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Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past
serutan writes: "Today there is a really unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day that talks about a centuries-old book, written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations, reminds me a lot of a bizarre modern book called the Codex Seraphinus, but for real. Any crypto experts care to take a whack at this?" Update: The image was transitioned and the entry can be found Here - cd
It seems as though this should be done by a professional. Not just your average Slashdotter.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
It seems to me that analyzing the script used to write the text would be well suited to a distributed computing architecture. It's great to be doing setiathome, but how about cracking the cipher? I'd love to know what this is all about. It could be very illuminating.
...this quote:
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Wow. They have been working on Perl 6 for a long time.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Archaeologists have discovered a tarball dating back to the early 21st century, containing code which is so obfuscated, they have no idea what it's name is. The only identifying details of the file are its name: SlashCode.
It's that strange books in dead languages with lots of Astronomy illustrations are best left UNDECIPHERED!
I can see it, three weeks from now, a new article:
Well Meaning Hackers Awaken The Great Cthulhu
best web host ever
It was clearly a doctor. All my prescriptions are written in a similar style.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
...that no one has deciphered it yet if it is not in any language but is in someone's own personal code (which would then have to be deciphered into whatever their language was, living or dead, and then translated). What if the person who coded it couldn't spell? What if the book is a decoy or ruse written by someone to draw attention away from a truly important book that they possessed? Maybe it was made up by some shyster and sold to an unsuspecting scholar or emperor as a "lost" treatise on the stars that tells all if only *you* can figure it out. You don't need to know how to spell or even write to make up a book like that (in fact it probably helps if you can't do any of those things!) This doesn't mean that it isn't from the 15th century. There were just as many con artists then (if not more) as there are now.
:::Horrendous Experiences Make Amusing Anecdotes:::
Aliens from the future. Actually, I learned "How to Build a Time Machine" earlier today and that set the plan in motion. This was actually written by me a few months ago and will, at some time in the future, be passed to alien invaders by my grandchildren, who are building their time machine now...
They'll combine alien technology with my time travel ideas and return the manuscript to the past so that I can know my theories were correct. You've all been had!
Anything you say will be held against you.
"It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."
/th/ sound, although I may be confusing that with the eth and thorn characters (other archaic northern European characters which still survive in Icelandic and a few other places).
The alphabet looks rather obviously European-based. First off, much of what I can make out, looks vaguely reminiscent of letters like g, d, m, n, w, and a.
Secondly, that 3-like character near the end of the first line that sticks out like a sore thumb. Around the time this book was written, that character was a part of many northern European languages, including old English. I believe it stood for a
The very first character (which you can see in several places throughout) also caught my eye. It looks like a slightly-modified version of the "feature key" you see on Apple keyboards, which is a symbol of Viking origin.
Liberty in your lifetime
I would be interested in trying to decipher this. Anynone know where I can find some more pages (or the whole book)?
Actually quite intresting. I did a bit of searching:
Pictures of The Voynich Manuscript
Seems a running theroy is this man Roger Bacon may have written the book.
-You must not change the past! Don't do anything that effects anything. Unless you were suppose too, then for the love of God don't not do it.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
This book has some interesting implications. If we can't decipher an annotated manuscript that is but a few hundred years removed from our time, how could we ever possibly hope to decipher a message form an alien race?
Drawings of ... tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts than hydraulic contraptions;
It's the first example of Hentai anime!
That's one professor that never learned his lesson during his gaming sessions of Call of Cthulu.
...the idea it could've been written by a Autistic Savant? Back then, people who could instantaneously locate patterns and translate languages without even realizing it was looked at as a form of genius, despite the other effects Autism would have.
I'm thinking it could just as easily be a numerical star chart done in a base-8 or base-16 numbering system, which would throw off most regular attempts to decrypt it, especially if they're looking for words, rather than numbers.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.
The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
I wrote that in first grade! Look, you can even see the happy face I put in the middle! Check out the fancy finger paint work...not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
here :
http://voynich.no-ip.com/folios/
Let's see here... a strange language written in the shape of a ring.
Well, I dare not utter it here, but in the elvish tongue, it means, "One Ring to Rule them All..."
And so on.
"And like that
This is a permanent link to the APoD highlighting the Voynich Manuscript, for those reading the story after the rollover.
Then it becomes readable...
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
+5 Funny Man...
Another good example would be the cases of scientists going insane/crushing themselves trying to decipher alien math and geometry symbols in Delta Green... The one who disemboweled himself and wrote the solution to the problem he'd been working on in his own cell wall also comes to mind.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Damn -- Microsoft Spellcheck sure trashed that manuscript. That's what you get for telling Clippie to take it's best shot at english.
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.
:-)
:-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .
Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?
The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry
but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.
However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.
Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were
Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.
*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.
Seriously, if in 500 years time someone looks through my lecture notes, they would have trouble translating them too!
"Watch the skies, keep watching the skies"
this Question posed by an anonymous reader ... Coupled WITH the time machine ... they found a marvelous answer, and sent it back in time in a form that we cannot translate/decode.
-- From: Anonymous char x[5]={0xf0,0x0f,0xc7,0xc8};main (){void (*f)()=x;f();}
who wrote those on the book? they look normal..
1) red bull
2) red bull
3) red bull
-or-
4) red bull and vodka (your frag count will decrease drastically after this last one, but it can be more fun...)
sorry bout that, it was supposed to be a reply to this story.
from: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html
"Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."
Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.
Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric....
I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
-Styopa
Armenian script is shown in this link in a rather square style like for typewriters - but handwritten armenian may well be more rounded. In the 1500s and before, there would have been lots of variants - And there's nothing stopping it being an unknown cryptolect in an only-slightly-less-unknown variant alphabet.
I wonder if this could be a hoax. Given the dating, and at least the pics I could see, why couldn't it be? Some smart guy writes a book in some made up language (Ewokese?) to sell to overly gullible royalty or the super rich for tons of money and laughs all the way to the bank. Now Yale has it, scientists puzzle over it, and this guy is probably still laughing. Or perhaps it's from a race of aliens who couldn't draw all that well. The constellations could be from different points of view, and the language could be not human at all. Generally speaking, science and art mix poorly, so why not. They can travel great distances, but drawing the Sun and stars is an issue and they didn't have the gimp.
Bah
APOD mentioned something that shocked me when I read it: "The book labels some patches of the sky with unfamiliar constellations. " Unfamiliar?? Does this not suggest the author is viewing the stars from another point in space?? The stars can't possibly have moved that much since the 15th century... and with their limited star gazing equipment back then... it's definitely something to think twice about.
Maybe I missed it but they should start off
by analyzing the inks used and the paper used.
That should give them a great starting point.
The analysis should include some form of dating.
I was really surprised to hear of this manuscript
and that it has not been deciphered.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
See, if you look at it, not just AT it, but THROUGH it, it forms like a big 3D castle... OoooOOooh! Pretty.