternoon, in one of those rooms that actually looks the way university offices are portrayed in the movies, with book-lined shelves and old wooden desks and whatnot. I was imagining a larger production crew, but really I was glad when it turned out to just be the director, story producer, cameraman, sound guy, and a production assistant. I was very slightly alarmed the night before when the producer emailed me to say she wanted to make the questions she had sent more exciting, but those fears turned out to be unfounded - it was mostly just a matter of rephrasing them. My concern that I didn't (and don't) consider myself to be a Voynich expert was alleviated greatly by the fact that the guy they were filming before me (a cryptographer) was even less familiar with the VM than I am.

The actual interview was mostly her bouncing questions off me and me rephrasing them in the form of answers that will eventually make sense when the questions are taken out - it's not an interview, just a way of setting up me as a talking-head expert. A lot of the questions were about language and writing in general - how we rule out the possibility that it records an extinct language (we can't), what features about it capture the attention of scholars (the fact that it looks so close to written language, for instance), and some of the barriers to decipherment if it were real. Others were about reasons we think it might be a hoax - the odd repetitions, the unusual distribution of word lengths, etc. I'm comfortable with everything I said - bearing in mind that they recorded me for a couple of hours and probably I'll only be on the final show for a minute or two, and so how I come off on TV will depend on what bits of my blather get picked. I do anticipate getting emails from the fringe-y people, but I knew that going into the affair.

And that's that, except that while I was there, I learned that apparently (because it's not listed anywhere on the Internet or anywhere else, so take it with a grain of salt) the show will be hosted by WILLIAM FREAKIN' SHATNER, not that I got to meet him or have any contact with him, but if that turns out to be true, I'll have a Bacon number of 3. I'm hoping to get myself an Erdös number in the next few years as well, because I know a bunch of mathematicians, in which case I may become a member of a small club of holders of a non-infinite Erdös-Bacon number (probably 6 or 7).

Oh yeah, and also, I'll be on TV. Details to come.

Tags: geekery, weird