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Web 3.0? Are these people crazy? I mean, Web 2.1 is still in beta testing, BLINK and MARQUEE were only just moved from the trunk to the branch, and these folks expect the Internet to release a 3.0 line already?

You've got to be kidding me...

In Action

Design schematics

Early Mock-up of Version 2

There is a way of disproving Rugg's hoax theory (or at least the part of Kelley's involvement in creating such a hoax).

If the manuscript is significantly older than it's first appearance in the court of Rudolf II between 1576-1611, then it's highly unlikely it's a hoax created to dupe Rudolf. Furthermore, if there was no connection between John Dee and the MS then they theory about Kelley seems unlikely.

Now, Rugg's theory can't be disproven without knowing more about the Voynich text, in which case the mystery wouldn't exist. The problem with Rugg's theory is that even if one *could* produce a Voynich-like text that doesn't mean that the Voynich manuscript is a product of that process.

My guess is that the Voynich manuscript is an Italian alchemical work in a highly bizarre cipher system - but my theory can't be proven either.

As Rugg's site mentions, the only way to prove or disprove the Voynich mystery is to come up with some kind of translation - which is always been the case even before Rugg's theory.

$2000 for a 500 MHz machine

You are comparing apples to oranges. This is not Intel "inflate your clockfrequency until you die" Corporation.

500Mhz US-III is equal to 1.5 GHz Intel P4.
1 GHz US-III is equal to 3 GHz Intel P4.

We have purchased many 1U Fire V100 boxes for less than $1000 each, that is cheap for a server with a true RISC CPU (which was designed specificly to run UNIX).

Professional gear:
SPARC
MIPS
Alpha
Power
Itanium

Toys:
Intel P3/P4/XEON
AMD 32/64B
Transmeta
Cyrix
PowerPC

(yeah go ahead and mod me to hell for my that, could care less becouse I was born to run UNIX)

Michelson-Morley had to do with the existence of aether. It was complicated, but elegant.

But Michelson had already done an even more historically impressive experiment, I think, that had to do with the most accurate measurements of the speed of light in his day by far. "In 1878 Albert A. Michelson first accurately measures the speed of light with $10 worth of apparatus along the seawall" (scroll toward the middle of the page).

The more accurate measurement he made in the 1920s is described briefly below that quote on the same page. Certainly the $10 experiment is in the grasp of most classrooms, but I think the mountaintop one is also possible for today's students, what with GPS and all, or even a really good topo map (+/- a few feet gets you close-enough-for-proof-of-concept). You have to get 2 teams of kids on 2 different mountains- and with SUVs and the quality of roads nowadays, how hard is that to do in the high sierras with some adult supervision? Maybe hard to do if you live in Kansas, admittedly.

Plus, what school kids want to sit around a stuffy lab? How cool an experiment would it be to the most science-jaded student to get out of the classroom and into the wilderness to do science on an as easily appreciated concept as the speed of light? ;-)

Here's another good article on the history of the speed of light and better details of Michelson's efforts.

Yes! - I saw a T.V. programme about this a few years ago in the U.K.

The man who organised the experiment was Albert A. Michelson, the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

He conducted two particular experiments, one to calculate the speed of light and another whose answer gave an early indication of the relativistic effects of the speed of light.

Here's a link I found using Google :-

Albert Abraham Michelson

All the compliments of the Season from Glasgow, Scotland. The 1999 UK City of Architecture and Design