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I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it.

His name was John Dee, or maybe his buddy Edward Kelley, both pretty interesting characters.

I also believe that you are referring to the hoax theory of Gordon Rugg, but I found that unconvincing (such ciphers were popular 100 to 150 years after the creation of Voynich, and even if someone independently invented it earlier, manually it is a lot of work for a 240 page hoax).

Yes it does. Perhaps my source is incorrect. Check out article 4. My understanding is that this is current constitution after the reunification of East Germany but as you pointed out, I might be wrong.

Mathematica has been able to output to LaTeX for some time. In recent versions, you can even save to a (La)TeX file.

in the forms of very trace amounts of magnetite in brain tissue. Whether or not this magnetite is actually used at all in human beings or not, there is no clear concensus on, however, at the moment it is believed that this magnetite has no effect on human beings and if this magnetite was ever used for sensing magnetic fields, it was in an ancestor of the human species going back many millions of years.

I believe the original source for my knowledge of this was some television program, but to save you some Googling, here is one of the first hits that came up.

No he did NOT - RTFA.

The "previous incidents" were things that other people at the company he worked for had done. Are you guilty because someone in your building that you may never have met did something questionable?

> The British justice system does not have an automatic presumption of innocence

Yes it DOES.

British Common Law is the source of the US's "innocent until proven guilty" approach to legal cases. You may be thinking of Roman-derived Civil Law, which does not have that presumption, and holds in many other parts of Europe.

> It would be fortunate if he hadn't been under suspicion

For what?

From TFA, they considered him suspicious because:
- other people entered the public transit station at the same time. Had he waited until nobody else was about to enter, he'd be "suspicious" for entering when nobody else did.
- he didn't leave his backpack unattended. Had he done so, he'd have been suspicious for leaving an unattended bag.
- he looked at other people. Oh no!!
- he didn't look at officers. Is he supposed to look or not?

He wasn't "suspicious" for anything he was doing, and he wasn't "suspicious" for anything he had done (unless you have information not contained in the article). Considering how bad your information was about British law and and how your version of events bears very little resemblance to the happenings in the article, I can't help but wonder if you even read the damn thing, or just started making stuff up.

..hmm.. good question
Among other 'proofs' I found this: http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cc/viruses.htm

...All PCs should have this virus protection software. It used to be called F-Prot but has recently become known as F-Secure. It is essential that you keep your version up to date...

Maybe that is how he was seen by the Tory MPs, I don't know. I doubt very much it's how the majority of the electorate saw him. Even so you could still say his appeal was in not actually being Thatcher.

Do you really think the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament lost the election for Labour in 1992? I suspect it had more to do with the threats, mainly put out by The Sun and it's ilk, about huge tax hikes. Of course the Tories blew that by hiking taxes anyway. Not that it was anything, but unavoidable as government finances were bad at the time. Of course it did serve to destroy once and for all the myth that the Tories are better managers of the economy. Much more important to the average voter than nuclear weapons that we could never practically use or need.

"... he would swing with every random thought that came into his head"? Thatcher never had to contend with a sub 100 majority. Major had 22 at the general election and less by 1997. Or in other words only 12 MPs out of the 336 might be needed to defeat him. It's no surprise that he was the victim of that minority to whom anti-europeanism was more important than anything else.

BTW having looked back at the results I find that Major did get a lower proportion of the vote, but a more of the electorate as a whole than Thatcher. This was because of the high turn out in 1992. http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/uktable.htm

"At the next election, it was vote that Conservative idiot out". I'm not saying this wasn't the case. However taxes, sleaze, and the state of the public services also had a big impact. Also add in the fact that the Tories couldn't get off their split over Europe.

Major was not the only or even main reason for the Labour victory in 1997.

Except it's nowhere *near* as easy as the simple "replace GBP with EUR" solution you imply; there are massive economic & political issues - basically the government passing/losing power to Europe - as well as the straight social one: people don't want to change their currency, as it'll mean they have to rethink/relearn the price of *everything* - would you be willing to do it? Read this for more info:

http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/docs/efaq.htm

Not that I'm saying switching to the Euro would be a bad thing, it's just nowhere near as easy as people tend to make out.

On the other hand especially for processing visual information the brain uses (as i already pointed out) loads of heuristics and cues which lead to the well-known optical illusions. See for example this or this. So there is a lot of stuff that gets preprocessed for the brain so it does not have to process the information every single neuron delivers.

Although i graduated in psychology i have to admint that i had more focus on statistics than general psychology which covers issues of perception but i cannot recally studies which point out that most processing is done brute-force. Would be nice if you could dig up some for me. Thanks in advance.

See Rugg's website about his "Voynichese" generation.

oops. extraneous space in the link. Here's one you just need to click

Prof. Rugg has a website about his methods and results, which may be of interest.

This is a wide-open door through which even the most rediculously obvious software patents could (and therefore will) slip.

Please please please don't let yourselves think that this is anything other than the EU getting a patent system open to virtually all of the abuses demonstrated in the US.

I just sent the following to my MEP, find your MEP's email address and contact them NOW before it is too late (people in the UK can find their members here)!:

Ms Doyle,

You may recall our recent discussion concerning the dangers of software
patents for European innovation and competitiveness in software. Apparently,
the Legal Affairs Committee has now recommended that patents on software
are to be permitted within the EU - while only paying lip-service to the
massive threat they present. This will be a collossal blow to smaller
European software developers as they will be unable to compete with large US
corporations in the patent land-grab which is sure to follow.

My question is - what problem are they attempting to fix? Software
innovation has been just fine without software patents in Europe. The Linux
computer operating system, which currently runs more web servers than
Microsoft's Windows software, was developed by volunteers donating their time
freely. This kind of effort is jeprodised when large software companies like
Microsoft can use patents on trivial and obvious software processes to crush
these altruistic development efforts, and Microsoft has stated that they are
willing to do so.

It is insufficient to pay lip-service to the problem of patents on trivial
and obvious techniques, I want to know how exactly this will be prevented.
Certainly the lesson of the United States is that the patent office will be
poorly motivated to deny patents on trivial software processes, leaving it up
to the courts - a process that is much too costly and time-consuming for
small companies in such a fast moving industry.
I realise that you are not directly involved in this process, and I am not
intimitely familiar with the internal workings of the European Parliament,
but as the CEO of a software company with offices in Leinster I feel that you
are the appropriate person to whom I should address my concerns.

If you could refer me to someone more appropriately positioned, I would be
extremely grateful,

Kind regards,

Ian Clarke
CEO Cematics LLC

But the point is, speed of counting is not an argument against paper ballots. The election result is pretty much known in about 4 hours, and even if it took 24 hours that would be perfectly quick enough.

hose of us who have worked in a scientific field as a researcher

I found out some more about it - in the UK at least, it's prescription only - and by sleep disorder professionals only. (although this was in 1998)

info here

"Modafinil is only licensed for use in patients with a clear diagnosis of narcolepsy.* Accordingly modafinil treatment should only be initiated by a specialist with experience of managing sleep disorders. Under these circumstances it is appropriate for general practitioners to prescribe maintenance therapy, within the context of an effective shared care agreement."

Standing at a computer in a Math department posting to Slashdot or sitting in your living room after having passed remedial Algebra in college

Have you ever taken a course in Applied Numerical Analysis?

The Technical Paper by Prof E. W. Williams can be found here

Ok, the statement from the university was alot better than the actual article,( http://www.keele.ac.uk/research/cmrkeele.htm) until I got to this

wristwatches could have vastly more power than today's PC Computers.

Can nothing about technology go without being tainted with sensationalism. I am not even going to point out why this wrong, as I am sure eveyone realized just how stupid it is without me having to say it.

The FT article that was linked to in the post says that an optical fiber is used for reading. This reminded me of Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NFSOM) which is a technique used by a research group where I was a graduate student. To read more about it look under techniques at the Awschalom Group web page. For this NFSOM technique an optical fiber is tapered and coated with a metal to produce a tip with an aperature of ~100 nm. With a spot size of 100nm square it would be possible to fit about 1 Tera bit in the space of a credit card. Of course, this does not sound like a completely solid state device. The optical tip must scan over the recording material.

I also found another article which seems to have been written by a more clueful journalist. They report that the data is stored on layers within the substrate. With the areal density that might be accessible using NFSOM and 16 recording layers within the material it might be possible to reach the densities they are claiming.

It certainly seems that technology like this could take a long time to be developed into a product, but the university announcement does say that they have already received some patents on the technology and they sound optimistic about how much more work is needed. That stance is probably geared to attract venture capital more than anything, but who knows? -Dan

Any UK /.ers want to call up the "Managing Director" of this project? Maybe ask him a few questions about it to see just how vapor this ware is?

Tel: 44 171 636 1744 (in the UK)

Got the phone number from this page.

50$ cheap? In fact, it seems the price went up. Aforementioned /. article talks about 30$. I have strong suspicions, though that that should have been in £...

There's a -not very informative- press release on the site of Keele University. There's an e-mail address, but I suspect that covers only the commercial aspect of the thingee.

I'll finish off with some Register articles: here, here and a cached planetit article.

50$ cheap? In fact, it seems the price went up. Aforementioned /. article talks about 30$. I have strong suspicions, though that that should have been in £...

There's a -not very informative- press release on the site of Keele University. There's an e-mail address, but I suspect that covers only the commercial aspect of the thingee.

I'll finish off with some Register articles: here, here and a cached planetit article.

Here are a couple of stories from The Register on this:

ONE - UK boffins reckon they can cram 10,800GB of data on a PC card
Monday, 9 October 2000

TWO - UK boffins unveil $35 '2300GB on a PC Card' RAM breakthrough
Monday, 9 August 1999

Note that the original stories said that the figures were in the thousands of gigabytes - this means TERABYTES

Cavendish Management Resources (CMR)seems to be an investment company. Keele University also seems legit, although the Cavendish website seems under the weather.

So it looks like they are making it through the vaporware stage, and approaching the heavy fog stage, before we a watch it materialize.

Bottom line for me is that I do not think I will hold my breath waiting, but I would love it to happen.

Professor Ted Williams, Emeritus Professor of Electronic Engineering at Keele University, Staffordshire, England has developed a patented solid state memory system with the capacity of 86 Giga Bytes per square centimetre of surface area. The system uses a magneto-optical system not dissimilar to that of CD-ROM, except that the system is fixed, solid state, and has a different operating approach.

The system has applications for computer and processor memory for credit cards and smart cards, and for high security bank notes, among many other uses.

In computer memory format, the system has a capacity per sq cm in excess of 86 Giga Bytes of re-writeable RAM data - this equates to a memory capacity of 3400 Giga Bytes(3.4 Tb) within the surface area of a credit card! Data access time is around 100 Mb/sec. A single unit with this capacity, but using the computer's processor, has a physical size of about 3 cm x 3 cm x 1.5 cms (high). An additional advantage over existing data storage systems is that only 20% of gross capacity needs to be allocated for error correction, which is significantly less than the 40% for hard disks and 30% for optical storage.

More

Here's a link from the university.It sounds like it's real to me.

Just off the top of my head, the Gimp does already have layers.

It's not photoshop, but it's getting better day by day.

You can find an introductory article to solar and laser driven lightsails on my website. It was written more than a few years ago now, back when I was an undergraduate, but its aged fairly well (unfortunately). If you want a really in-depth look at this topic I'd recommend Colin McInnes' book Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics and Mission Applications .

I sort of telecommute, my boss and the bulk of the poeple I work with (for) are at RAL, in Oxford, while I'm at Keele University (a few hundred miles north). This is actually the standard way that the people I work for (the Starlink Project) hires programmers. There are six or seven of us scattered through different Universities thoughout the UK, we only meet up a couple of times a year to discuss stuff. Appart from those meetings everything goes over email, it seems to work okay.

Its not really working from home, although I have that option (and when I actually want to sit down and code something up I usually take it). However I don't really see much of a difference.

Wasn't one of the ideas put forward when people started talking about telecommuting back in the seventies that people would still go into central facilities and have a desk (and associated stuff) its just that these facilities wouldn't be owned by the company they work for, but it would be sort of clearning house type thing, and people from all different companies would work there side by side, the company they're working for only really existing in virtual space?

Pre.......

Second, arstechnica has a follow up article about a british venture capital company that's working on something even better: think multiple terabytes on a single cd!

"God does not play dice with the universe." -Albert Einstein