The Voynich Manuscript May Have Been Decoded

MBCook sends word on a possible solution to the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, which we last visited nearly 6 years ago. "The Voynich Manuscript has confounded attempts to decode it for nearly 100 years. A person named Edith Sherwood, who has previously suggested a possible link to DaVinci, has a new idea: perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words. There are three pages of examples from the herb section of the book, showing the original text, the plaintext Italian words, and the English equivalents. Has someone cracked the code?"

Comments

It Hurts

[eldavojohn]

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on! Did Edith Sherwood ever stop to think that maybe -- similar to numerology in The Bible -- she'd be able to make words out of any strange text regardless of its true origin?

Here's a real gem:

This brief sentence indicated that the use of anagrams should be investigated. This was further supported by reading Wikipedia’s report that anagrams were popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and that some 17th century astronomers, while engaged in verification of their discoveries, used anagrams to hide their ideas.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me.

This is the game that will be played with the Voynich Manuscript. Every so often people will claim to have 'decoded it' by offering up a small part of the manuscript which very imaginative minds have pulled together 10+ very very flimsy clues that point to some individual. The fact that there are so many coincidences will add weight to it being the real explanation. But it oddly won't work for 99% of the manuscript. Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.

Re:It Hurts

[ianare]

Well, she does say she doesn't speak Italian ... If this is true then I'm sure someone familiar with medieval Italian will come along and decode the whole thing. As for the labeling, yes of course it's 'bullshit', the manuscript is recognized as being fiction for a long time now.

Re:It Hurts

[Yvanhoe]

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

She calls for help from people knowing medieval Italian. Apparently she used a reference book on the medieval Italian name of certain plants ot get these hints. She makes the interesting suggestion that this was written by a child, maybe mimicking scientists he knows be drawing "obvious" stuff, i.e. the plants in the garden and in the kitchen, and "hiding" his discoveries using a code used by scientists of the time.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me.

She referred to Wikipedia as an inspiration to explore an anagram-based lead. Not such a bad thing to do.

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.

That was the theory that sounded the most plausible to me too, but these new leads and discoveries call for more investigation, I would say.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

the manuscript is recognized as being fiction for a long time now.

Um, no? Per Wikipedia: "The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine." (ie, nonfiction)

If you're referring to the argument that the work is a hoax, that's probable, but far from proven.

Re:It Hurts

[radtea]

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.

That's an interesting idea, with the key word being "artist". The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message. Considered as a weird kind of autistic art, that might be kind of cool, although by far the more likely solution is that John Dee or one of his associates created the thing as a fraud to bilk gullible aristocrats or royalty (Charles V gets mentioned as a possible target, if I recall correctly.)

Seriously: an error-free exotic MS with bizarre and suggestive (in the broadest sense) drawings that we are pretty sure passed through the hands of known "magicians" at least some of whom almost certainly accepted in their own minds that much of what they sold was fraudulent (many probably at least half-believed in what they were doing, but still...)

Never assume intelligence when venality will do, or something like that.

Re:It Hurts

[somersault]

Well, it could just be a randomly generated joke.

Re:It Hurts

[JasterBobaMereel]

So she has apparently decoded a manuscript written in a language she does not read (medieval Italian) does not know what a medieval herbal looks like, is not a botanist, a linguist or anything else that would be helpful to decoding a medieval manuscript of any kind .....

For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat .....

Re:It Hurts

[maxume]

Perhaps she referenced Wikipedia because it initially gave her the inspiration, and not because she thinks it is the word of god.

Re:It Hurts

[MrNaz]

But it's Wednesday...

Re:It Hurts

[thisnamestoolong]

Umm... really? The manuscript has still yet to be decoded at all -- how would we go about determining that it is fiction?

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I'm sure no one familiar with Medieval Italian has taken a gander at this world famous manuscript... Which is why it's so ridiculous that this woman is taking a shot at it. Give me a break.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when idiots on Slashdot "call bullshit" like it's some great intellectual veto power. Hey moron: you can't "call bullshit" and sit there with a smug smile. Explain why she's wrong and offer up a better theory.

Re:It Hurts

[SharpFang]

I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like [wikispaces.com]. Not like this [edithsherwood.com]. I mean, come on!

But maybe the manuscript author didn't. I mean, the whole mystery aside, we all know the level of accuracy of scientific texts of that time. The fact it is hard to decode doesn't mean it is true.

Re:It Hurts

[careysub]

... If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

This is an interesting possibility, but a problem with this hypothesis is that the Voynich Manuscript exhibits a statistical property of natural languages called Zipf's Law ("the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a word frequency table"). Possibly the postulated artist produced imaginary symbols following this law? It would be interesting to see if studies of work created by autistic individuals commonly possess this property. If this is not a common pattern then this possibility would be much reduced.

Re:It Hurts

[divisionbyzero]

It seems like you're being a bit harsh. She seems like an amateur doing amatuerish work that has found something suggestive. It's not like she tried to get it published in a journal or claims to be a some sort of professional. Sure she has a phD after her name but that doesn't mean she is trying to claim he phD applies to Voynich Manuscript. Maybe I'm being naive.

Re:It Hurts

[reg106]

Personally, I like

This picture also depicts the union of a sperm with an ova, indicating an extraordinary insight into human reproduction.

and then

I postulate that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript circa 1460 when he was about 8 years old.

Meanwhile,

An early microscope was made in 1590 in Middelburg, The Netherlands.

How exactly did a youthful da Vinci figure out what an ova and sperm look like? If Leonardo da Vinci (as a child) could sketch sperm and ova over 100 years before a crude microscope was invented and almost 200 years before Hooke and Leeuwenhoek, then that alone would be an astonishingly significant discovery. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Leonardo would build a microscope, discover cell biology, and not bother to write something up about it as an adult. He was, after all, interested in pretty much everything. The more reasonable conclusion is that Edith Sherwood is willing to interpret images very "liberally" (meaning here, without much evidence), without making even simple checks for logical consistency. This is a single example, but the carelessness calls the rest into question. (As you have already indicated)

Re:It Hurts

[ianare]

Simple : the illustrations are clearly not representation of reality.

Though I suppose it could be the same kind of fiction found in the bible or other religious works - in some cases based on reality, but clearly distorted.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

One item about the autistic artist theory. In the period of time this is reported to be an autistic child probably would have been sent to an asylum, and never taught to write any letters and surely not given paper, which was relatively expensive in that day LOL

Re:It Hurts

[clone53421]

Hey! I rather fancy the idea of an 8-year-old getting sperm and egg donors for his research.

Er...

Re:It Hurts

[ConceptJunkie]

Since you're not a botanist (nor am I) how do you know what garlic looked like 600 years ago? When corn was first cultivated, it looked like what we call "baby corn" today. It wasn't until centuries of selection and cross-breeding that we got the much larger corn that everyone knows.

That said, I agree with your premise that this is a shaky "solution", but I wouldn't rule it out based on that evidence.

Re:It Hurts

[boristhespider]

Yeah but on the other hand take a look at page 4.
http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/image_list.php?page=4
We are lead to believe that these illustrate "Rose bush" (looks like few roses I've ever seen that haven't been trampled on), "illustration" (gee, really? Thanks for telling me that this illustration illustrates an illustration -- I mean, is she serious?) and "oil". Which isn't oil. It may be something that can *produce* oil, but it isn't oil, it's a plant with a name.

This isn't news, this is just someone making a wild guess and pulling out some words from her arse, not many of which make sense.

Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks.

Total nonsense. I quite agree that this hurts.

Re:It Hurts

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

It's a really, really bad case of the Mondays.

Re:It Hurts

[Linker3000]

There's an Italian song about the manuscript - maybe it holds some clues...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcUi6UEQh00&feature=player_embedded

(not a Rickroll)

Re:It Hurts

[Mindcontrolled]

Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks

Makes totally sense. Magic mushrooms. Like, dude, if you eat them shrooms, you'll get rapidly wasted and forget about all that shit'n'stuff, like totally, man.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 Insightful. It's easy to forget how drastically centuries of selective breeding have changed wild plants. The "heritage" varieties are no exception.

Re:It Hurts

[boristhespider]

You know, you have a very good point. It's classic da Vinci! You need to read it from the back towards the front and then it all makes sense! How could we all have been so stupid for 500 years?

Re:It Hurts

[sennyk]

The world is flat; it only appears to be round, because it is periodic. :)

Re:It Hurts

[MattSausage]

LOL

wait.. why are we laughing again?

Anyway, the fact you said 'most likely' means even you agree there were times this would not have happened. Especially if the autistic child showed an early and remarkable ability to draw. This was the age of artists, and an autistic savant would be highly valued indeed if one could be found I'm sure.

Re:It Hurts

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

there are known cases of cyphers being broken by someone who does not speak the language in with the original message was written. some classical cypers can be decoded using frequency tables for the language. this requires the breaker to know (or guess) the original language, but it can be done.

now, do you really think _ALL_ workers of bletchley park were fluent in german ?

Re:It Hurts

[Nadaka]

It is possible for an autistic person to have a unique and fully consistent analog to a real language.

Re:It Hurts

[InsaneProcessor]

Or, It is just a bunch of scribbling designed to drive people who think they really know something about it, nuts.

Re:It Hurts

[Verdatum]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The burden of proof is on TFA Author. She has provided none. That's why you can claim bullshit without bothering to explain why she's wrong. That, and the fact that it is indeed bullshit.

Re:It Hurts

[boristhespider]

Might be a British/American spelling difference, I've always used "lead" and pronounced it to rhyme with the metal, which is also spelled "lead".

Of course, I'm not discounting that I might be a moron who can't spell, but it could just be one of the differences in the language.

Re:It Hurts

[iluvcapra]

[citation needed]

Re:It Hurts

[PirateBlis]

Coincidently, that whole wall of text you wrote was in fact the decoded version of the voynich manuscript. Refernce Sites: 1) Wikipedia.com 2) Slashdot.org 3) IllWillPress.com

Re:It Hurts

[clone53421]

An artistic autistic savant?

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, are an ass.

Perhaps the previous code breakers have been making the problem too complicated.
It wouldn't be the first time.

And you call Edith a dumbshit..... pot, meet kettle.

I still think the answer is 42.

Re:It Hurts

[Cwix]

Perhaps unknown modifies autistic instead of artist. Lol sorry I couldn't help playing devils advocate.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm now making it my life work to decode that song. All right?

-- gid

Re:It Hurts

[vegiVamp]

I generally agree with your rant, but I'd like to point out that the Allium family has more than just regular garlic. A wild plant that's called 'daslook' here (look is garlic) of that family, does look a lot more similar to the drawing: http://www.waterwereld.nu/images/daslook2.JPG .

Ah, wikipedia is helpful again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_ursinum

The leaves are quite nice in a salad, too :-)

Re:It Hurts

[mea37]

I have no idea the validity of her work, but I do find it interesting that you've juxtaposed derision of her work as that of an outsider with a reference elevating Einstein - who did much of his formative work as a scientific outsider.

Re:It Hurts

[eldavojohn]

Since you're not a botanist (nor am I) how do you know what garlic looked like 600 years ago?

Well, here's an illustration from the 15th century. Notice any bulbous feature that is lacking in the Voynich sketch? Notice they don't even bother to depict the root system in the 15th century sketch unlike the Voynich. My point was, not a single one of those plants relayed the distinguishing features you would obvious take care to note on the plant--all she offers is the leaf of stachys that has a hilarious tuber below it in the Voynich sketch but nothing in her botanical book! An obvious stretch of the imagination is the rose bush with no roses.

When corn was first cultivated, it looked like what we call "baby corn" today. It wasn't until centuries of selection and cross-breeding that we got the much larger corn that everyone knows.

I'm not sure where you found information that plants have changed dramatically in a few hundred years. While it's true that they have changed dramatically over thousands of years and since the advent of agriculture, 600 years is not the same as 6,000 years. While you're kind of right that thousands of years changed plants, I assure you that most if not all of today's plants look the same as they did 600 years ago.

Re:It Hurts

[Dog-Cow]

You have a strange idea of what constitutes "solid proof", even for a slashdotter.

Re:It Hurts

[Lars T.]

Or a really, really long weekend.

Re:It Hurts

[Rarzipace]

On this note, it may not hurt to point out that the Voynich/Sherwood drawing (as previously linked) does more closely resemble these pictures (1, 2) of wild garlic I found with a quick Google Image search. Still not a perfect likeness, but the Voynich drawing might imperfectly depict something more closely related to that wild garlic than the grandparent post's modern cultivated garlic.

Re:It Hurts

[Lars T.]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome

Savant syndrome, sometimes abbreviated as savantism, is not a recognized medical diagnosis, but researcher Darold Treffert describes it as a rare condition in which persons with developmental disorders (including autism spectrum disorders) have one or more areas of expertise, ability, or brilliance that are in contrast with the individual's overall limitations.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh.

Re:It Hurts

[Lars T.]

The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message.

You mean just like those funny "Hieroglyphics" that are supposed to be the written ancient Egyptian language. What a hoot.

Re:It Hurts

[pugugly]

Just on general principles - the article posits Da Vinci as the creator, but follows up with

"Most of these drawings are so poor that the author of the manuscript obviously considered it necessary to identify the roots/plants with names."

Umm -

Leonardo Da Vinci.

Poor Drawing.

Is it even legal to have these words on the same web server together?

Pug

Re:It Hurts

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

If this manuscript is such a mystery, how come nobody tried to do this with the "herb" section before?

And secondly, is the same encoding used for the entire book? If so, it should become immediately obvious if she's on the right track by just trying to decode some of the other pages.

Re:It Hurts

[CecilPL]

Of course, I'm not discounting that I might be a moron who can't spell, but it could just be one of the differences in the language.

It's actually the former. Sorry, truth hurts.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lead

Re:It Hurts

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Bones, to Spock: He's just saying he's more sure of your guesses than other peoples' facts.

As for Wikipedia -- all TFA says is that it says anagrams were popular in the Renaissance era. Well, either they were or they weren't. I don't know why "trusting Wikipedia" on this one is so damned important. And even if they were almost never used, that wouldn't impact the logic of a successful decoding.

Re:It Hurts

[Eric52902]

Sadly, he's been diagnosed with acute Mondays. It's terminal...

Re:It Hurts

[Yvanhoe]

The article posits child Da Vinci as the creator

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

No... not really.

Re:It Hurts

[Mister Whirly]

My theory is that someone wanted to create something that people would discuss for hundreds of years. Mission Accomplished.

Re:It Hurts

[XantheKnight]

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text? More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on! Did Edith Sherwood ever stop to think that maybe -- similar to numerology in The Bible -- she'd be able to make words out of any strange text regardless of its true origin? Here's a real gem:

This brief sentence indicated that the use of anagrams should be investigated. This was further supported by reading Wikipedia’s report that anagrams were popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and that some 17th century astronomers, while engaged in verification of their discoveries, used anagrams to hide their ideas.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me. This is the game that will be played with the Voynich Manuscript. Every so often people will claim to have 'decoded it' by offering up a small part of the manuscript which very imaginative minds have pulled together 10+ very very flimsy clues that point to some individual. The fact that there are so many coincidences will add weight to it being the real explanation. But it oddly won't work for 99% of the manuscript. Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense. If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

Remember when making criticisms of a work, one must consider both the audience intended for the work and the work's context. This piece was aimed at a low-tech audience, designed to explain the basic concepts of her discovery to the layman. It was published on the Internet as opposed to an academic journal. For those reasons, the tone, style, and sources cited are appropriate.

Eldavojohn, she uses a method of decryption that is similar to how the Rosetta Stone was decoded. The decoder of the Rosetta Stone was considered a genius. The method: you find a page or a section with proper names that can be identified, or just guessed, and then use that decoded portion to slowly decode the rest of the text. She used the page with herbs, vegetables and drawings because, as you mentioned, the rest of the block text gives no clue as to the subject matter of the text and therefore unlikely to yield the decrypt key.

Using Wikipedia as a source of inspiration to find the key to decryption isn't idiotic: it's inspired. Mentioning Wikipedia as a source of inspiration is not the same as citing it as an academic source. One is appropriate; one is not. And, with respect, this is not the type of academic project that a Wikipedia source detracts from. This is a problem to-be-solved, not a new theory of genetics or history that de facto relies on the reliabilit

Re:It Hurts

[Garridan]

Wut? Academia is all like "YOU CAN'T LOOK AT IT YOU'RE NOT AN EXPERT!!! ZOMG! AND YOU'RE A WOMAN GET OUT BEFORE MY PRECIOUS ACADEMIC BRAIN CATCHES COOTIES".

She's got an idea that perhaps nobody else has tried before. Now all she needs is a grad student in Medieval Italian who doesn't have a thesis project yet. Of course... it's ridiculously easy to come up with anagrams in English -- and Italian has a smaller alphabet and a higher vowel density, so my concern is that this might be an exercise in reading tea leaves.

Re:It Hurts

[boristhespider]

Oh dear, what a pity.

And yet, somehow, I'll carry on living with the knowledge that I'm a moron who can't spell.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so the drawing of garlic doesn't look like the one example picture of garlic that you picked. But, it looks a lot like these pictures of garlic (found using google image search for "aglio" and "garlic roots":

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ZgF6ZggcoVQ/SluASrOFhOI/AAAAAAAAAXk/-D6hqQMw5F0/s400/garlic+curing.JPG
http://www.gingerandtomato.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/aglio.jpg
http://comps.fotosearch.com/comp/IMZ/IMZ362/mazzo-aglio_~pix0740.jpg
http://www.universonline.it/_sessoesalute/salute/img/aglio_e_salute/aglio_e_salute.jpg

Re:It Hurts

[XantheKnight]

So she has apparently decoded a manuscript written in a language she does not read (medieval Italian) does not know what a medieval herbal looks like, is not a botanist, a linguist or anything else that would be helpful to decoding a medieval manuscript of any kind .....

For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat .....

Goodness, gentlemen and ladies, I am astounded by the skepticism and nay-saying that is on this thread. Isn't anyone else actually inspired by what this person has done here? It sounds like the old American dream analogized into the field of science to me: despite the odds, the obstacles, the reputation of the problem for complexity, this person bravely took the problem on nonetheless and actually had a measure of success by coming up with a pretty damn good idea that nobody else did.

It reminds me of the Star Trek episode where the Enterprise encounters that world full of genetically engineered humans... each person specifically bred for a task, nobody allowed to stray away from their "destined" field of work. Yet, they are hundreds of years behind un-genetically-engineered Earth technology for the very reason of their prejudice and entitlement syndrome. They think they are better qualified to do the job, so they never allow anyone else to have a go; never allow anyone to surprise them, never allow stray sparks of genius to infect their genetically engineered perfection. And lo and behold, in comes Geordi LaForge with his VISOR, which contains the technology they needed to solve their technical problem and save the day. All that was needed, right there in the fake eyes for a blind man - a source of inspiration they'd never have expected.

Please don't buy into the idea that nobody else could or should "do" science except those with a PhD or 18 articles published. Science is for everyone. It is a method, not a club. The very day we start evaluating peoples' ideas SOLELY on the basis of the person's status, as opposed to the merit of the idea, is the day we should just go ahead and shoot ourselves, because we have become idiots.

Re:It Hurts

[XantheKnight]

So she has apparently decoded a manuscript written in a language she does not read (medieval Italian) does not know what a medieval herbal looks like, is not a botanist, a linguist or anything else that would be helpful to decoding a medieval manuscript of any kind .....

For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat .....

Oh, by the way-- Einstein WAS wrong :) God does indeed play dice. "Spooky," no?

Re:It Hurts

[vertinox]

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.

Actually... Here is my theory. During the time this book appeared, cryptology was a really big craze in Europe. Persons like John Dee and fellows like him spent a great deal of time and money hunting for books on the subject in Northern Europe.

Someone thought to take advantage of this and wrote a book with nothing but gibberish and sold it to one of those book hunters at top dollar.

Re:It Hurts

[FingerDemon]

The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message.

Granted, I know next to nothing about this controversy or Medieval history. But before conveniences like the printing press I believe it was pretty common to write out a draft and then copy very carefully the final version without errors. If someone could throw out any pages they made a mistake on, it wouldn't be too hard to come up with an error free manuscript given enough time and attention to detail. Even if the whole thing was done on some kind of prebound book, if someone had alot of practice making careful copies like this and went slow enough, an error free manuscript doesn't seem too far fetched to me.

That's not to say it isn't nonsense, but I don't know that the error rate is that strong an indicator.

Re:It Hurts

[shane_rimmer]

You might be a moron who can't spell :)

Re:It Hurts

[Ecuador]

For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat .....

Well, the world is not flat, but it USED to be. Then, the ancient Greeks found a way to inflate it.

Re:It Hurts

[mellon]

It's widely accepted at this point that the manuscript is a deliberate fiction, intended to look mysterious for the purpose of enriching its author. Looked at in that light, it's still an amazing work of art, particularly because the author needed to be literate about cryptanalysis to make such a convincing fake.

Re:It Hurts

[boristhespider]

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1463472&cid=30299028 :) I'm comfortable with it.

Re:It Hurts

[thisnamestoolong]

From the research I have done, it does not seem to be very widely accepted that this manuscript is a hoax -- for instance, I find it extremely unlikely that the author would have created such a convincing fake to fool the crytologists 500 years ago -- the code could have been a far more transparent fake and would have been accepted for quite some time.

Re:It Hurts

[IorDMUX]

What I find very telling and most undermining to this hypothesis is the simple fact that soybeans were not introduced to Europe and the United States until the 18th century, and did not become a significant crop until the 20th. Given that the Voyinch manuscript is thought to be from the 15th - 16th century, the supposed translation--which claims to identify a soia = soybean plant--has quite a bit of explaining to do.

... along the same lines, do you notice any resemblance between the "soybean" illustration in the manuscript and these actual soybean roots?

I don't.

Re:It Hurts

[thisnamestoolong]

The illustrations are clearly not a literal representation of reality, but they could certainly be a figurative representation of reality used to elucidate the accompanying non-fiction text. If you looked through any modern science text book, the often bizarre figures and illustrations used to clarify the point could very easily be construed as fiction to one who was not familiar with the format.

Re:It Hurts

[operagost]

Sorry, but the Bible is not a good example of this. There is not a single disproven event in the Bible, although there are many that appear embellished (that is, we haven't found a corroborating source). Frankly, I think you're trolling but there's so much of that on Slashdot that I can't be sure.

Re:It Hurts

[AnonGCB]

How about the flood? I don't recall hearing anything about a worldwide flood in my history books, or geology class. What about the creation story? We know we evolved -- seems to me to be completely wrong.

If anything, I'd think you're the troll.

Re:It Hurts

[TinkersDamn]

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings.

While plant names do change, some have stayed consistent over the years. However plants that are heavily used for food, medicine and flavouring tend to remain the same over time.

I have studied a bit of botany and herbal medicine and while I don't have the referred to text in front of me, I do find the comparisons a bit ludicrous.

Particular bad examples : garlic, rose bush, juniper berry, bay leaf

A particular glaring one for me is "nutgall", which presumably refers to oak galls, and were used to make ink, that drawing makes no sense to me. I think this "solution" has a bit too much selective matching.

Re:It Hurts

[b4dc0d3r]

You're debunking a preliminary report from someone who admits they're not familiar with the subject matter? And clearly has not devoted enough time to completely decode it? And as evidence, pointing out that lots of people have tried and failed. And your conclusion is that this person is wasting her time?

Then let them waste it. And let the piles of like minded people follow up on it wasting their time in the process.

I've seen a number of close-minded posts on the internet, but this one takes the cake. Let's just shut down the LHC, because we're just wasting our time there, yes? All theoretical physics should stop too. We're all going to die eventually, so why not just meet downtown tonight, have a celebration that will go down in history (which will have to be pre-written of course) and then off ourselves and get it over with?

Where's your sense of adventure, or at least some curiosity?

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

and there's a teapot between earth and mars orbiting in an elliptical orbit

Re:It Hurts

[pluther]

There are parts of the bible that are based on reality?

Re:It Hurts

[Scrameustache]

I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on!

http://vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/28/rare_ripe_garlic_shoots.jpg

http://ballardfarmersmarket.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/green-garlic/

http://inpraiseofsardines.typepad.com/blogs/2006/02/spring_is_just_.html

Re:It Hurts

[Beelzebud]

Someone is about to get their ass kicked for saying that!

Re:It Hurts

[Toonol]

I call bullshit on you.

She provided a couple pages of proof, and is asking for help to get more. It's not conclusive, but it's evidence. She may be wrong; she probably is. At this point, though, she has more credibility than you.

Re:It Hurts

[John Hasler]

Sure. For example, all the people have two legs (well, all but one).

Re:It Hurts

[aix tom]

Well, the "big flood" could be based on the Black Sea Deluge in about 5600 BC.

And the whole "creation story" might just have been an attempt by the scholars of old to put the rudimentary things they have found out about the general order in which live was "created" into a form that people that could at most count to ten understand.

The Bible is not complete fiction, but not complete fantasy either. May be one could thing about it as a Roland Emmerich film loosely based on certain events, not a detailed report on exact events.

Re:It Hurts

[rhathar]

Are you kidding? The flood is the one part of the Bible I do find interesting. While surely not at the same time they list in the Bible (determined by tracing back the lineage), there are many, many corroborating sources on a flood.

Looking at various early creation myths, we see flood myths mentioned almost universally. While some are no doubt local floods that caused a minor inconvenience (but enough to write down) there are many that employ the 'and so were our people wiped out, except for a few saved'.

Off the top of my head: Babylon, Sumer, Greece, Rome, Hebrew, Assyrian, Celtic, Cherokee (Great Lakes area), Pomo (California), China (22 year flood), Inuit (Alaska)...

I'm probably forgetting a lot, but the idea is that Yes, there was probably a major world wide flood at some point in prehistory. It was probably around the end of the last glacial period (about 10,000 years ago). The time scale is skewed in myth because no one keeps track of time on the 500+ year scale. Things become 'in my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's time'.

Re:It Hurts

[tftp]

I don't recall hearing anything about a worldwide flood in my history books, or geology class

Just for completeness, here is a possible explanation. We must understand that when those religious books were written the world was very, very small. A minor flooding of a local pond, displacing a handful of families, could be easily written up as a major event. Pretty much just as media does things today :-)

Re:It Hurts

[aix tom]

Well, not so long ago *everyone* familiar with Greek history was absolutely sure that Troy was just a figment of Homers imagination, until a ridiculous (much laughed about in the archaeological circles) nut-case named Heinrich Schliemann came along.

Fresh ideas are good. I guess 99.9% of them will most likely turn out to be bullshit, but the 0.1% that make it are the things that advance science.

Re:It Hurts

[tftp]

If this manuscript is such a mystery, how come nobody tried to do this with the "herb" section before?

That was the first thing everyone tried. Unfortunately, very few plants can be recognized, the rest apparently is fictional. That feeds the hypothesis that the whole document is a hoax. Absence of another example of such a script is another hint at that - there is little reason to write a manuscript if nobody else can read it.

it should become immediately obvious if she's on the right track by just trying to decode some of the other pages.

She doesn't speak Italian, and it's awfully hard to decode anagrams of words that you never saw. Her own samples of decoded plants are all wrong.

And in any case, the anagram approach would be only useful if the manuscript is written as notes to self. It takes an unusual mind to make and decode anagrams on the fly. Most people would be struggling with each word even if they understand the script.

Re:It Hurts

[jofas]

"When corn was first cultivated, it looked like what we call "baby corn" today."

Well, that was a foolish thing to write. Why would Aztec, Maya, Inca, etc. create stone tools to grind something like baby corn?

Honestly, I wish some of you reply-artists would use the five-second "stop and think" rule before posting ridiculous garbage like this.

Re:It Hurts

[tftp]

[citation needed]

Here it is.

But wait, here is another. I was studying a foreign language in school, many years ago. The language had a pronunciation that is very different from my native language. Me and my friends sometimes used a "secret language"; it was a transliteration, when characters of words in language A are transliterated into [poorly matching] script B, with di- and trigraphs, and the result pronounced with phonems of B. It was completely unintelligible to speakers of either language who don't know the rules, but we could easily speak it. That "secret language" would have conformed to Zipf's law because it was a natural language.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The burden of proof is on TFA Author. She has provided none. That's why you can claim bullshit without bothering to explain why she's wrong. That, and the fact that it is indeed bullshit.

She makes no extraordinary claims. She makes perfectly ordinary claims and shows her work. Your objections are bullshit, regardless of her veracity.

Re:It Hurts

[MrMr]

Her story may be incorrect, but you clearly haven't seen wild garlic on your farm
http://www.caterersearch.com/blogs/rhubarb-and-mustard/Wild%20garlic.jpg

Re:It Hurts

[Seraphim_72]

Read your own link:

Between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, Native Americans living in what is now Mexico began domesticating teosinte, or the "grain of the gods," as the name has been interpreted to mean. Scientists cannot yet say how long this domestication process took, but they do know that around 4,500 years ago, a plant recognizable as today's corn was present across the Americas.

So at its shortest 1500 years, max of 5500. And that is something a layman would say is corn. I took some of my botany classes from the guy who first worked on sequencing the corn genome. If you drew me a cob with but four rows of kernels I would call it corn. You would have found that at 600 years in easy, even given the 5,500 year span. Selective breeding is a wonderful thing.

As for the garlic, the leaves look drawn well enough for some varieties of garlic And you see them come down into some nodules in the drawing and then into long over emphasized roots. Considering some garlic is grown for the leaves the important part of the drawing is emphasized: Big leaves, and long stringy roots.

Re:It Hurts

[TemporalBeing]

Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

I agree that it will take a lot more than 2 or 3 pages to declare it has been decoded.

What will be interesting though is if it was originally encrypted in numerous methods - a few pages of one method, then on to another method. It'd be like switching SSH keys in the middle of an SSH session - and very hard to decipher if you didn't know it was happening - especially if the period of switching was irregular.

Re:It Hurts

[Verdatum]

While she draws no glib conclusions, the fact that a manuscript that has been in hand for 300 years with professional linguists and cryptologists attempting to decipher it, and it turns out to just be a fairly obvious substitution cipher with word level anagrams on old-Italian...yes, that's an extraordinary claim. I'm sorry if you don't like rational skepticism, but I find it works well for me.

Re:It Hurts

[TemporalBeing]

And in any case, the anagram approach would be only useful if the manuscript is written as notes to self. It takes an unusual mind to make and decode anagrams on the fly. Most people would be struggling with each word even if they understand the script.

It's not very hard to learn to write in reverse that way - a little training, true; but nothing you can't pick up to a natural degree. For example, if I started typing words in reverse after about 1/2 hour it becomes a lot easier for most words.

BTW, I've spent a few hours in IM conversations doing just that. I do end up having to pick it up again each time I do so, but only b/c I don't do it with any frequency. The same can be said for other word arrangements.

Re:It Hurts

[branewalker]

So, just because she doesn't have credentials means that she is an idiot? If that were the case, we would have no universities, because where were the people with PhD's to teach the others? Discoveries come from smart people. Some smart people have pursued formal education in their areas of expertise. Others have simply used their brains to figure out hard problems. No PhD required. Heck, if this were a high school student, I'd be inclined to let my interest be piqued. What is so wrong with giving this woman's ideas a chance, despite her lack of specialization?

Re:It Hurts

[ianare]

Some of the historical accounts have later been found to be based on actual events, there is also mention of 'lost' cities which are now significant archaeological sites.

Re:It Hurts

[hesaigo999ca]

I don't know enough about this manuscript, but what you are saying makes a lot of sense, there should be a committee
assigned to distinguish fact from fiction on such a task. Now if we can only find an unbiased partisan group of people willing to do this for free...

Re:It Hurts

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Simple : the illustrations are clearly not representation of reality.

Did you RTFA? She is quite convinced that the manuscript was penned by DaVinci when he was 8-10 years old. In that context, the illustrations are EXACTLY the kinds that an 8-year old would draw, so no, they wouldn't be particularly realistic. Also in that context, I doubt it was intended as something like a botanical textbook, but rather just the ramblings of the mind of an 8-year old genius.

Re:It Hurts

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Well, in the 4th dimension a 3D sphere would look flat, just like a 2D sphere looks flat to us.

Re:It Hurts

[j00r0m4nc3r]

And secondly, is the same encoding used for the entire book? If so, it should become immediately obvious if she's on the right track by just trying to decode some of the other pages.

Who says the exact same encoding needs to be used for the entire book. If DaVinci did write it, he is genius enough to use a completely different coding scheme on every single page.

Re:It Hurts

[Haeleth]

Even better is the way she has Leonardo da Vinci (died 1519) drawing pictures of soybeans (introduced to Europe circa 1700).

I suppose that just proves his genius ...

Re:It Hurts

[Nefarious Wheel]

...She is quite convinced that the manuscript was penned by DaVinci when he was 8-10 years old. In that context, the illustrations are EXACTLY the kinds that an 8-year old would draw, so no, they wouldn't be particularly realistic. Also in that context, I doubt it was intended as something like a botanical textbook, but rather just the ramblings of the mind of an 8-year old genius.

And coming to terms with left-handedness in a Catholic culture, where being left-handed would be considered "sinister" and thus evil? It would have been a while before he started writing Italian in his customary mirror-script. The church at the time was always quick to beat the devil out of you.

Re:It Hurts

[clone53421]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration... you’re welcome.

Re:It Hurts

[flameproof]

Dyslexia seems more likely.

Re:It Hurts

[pluther]

Some of the historical accounts have later been found to be based on actual events, there is also mention of 'lost' cities which are now significant archaeological sites.

Really?

Like what?

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously: an error-free exotic MS with bizarre and suggestive (in the broadest sense) drawings that we are pretty sure passed through the hands of known "magicians" at least some of whom almost certainly accepted in their own minds that much of what they sold was fraudulent (many probably at least half-believed in what they were doing, but still...)

Never assume intelligence when venality will do, or something like that.

Seriously, you anti-Microsoft folks disappoint me. I'm positive there's a joke just staring you in the face ("error-free exotic MS...").

Step it up kids!

Re:It Hurts

[Fluffeh]

From the link that you posted:

“For the Noah's Ark Hypothesis to be correct, one has to speculate that there was no flowing of water between the Black Sea and the Marmara Sea before the speculated great deluge. We have found this to be incorrect.”[9]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2002-09-01). "Noah’s Flood Hypothesis May Not Hold Water". Press release. http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=245.

The proposed deluge has been connected with various Great Flood myths, notably Noah's Flood. Based on their interpretation of the Bible, the Christian apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis have stated that "Noah's Flood was not a local flood in the Black Sea area, but a world-wide flood that has left its mark on every continent on this planet"; the proposed date of the Black Sea deluge does not match what they believe to be the date of the biblical flood.[16]
"Proof of Noah’s Flood at the Black Sea?". Answers in Genesis. http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4168.asp. Retrieved 2006-03-08.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

do you know italian? in an italian website there's all the recent History. it's algebra and a secret code
http://www.gialli.it/decrittato-e-tradotto-il-manoscritto-di-voynich

Re:It Hurts

[HBoar]

Or, applying Occam's razor would suggest that there were probably just a large number of major, but localised floods during the ~4000 year margin you speak of.... as one would expect.

Re:It Hurts

[adiposity]

When it comes to the Voynich Manuscript, you get to call "bullshit" without anyone questioning you. Because, you are always right. The decoding always fails. All you need is a knowledge of the history of this manuscript to know that this amateur is extremely unlikely to have decoded it.

-Dan

Re:It Hurts

[rhathar]

Sorry, 'world wide flood' was a very bad choice of words. I didn't mean to suggest there actually was some armageddon type flood, but rather a very specific rise in the world's water levels caused disproportionately large floods at a relatively specific time in history.

Re:It Hurts

[AHuxley]

Frogs?

Re:It Hurts

[Whiteox]

"If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work."

You raise good points, however something can be gleaned from the text in a cursory fashion, is that it uses roman lettering and secondly, that there is a preponderance of 'o' leading to the obvious conclusion that if the script could be vocalized, it is based on Italian.
Vocalisation is important here, as it could be a written phonetic record of an aural translation from language X to Italian.
The other aspect I noticed in a very short time by looking at the foldout (p68 Wikipedia) is that the diagrams are based on 8.
Now as a self-proclaimed expert on gnostic texts, 8 is a very significant number. Unfortunately, the diagrams and its use of 8 is plainly wrong. It does not follow any theory of cosmology and it is too simplistic, basing the first diagram on 2, then 4 then 8 and the last on its multiple 16. Even in octive (octavian progression), it makes no sense.
So my conclusion is that it was authored by someone with limited grasp of basic concepts of nature and Kircher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher (who wrote something similar) wouldn't make too much sense out of it.
So a young DaVinci is possible (even though the script is by a mature hand?) or a form of autism by an unknown.

Re:It Hurts

[easyTree]

There is not a single disproven event in the Bible

There is not a single disproven event in Toy Story

It seems to me that it makes more sense to seek proof not disproof.

Re:It Hurts

[A nonymous Coward]

Not to try to prove that pile of pretend, but the Black Sea Flood comes to mind ...

Re:It Hurts

[ianare]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=cities+mentioned+in+the+bible&l=1

Re:It Hurts

[fletch44]

It seems apparent to me that the colours were added to the illustrations at a later date, probably by someone's child using the manuscript like a colouring book. A dead giveaway is the way alternating segments have been coloured in flowers to present a pretty pattern rather than realism.

Re:It Hurts

[emjay88]

The Exodus of Moses and the Jews from Egypt?

We know that the Egyptians were really good at keepin records. Like "small family of farmers came in to Egypt to get some grain" kind of good records. And yet, there is no mention of 1000's of Hebrew slaves existing in Egypt, let along escaping, let alone the plagues that were supposedly brought upon the pharaoh, let alone the parting of the sea and murder of 100's (or maybe 1000's) of soldiers when the sea collapsed.

And then there's the lack of archaeological evidence of a large group of people "wandering" the deserts for 40 years.

Re:It Hurts

[techno-vampire]

What about the creation story?

Mainstream Jewish though is that the first chapters of Genesis aren't intended to be taken literally. Their importance is that they remind us of who is responsible for Creation, not how it happened.

Re:It Hurts

[techno-vampire]

And then there's the lack of archaeological evidence of a large group of people "wandering" the deserts for 40 years

Just a minor nitpick here: the Hebrews didn't wander in the desert, they wandered in the wilderness, that area between the settled lands and the desert.

Re:It Hurts

[ushering05401]

Simple : the illustrations are clearly not representation of reality.

Though I suppose it could be the same kind of fiction found in the bible or other religious works - in some cases based on reality, but clearly distorted.

Not representations of reality? Not representations of the visual appearance aspect of reality perhaps. Your second point about intentional distortion seems more likely. I just looked at the book for the first time, the whole thing wreaks not of straight cryptography, but mnemonic devices. If this is the case, then the words and images may not be arranged 'in sequence,' but should contain a sequence map, possibly derived from the distorted images (counting features and number of meaningful items between various feature occurrences, etc).

Fraudulent wizards who bestow 'mystical' knowledge to paying patrons via occult text, and prodigious savants could both be assumed to produce works like this during the normal course of their lives. I don't see this book being much different from any number of 'codex' style manuscripts that are floating around out there.

Anyhow, I would have started by analyzing the features of the drawings on each page, counting tips/shapes/groupings... Matching that to numbers of letters and words when grouped in different ways. It is possible that not simple re-arrangement, but actual expansion needs to be performed. It has always amazed me that we don't have more complex and prestigious examples of early semantic compression... just mystical shapes many of which are of dubious lineage. Maybe that is what this is.

Re:It Hurts

[ajlisows]

Look, I'm not into the entire Christianity thing and I don't have any real source to back my stuff up right now...but I do recall reading somewhere that I felt was reasonably reliable that there is evidence of mass extinction during some time periods that could very well be attributed to floods.

If anything, I think the flood story could be very believable in a localized manner. Some area of the world floods. A bunch of shit dies, some dude survives because he has a fucking boat. He jams some small animals on the boat not to save them of course, but to eat them. He survives, writes it down. To him, it was the world...because it was water as far as he could imagine. The story gets some major embellishment over time until the boat is the titanic and dude wanted to save two of every type of animnal because he's just nice like that. Noah's arc is quite possibly one of the more realistic stories in the Bible.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

She wasn't offering proof. She was offering a heuristic. It wasn't a law, it was a possibility.

Re:It Hurts

[sjwt]

In nature your 600 vs 6000 year stament would be close to correct, but we have mankinds helping hand hear, and natural selction and natural mutation go out the window. Take any bred of show dog or cat, in the last 100 most have undgone massive changes, the English bulldog used to look a hell of a lot more like an American one. now they are so grossly inbreed they cant even mate on their own. But back to friut and vegitbles. What you see in a supermarket these days where allmost unabtanible in colour, shape and size 100 years ago. You should look up Hairloom fruit and vegitables, most ahve alterd in shape, colour and size. But back to teh garlic in the piture, It looks like a singel clove that has been planted and shoot roots out to me.

Re:It Hurts

[Ploum]

Harry Potter is not complete fiction : this is the story of a teenager who loose his parents and has a bad time. It happens. It's true.

Statistically, the probability of having a book that is 100% false, 100% pure non-sense is really low. Maybe the Voynich manuscript try to address this, just like David Lynch did for movies. So, of course, some parts of the Bible are not complete fiction.

And then? What is the conclusion?

Re:It Hurts

[reg106]

Yes, that's the image I'm talking about. I never suggested that it was unreasonable for an amateur to make a hypothesis. Certainly Leonardo had many insights that proved right over time.

But the history of reproduction is well studied and is written up nicely in popular style in this book. (You can even browse the book. The first few pages show and discuss a relevant Leonardo sketch.) Leonardo is credited with recognizing (as an adult) the connection between sex and reproduction and noting that the features of the child derive from both parents. That in itself was a significant leap for science at the time. Identifying the sperm and egg as carriers of sexual reproduction would have been groundbreaking. Interestingly, Leonardo sketch of copulation (found in the book above) shows no indication of sperm or egg.

I don't believe the specifics of plant reproduction were known in the mid-15th century either. Nehemiah Grew is generally recognized with identifying plant sexual organs Before that, horticulture proceeded through the selection of seed from plants with desired properties rather than through selective crossbreeding. So plant reproduction seems like an unlikely place for extrapolating the sexual carriers.

Examining the VM drawing, I'm guessing the "united sperm and ova" is the circle near the middle of the image with four spikes coming out of it and four smaller circles adjoining it. The circle to the left does indeed have a very sperm-like tail. But why would the artist hypothesize this specific shape for the sexual carrier? A flagellum isn't even a particularly useful means of propulsion at length scales that can be seen with the naked eye (which have higher Reynolds number, making fins a better choice).

More reasonably, I suspect that modern knowledge of the appearance of sperm was combined with Leonardo's acknowledged insight into reproduction, resulting in a misinterpreted geometric doodle.

Re:It Hurts

[aix tom]

Just the basic conclusion that there is no black or white, only greys.

The Bible is definitely not any "Word of God", it was written by people. As such it is an historical text, and like all historical texts there is a lot of context that is missing by now.

We have to remember, it was written down before people could check urban legends on snopes.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

You should probably use the same rule, since a moments thought will tell you that the stone tools for grinding corn may have come much later and also, that, even if the corn was much smaller, it still could have been hard when it ripened and required grinding.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll go to starbucks and order up a venti latte and write about it in my encrypted diary along with a picture. Then, if the world gets blown up, and future armchair pedants are discussing my decrypted diary, they can argue over how the translation: "twenty milk" is obviously wrong because milk is white and the fluid depicted is brown and what sense does it make to call it twenty. I'm going to have to assume that, for a start, you're monolingual or are at least hopelessly clueless about language. For one thing, meanings of words change over time, or, at least, they accrue meanings. For example, you're complaining about the possible translation of a plants name being "forget" as if it's some ridiculous concept for a plant (or maybe a fungus) to be named that, when we have a plant named a forget-me-not. Plants that are just starting to grow from a seed are called shoots. That means to fire a gun! How ridiculous!! Mushrooms tend to form ring colonies that we call fairy rings. If I drew one and labeled it as such, would you scoff because I hadn't drawn a picture of dancing fairies? How about if I drew a picture of a locust, and labeled it as such? I don't mean the insect, I mean the tree that is also called the locust, would the label be wrong? How about the columbine flower, hares-ear, mouse-tail, buttercup, etc. Do I need to get into what the heck is gopher wood?
Anyway, in the end, this theory about translation of the document obviously has a lot of obstacles to clear before it can be accepted as any sort of proof. A meaningful translation of some of the block text, for example. A theory has been posited, but the person with the theory doesn't have the expertise required to prove or disprove it, the best they could do was go after some labels on some illustrations. Nevertheless, it's a starting point, and maybe someone with the right expertise can now, at the very least, attempt to disprove it. You clearly don't have the necessary expertise, and your attacks on the translations are weak to the point of naiveté.

Re:It Hurts

[vgerdj]

If my weekends last 4 days, I'd never have a case of the Mondays.

Re:It Hurts

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of rubbish.

Life and autism isn’t a movie like Rain Man, the plausibility of an autistic person doing it is ridiculous and for it to then be kept this long, seriously.

Why do simple minded people think they are the only culture that has humour and pranks?

It‘s obviously a joke or at best fictitious artwork.

But to have written fluently there needs to be a language and structure behind it. People can’t just make random stuff like that up and write fluently for 200 pages.

I’d guess it’s phonetically written from a real language or perhaps a slang dialect. Perhaps also in Pig Latin as this post suggests. But it has to be something that would flow for the author.

Re:It Hurts

[JasterBobaMereel]

Einstein a scientific outsider? He was a full trained physicist working in the Swiss Patent office when he came up with his early work, and had no problem getting published in well known peer reviewed journals, not exactly working out of his field?

Re:It Hurts

[VeNoM0619]

except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

Depends on how meaningful the message was... Me trying to communicate to someone else, how my day was today in encryption. Then having you pick it up trying to decipher it wouldn't mean I'm laughing about it, it means it wasn't intended for you.

Re:It Hurts

[pluther]

Oh, OK.
Thanks. I misunderstood. When you mentioned "lost" cities, I thought you were talking about cities that were actually lost. As in, they weren't still around, or that we didn't know where they were, but then archaeologists later discovered them.

Now I see why you put the word in quotes.

And, of course, when you mention "historical accounts [that] have later been found to be based on actual events", you meant... um... not sure how you spin that one. Doesn't matter, though. I was really mostly joking when I suggested that *no* parts of the Bible were based on reality.

I know that there really was a Roman Empire, and that it really occupied Jerusalem, and that there really were several Caesars, and that there really is a country called Egypt, which has been there for a very long time.

So, I apologize to anyone I upset by suggesting otherwise.

Re:It Hurts

[JasterBobaMereel]

It's not a lack of specialisation but a lack of any knowledge of the subject in hand?

An amateur working knowledge of botany, a basic knowledge medieval herbals, and at least basic working knowledge of medieval italian (or whatever she thinks it's written in) would at least make it possible to decipher

Even if it is a basic code then to check she is not just getting nonsense she needs to be able to recognise that it at least makes sense ..so if it shows a typical representation of a plant as shown in medieval herbals and then mentions that plant in the right language and with the right context and grammar nearby she might be on to something .... but she does not know enough to even check her own work

People who have broken code without knowing the language have been able to check it because what they get looks like a language... the method she uses (anagrams) is impossible to check unless she knows the language ?

I just cracked it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Using my botnet, I finally cracked the message! It's just the same phrase over and over again...

Drink More Ovaltine

Anyone have a clue what it means?

Re:I just cracked it!

[snspdaarf]

It means the Visitors are trying to poison us all.

Re:I just cracked it!

[PirateBlis]

Hahaha you sir are a genius. With that said, I'm going downstairs to make a glass and obey our new cryptic overlord

Re:I just cracked it!

[CecilPL]

Jeez, why didn't they just call it roundtine? I mean the jar is round, the mug is round...

Re:I just cracked it!

[Randle_Revar]

Drink More Ovaltine

I'm doing my part!

Re:I just cracked it!

[operagost]

That's not what I got. My translation says:

You've got a text

You can't translate

Take it to Slashdot

And wildly speculate

BURMA SHAVE

This would explain a lot about Ohio politics.

[John Guilt]

Oh, that was Voynich Manuscript...that's different. Never mind.

Re:This would explain a lot about Ohio politics.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that was Voynich Manuscript...that's different. Never mind.

At least I'm not the only one to have that cross my mind.

obMST3K

[Megaweapon]

The link is at least more likely than to Leonardo da Gary Indiana.

Re:obMST3K

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Leoardo da Oxnard

Re:obMST3K

[Culture20]

The link is at least more likely than to Leonardo da Gary Indiana.

or Leonardo da Ninja Turtle

Important texts are ultimately communicated

[BadAnalogyGuy]

A message is encoded with the ultimate goal of its being decoded and transmitted. A message that is not decoded is a failed message. This means that someone has the key, if one exists.

A code that has no key is a joke or a puzzle. It has no important information to convey.

Fermat once wrote "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain." If he did indeed discover such a proof, he would have written it down somewhere else. This was a joke.

So too is a whole book written in an undecipherable code. Whatever the roots of this manuscript are, there is no doubt that it was the work of a prankster (or team of pranksters) playing a trick on posterity.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[CastrTroy]

But they did go on to prove Fermat's theorem. So maybe he did write down the proof somewhere else. Maybe it was just lost. I'm sure paper's have been lost before, it wouldn't be the first time. The proof took a long time to be proved, and was quite a long one, but that's not to say that it's impossible that Fermat actually had a proof. For sure it wouldn't have fit inside the margin of that text. Maybe the person who the Voynich manuscript was meant for did decode it, and it completed it's point. Maybe it wasn't meant for the entire world to get the message, but just a small group of people who have since passed away.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Many medieval works on alchemy, necromancy, and other forbidden or secretive topics were written in obscure codes, such that we're not sure if some texts on alchemy are works of philosophy or coded recipes.

Something encrypted with a one-time pad is also "undecipherable". That doesn't mean it's a hoax.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[Nazlfrag]

Neither was a joke, firstly theorems often take pages to prove even though they glisten lke a perfect jewel in the mind and you can't squeeze that into a margin. Secondly it seems to be a code that still puzzles cryptographers because they are far too constrained. We might need a clueless blogger to figure it out after all.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[dkleinsc]

Regarding Fermat's last theorem, the usual story on that is that Fermat had what he thought was an extremely elegant proof in mind. The trouble was that his proof was wrong.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[corbettw]

Fermat's theorem was that, given a tantalizing-enough hint, mathematicians will spend centuries trying to discover a proof that does not exist. I'd say he was right.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[boristhespider]

What actually helps persuade me about that version of events is that he evidently *did* write it down somewhere -- and realised his mistake and burned it in the fire.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[epine]

Fermat's theorem was that, given a tantalizing-enough hint, mathematicians will spend centuries trying to discover a proof that does not exist. I'd say he was right.

That always strikes me as projection. I mean, if you haven't got slashdot to post the most dumb-ass thing you can think of, what *would* a man do to keep his sanity? Invent riddles for future civilizations, with a model of the future based on your historical knowledge of Rome?

It some ways it would have been more intriguing if Fermat had written this in the margin beside the four colour theorem, having realized it could be decomposed into several thousand cases and only a large amount of scribbling stood in his path, with some heavy irony on "elegant", since he could not have justified purchasing enough paper to finish the project.

Perhaps it was a flash of insight that what a man can prove in mathematics is partially dictated by the market rate for ink and paper, a realization which can come as a bit of a blow to an objectivist psyche.

Non-standard analysis

On the other hand, much can be proven by an industrious person once you relax the requirement that proofs are finite in length.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

yes, so by your reasoning, the egyptian hieroglyphs were just an elabore prank on future generations right ? and it remained like that untill the roseta stone was found.

there was a single bi-lingual stone tablet left in the world with the key to understand those symbols, and it remained lost for centuries.

unfortunately, a "rosetta" document for the voynich manuscript, if it was ever written, may never be found.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[vegiVamp]

> Fermat once wrote "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain." If he did indeed discover such a proof, he would have written it down somewhere else. This was a joke.

He might also have had ADD and seen a shiny thing soon after; or he may have lost the moment of brilliant insight before he got his hands on more paper. He may even have started to write it down, only to discover a flaw.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[Anonymous Coward]

fermat couldn't have known how to prove his theorem. back then they had no concept of a non-commutative ring.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no reason that every mathematical proof has to follow the same lines. All we know is that *Fermat didn't use the proof we know*. That doesn't say that he didn't have a proof.

It's extremely unlikely that he had a viable proof, given the advances in maths that were needed since he died, but it doesn't say that there wasn't some extraordinary, subtle proof that he happened across.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[Anonymous Coward]

What utter crap and bullshit!

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[MozeeToby]

They did prove his thoerem but it took decades of work by some of the brightest mathematical minds using tools and techniques that hadn't been invented in Fermats time. In short, if Fermat really had a simple proof for his theorem, he was the best mathematician in history by orders of magnitude. It's more likely that either A) He realized what a hard problem it was and was making a joke (but the hardness of the problem isn't obvious to most people so they took it seriously. Or B) He thought he had discovered a simple proof but was incorrect and therefore never bothered to publish it (or go back and remove the note from his jounal).

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[MozeeToby]

You're comparing a single document written basically ink on paper to thousands of square feet of glyphs carved into stone over a centuries long time span. It isn't really a fair comparison at all. One guy as a prank or as the result of a mental imbalance could easily have produced the manuscript, not true for hieroglyphs.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[tibman]

Yeah, that's a good point. I was just thinking if you wanted to have something encrypted and still be able to read it.. but you couldn't write down the decryption steps as you went (to hide the process).. you could have something mechanical. Just off the top of my head you could have ten wheels with 26+10+1 symbols (for english). This would let you decrypt small blocks of text without leaving any evidence of the decryption process. For example the anagrams are easy and could be done in your head.. the first x letters of the corrected anagram could be the key added to the block to spin the wheels for the correct answer. The pictures could be a part of the mental process as well.. some simple modification of the wheels? If the answers were cumulative it could get complicated very quickly and a mechanical process would be very helpful. It could even be symbols added to the inside of a clock that can be manipulated.. who knows?

The mental process of decoding and the design of the machine could be small and simple to pass from person to person.. but a books worth of knowledge would be difficult to keep secret if you wrote it down in pt and difficult to memorize.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[masterzora]

Actually, we're pretty sure we know the (wrong) proof Fermat thought he had. It's highly possible that he just realized the flaw in the proof after writing that but before writing up the proof.

Really now

[Bluesman]

I know nothing about this manuscript except what is written in this article, but if it's anagrams, a simple analysis of the letter frequency would have revealed that.

Re:Really now

[FlyingBishop]

I wouldn't say that necessarily. It's a very old manuscript, and modern Italian letter frequencies won't necessarily hold. It also appears that many people were laboring to decipher it under the assumption that it is encoded English.

But someone a little more thoughtful is obviously going to need to take a crack at it.

Re:Really now

[stupid_is]

Given that NSA cryptographers have had a bash at it in the 50s (as have many other experienced linguists/cryptographers/... in the last 400 years or so), I suspect they may have considered that the decrypt wasn't in english and that they would have looked at letter frequencies of languages at the time of the authorship of the work. The wiki (font of all true facts, I know) mentions that the best fit of the language structure is something from the orient, even.

Re:Really now

[Trepidity]

The article itself doesn't seem to claim it's anagrams. In fact, it's not clear it claims anything at all, besides "cc" standing for "on" wherever it appears (or maybe only some of where it appears). The main thesis seems to be that if you squint at it, read it as sloppy handwriting, replace a few letter-pairs with something else they cipher for, and ignore words that don't fit this scheme (assuming they were thrown in to confuse), it might make sense. But that's a pretty ad-hoc hypothesis, and not much is shown to explain how well it works.

Re:Really now

[Trepidity]

Oh, oops, I was reading the wrong one of her articles (the 2nd one linked). The first one does indeed claim it's anagrams. Which, indeed, don't explain the strange letter-frequency and word-length-frequency distributions (or at least don't by themselves explain it).

Re:Really now

[Verdatum]

Philologists know the progression of Italian going all the way back to latin pretty darn well (which is all really quite interesting). letter distribution is either known, or can be very reliably extrapolated for just about any year you want.

Re:Really now

[Skreems]

From glancing through the article, it appears they're contending that DaVinci had some peculiar letter substitution habits of his own (substituting 'on' with 'cc', 'ove' with 'x', etc). I don't know the source of this claim, but if it's true, it seems reasonable that medieval Italian plus a single individual's personal shorthand might be enough to throw broad language-based frequency analysis off track.

Re:Really now

[icebrain]

I don't know how well this would apply to other languages, but imagine if someone took English and wrote it purely phonetically.

Yu myt wynd up with sumthing riten lik this, wich cud ezily thro of a leter frekwense analisis, uspeshule if yu hav vareashinz in pronunseashin for diferent reginz.

Re:Really now

[NeutronCowboy]

I think letter frequency actually supports the theory of anagrams. If my recollection is correct, the manuscript's frequency of letters and the frequency of the length of words strongly mimics that of a natural language. This is why many people think that it is neither a random hoax, nor something completely made up. Instead, the suspicion is that there is something real going on - the question is though, whether the language is merely transformed, a secret real language, or whether it's just a regular language applied to a made up world.

Re:Really now

[dintlu]

All of the author's cited works were written after the cryptographers had their go, presumably she has access to better information than the 1950s sleuths.

For a little bit of alphabetical shuffling and simple puzzle solving to provide a solution to a 400 year old mystery does seem outrageous though, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Hopefully an actual linguist will take a few minutes to look at the manuscript and see if there's any truth to this claim.

Re:Really now

[Dynedain]

If my recollection is correct, the manuscript's frequency of letters and the frequency of the length of words strongly mimics that of a natural language.

Except for one small problem... it doesn't match any known language.

Re:Really now

[Anonymous Coward]

They did do lots of analysis on it years ago and did say it was not a fake and some sort of language because of the letter frequency.
I'm too lazy to google for a reference and it's late at the moment (my bed is calling me).
But, if you goggle I'm sure you will find the reference. (Actually, follow the slashdot links backwards to the last time they discussed this, because I'm sure it was one of those links that I read about it last time that referred to the letter frequency analysis).

Rather poor.

[Walterk]

According to the linked(!) wikipedia article, they've been trying to decode it since 1629, which is nearly 400 years, not just 100. One of the big mysteries seems to be how old it exactly it. Why has no one tried carbon dating this book yet?

Re:Rather poor.

[clone53421]

Why has no one tried carbon dating this book yet?

Well gee, let me Google that for you.

First result:

* Radiocarbon dating has not been carried out because it would be necessary to destroy a small portion of the vellum; even then it could only give the date of death of the animal from which the vellum was made, not the date of the application of the ink, which could have been any time after; and also because radiocarbon dating isn't sufficiently exact – it could say whether the animal died in the thirteenth century, or between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, but could not be any more specific than that (ie, it couldn't distinguish between vellum from 1912 or vellum from 1600).

Re:Rather poor.

[careysub]

Why has no one tried carbon dating this book yet?

Well gee, let me Google that for you.

First result:

* Radiocarbon dating has not been carried out because it would be necessary to destroy a small portion of the vellum; even then it could only give the date of death of the animal from which the vellum was made, not the date of the application of the ink, which could have been any time after; and also because radiocarbon dating isn't sufficiently exact – it could say whether the animal died in the thirteenth century, or between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries, but could not be any more specific than that (ie, it couldn't distinguish between vellum from 1912 or vellum from 1600).

Dare I question the first result in a Google search? Yes, I dare. This assertion does not match the capabilities of accelerator mass spectrometer carbon dating.

A good proxy for the Voynich Manuscript is the equally mysterious Vinland Map, which has been dated to within +/-27 years using only 28.8 milligrams of parchment. It is true that once having dated the parchment you only have a maximum age for the document since old parchment was commonly reused back in the day due to its cost, and is commonly reused today to make forgeries. Still, it is an important and essential staring point for a serious investigation.

Apparently the ink has also never been subjected to chemical analysis to see if markers are available for dating (but the inconclusive results of this with the Vinland Map suggests that this is no panacea).

Anagrams and ciphers

[John Guilt]

If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....

Re:Anagrams and ciphers

[dachshund]

If it were just anagrams, that shouldn't have stymied people trying to crack it as a cipher---symbol-frequencies aren't screwed-up by changing the ordering....

My understanding is that the letter frequencies are correct, as if it is a cipher, but nobody's been able to make much sense of any candidate decodings --- which all seem like gibberish. This is what makes it so interesting. Letter scrambling might explain that, but who knows.

Hmm...

[denzacar]

Wasn't Voynich Manuscript already solved by Randall Munroe?

Re:Hmm...

[Neutral_Observer]

Makes me think of people speaking Klingon...

I have a theory too.

[L4t3r4lu5]

The key to discovering the secrets of this manuscript are to be found by first finding Wilfrid Voynich's Bacon Factor.

Re:I have a theory too.

[locallyunscene]

Clever, but you have to RTFA so no one will get it.

I cracked the code years ago.

[Cornwallis]

It says:

Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma."

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Megaweapon]

It also says:

Form eyeball-size pieces from the dough
Roll in the powdered sugar
And say the Magic Words:
"Sim sala bim bamba sala do saladim"

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[bmo]

Mod parent up for best literary reference.

--
BMO

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[donaggie03]

It says:

Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma."

NO NO NO! Whoever heard of "A Canticle for Voynich" ?? It just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Jaysyn]

Presto, Eggs of Satan!

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[MadKeithV]

And NO EGGS!

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's saying that because the line "Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma" is from a book called A Canticle for Leibowitz which is a science fiction novel about a post-apocolyptic era where a monk discovers a scrap of paper that is considered a sacred relic because it says Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma and nobody can figure out what it meant. So the OP is making a joke. Just letting you know.

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

The title is "To Serve Man"

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[sfsp]

"A Canticle for Liebowitz"! Great book!

Emily had a gold tooth.

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Anonymous Coward]

It also says:

Form eyeball-size pieces from the dough
Roll in the powdered sugar
And say the Magic Words:
"Sim sala bim bamba sala do saladim"

it certainly seems like a hashish-induced document. I wonder what theory the guys from Tool believe...

Hypothesis testing

[PopeOptimusPrime]

Hypothesis: The manuscript is anagrammatic Italian.
Corollary 1: The manuscript should contain appropriate letter frequencies for said language.
Corollary 2: The manuscript should contain all relevant letters.
Conclusion: Neither Corollary 1 nor 2 are true, thus hypothesis is rejected.
...
???
...
Add to the annals of the internet.

Re:Hypothesis testing

[bytesex]

Only if the amount of words is large enough to have said letter frequencies and said relevant letters. I find the examples given very, very convincing. That doesn't mean that other examples are unconvincing, nor that most examples simply aren't given. But there may just be an explanation for that. As in: written in another language, or using another method of obfuscation.

Re:Hypothesis testing

[boristhespider]

So...

Tactic to decoding any encrypted or otherwise obfuscated work:

1) Pick an arbitrary set of words
2) Perform an arbitrary map from those words to the Latin alphabet
3) Play a quick game of anagrams
4) Declare those words deciphered

5) Pick another arbitrary set of words
6) Declare these words encrypted with a simple shift algorithm
7) Declare the results anagrammatic and play games
8) Declare those words deciphered

9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until the entire work says what you want it to say
or
9) Rinse and repeat for any arbitrary sets of words and arbitrary encryption mechanism you like until you get bored and decide that leaving illustrations labelled "illustration" is good enough for government work and go home for a happy wank

Re:Hypothesis testing

[bytesex]

If the text is sufficiently integral, and the captions match the illustrations, and the amount of languages as limited and relevant, then: yes.

Re:Hypothesis testing

[boristhespider]

Point taken, but my point (badly and sarcastically phrased because it's been a rubbish day -- sorry) was that if you feel free to do as you wish to each section then you *can* cook it to say what you like. It's if the rationale behind the sectioning makes sense that this would begin to persuade me more.

Re:Hypothesis testing

[Neutral_Observer]

Books today will say "see figure 23" and that could be three pages away from the text. So the text on the page may not necessarily match the illustration on that page.

Re:Hypothesis testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from h it contains all of the letters of the italian alphabet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_alphabet

Oh Crap!

[AnotherBrian]

Like we need another lame Dan Brown book+movie.

Also, http://xkcd.com/593/

Debunked almost a year ago

[Weedhopper]

http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-cipher

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Verdatum]

I said the same thing when this was still in "recent". If there's been genuine cryptanalysis on it, and there has, an anagram cipher would show up immediately. I can't find any information on who this edith sherwood (Ph.D!) is, but a simple google search on her name popped up with that informative link.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[gad_zuki!]

I dont know why people cant accept that this thing is just a fun little hoax from 500 years ago. 16th century people had senses of humor and mystery too. Someone concocted it for shits and giggles or perhaps from a serious mental illness. Its a shame this person isnt around today to hear these tales of connections with da vinci, aliens, etc. Shame, for now it just brings out the "Dan Brown is the realz" crowd and other conspiracy nutters.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Weedhopper]

Hey, quit projecting your pompassitude.

How do you know who does and who doesn't think the Voynich manuscript was a hoax? You haven't heard what I think about it.

And I call your Dan Brown and raise you an Umberto Eco.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[yerktoader]

One of the posters above read the article rather than Slashdot's headline. She is apparently postulating medieval Italian. Would cryptanalysis reveal that? Because I am otherwise inclined to agree and write her off as another Zecharia Sitchin.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Culture20]

now it just brings out the "Dan Brown is the realz" crowd and other conspiracy nutters.

Dan Brown IS real. You Dan Brown deniers are the real conspiracy nuts. "It's a ghost-writer" "It's plagiarized from aliens" "My dog is Dan Brown" Nutters all.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between them?

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Kadagan AU]

It does seem to be kind of old "news" if you can call it news.. The bottom of the page in TFA says Copyright 2002...

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Verdatum]

Yes. Yes it would. If the claim is that it's just a substitution + anagram cipher, then the character frequencies would stay the same as the plaintext of this language. And even for ancient languages, these frequencies are known. Even despite the fact that ancient writing tended to be phonetic, and thus varied greatly on dialect; philologists take all this into account. The conclusion is that the frequencies don't match any of them. And no cryptographer is going to analyze an ancient document and presume it will translate to modern Italian. That'd be about as stupid as postulating that it was penned by an 8 year old Leonardo Da Vinci...oh wait.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

" [...] both of which are key first steps without which you’ll very probably get nowhere."

It's a good thing he doesn't write books.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[H0p313ss]

now it just brings out the "Dan Brown is the realz" crowd and other conspiracy nutters.

Dan Brown IS real. You Dan Brown deniers are the real conspiracy nuts. "It's a ghost-writer" "It's plagiarized from aliens" "My dog is Dan Brown" Nutters all.

Come now sir, it's been pretty well established that the real Dan Brown died in 1977 and his identity was stolen by Elvis.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Well, 272 pages? With pictures? That seems like a lot of work for a "fun little hoax", although with a profit motive I suppose there's a lot of people that will spend a lot of time creating something that they can foist on the gullible. With one rich patron who is known to be interested in curiosities, and to pay well for them, I suppose someone might spend the time and energy to create this lengthy of a hoax. Even to construct an artificial language behind it.

I personally have done a lot of glossolalia, especially when I was younger, and that seems the most probable to me. I even used "invented script" which the wikipedia article claims to be rare. I have no idea what an analysis of it would show in terms of patterns and grammar, but frankly it probably would be seen to follow the patterns of English, by-and-large. Still 250+ pages of that including pictures would take a lot of dedication. Perhaps if I made a point of it, including subjecting myself to some kind of period-appropriate hallucinogenic, either accidental exposure or on purpose "to channel the energies".

The use of repeated words--sometimes three in a row!--would seem to exclude any European author that was either speaking in their native language or an invented one. I can't imagine that grammar pattern to seem natural, even if generating an invented language attempting at naturalness, to a European language speaker. I can't think of a single instance where I have used triple words, and only very rarely use doubles (eg "that that" or "had had"). I don't think I did when I was performing glossolalia even, I was following my, and my instinct for the language conformed to what I found natural patterns, which is English natch. Perhaps if writing trailing sentences, like verbal ellipses? "I wanted to slay the dragon, if if if only I could find the sword." It's interesting that that (!) construction is more common in Asiatic languages, which leads me to think that it was perhaps a European taking dictation from an Asian language speaker. A European author would explain the lack of Asian symbolism in the drawings, but might still account for their unusualness if they were drawing by description. One would think, though, that they would have more errors then too; the text as well. Perhaps the rough draft had the corrections and errors, and this is a copy from that.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[nickpelling2]

That's my blog: I've been documenting Edith Sherwood's amazing (but wobbly) Voynich claims for the last few years, such as:-
(1) That a very young Leonardo da Vinci wrote it
Problem: LdV was left-handed, while the Voynich Ms was written by a right-hander. D'oh!
http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2008/01/25/mona-lisa-overkill

(2) That she has managed to decode the Voynich plants
Problem: her botany and history both seem thin (if not actually transparent). Duh!
http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2008/09/13/edith-sherwoods-voynich-plants

(3) That the VMs is anagrammed, as evidenced by the unreadable marginalia on the back page
Problem: this is just optimistic rubbish, based on her reading of the third letter. Drat! See the above link as well as:-
http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/04/11/a-guide-to-leonardo-da-vincis-handwriting

Honestly, why does she keep posting up this stuff? And (perhaps more interestingly) why does she keep promoting it via Google Adwords? Given that she must have spent thousands of dollars by now, perhaps she's planning to write an amazing "The-Voynich-was-by-Leonardo" book? All nonsensical grist for the long-suffering Voynich mill, I'm afraid. :-(

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[gad_zuki!]

>That seems like a lot of work for a "fun little hoax", although with a profit motive I suppose there's a lot of people that will spend a lot of time creating something that they can foist on the gullible.

Case in point: Shroud of Turin.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[JoshuaZ]

Umberto Eco has a brain, can write well, researches well. Dan Brown is an idiot who writes his books from what seems to be the first page of google hits.For example, Dan Brown doesn't even get correct what century the Illuminati were founded in. (Also, after his newest book, Newton was apparently deeply involved in two separate conspiracies. So Brown apparently has zero originality also). Oh, and a large segment of his most recent book was devoted to what could most charitably be called urban legends. When you run through pages where every paragraph is a claim by a "scientist" that is listed as false on Snopes... yeah.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Dan Brown & so's my wife.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Your dog is a better writer than Dan Brown though.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, if my dog had written Dan Brown's books, *they'd be a lot better.*

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[AHuxley]

Dont spoil the magic for the young and generation Y. Just keep the bad guys close and the symbols per chapter count up.
Add in the 'smart' American and you have a best seller.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[AHuxley]

Well, 272 pages? Romance novel dude :) Passes the time and is fun to look at and dream.
Or the world works out the Voynich work before 2012 and finds warnings about a scarlet lady from the wilderness, giving birth to a man-child who is will rule all nations with an iron rod.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

There are small changes that would completely throw off character frequencies. For instance, if the key were rotated every X words. Some characters only occur at the beginning of words, which could make them control words for the cipher. So yes, a simple substitution + anagram cipher would be quick to solve with character frequencies, but add a simple key rotation, and your frequencies go all to hell.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Weedhopper]

Hey, even though no one else is responding, this is good stuff.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[yerktoader]

Good explanation, I'll have to do some reading. Sounds nice and nerdy.

That'd be about as stupid as postulating that it was penned by an 8 year old Leonardo Da Vinci...oh wait.

Hehe +1 to your internets, sir.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Verdatum]

Agreed. These are known as "Polyalphabetic ciphers" and the issue is discussed in the previously linked Wikipedia article.

Who's "Munroe's Law" is it...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that states, 'Whoever first cites an xkcd comic in favour of their argument wins,"?

Re:Who's "Munroe's Law" is it...

[YourExperiment]

Just a wild guess, but is it Munroe's?

And it says...

[halcyon1234]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis ut nibh et nunc scelerisque vestibulum non ac diam. Sed porttitor mauris a lorem tempus faucibus.

This is a test of my new pen."

Re:And it says...

[Falconhell]

It's from my aunt in Brighton, she must be out of her mind!

It's a cook book!

[Rhaban]

It's a cook book!

Re:It's a cook book!

[uncledrax]

I don't think it's called "How to serve man".. but nice try :]

So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[cpscotti]

This is NOT funny in many ways.. I used to amaze people around me with the story of the never solved, very old, famous manuscript. I was really happy living with this "mistery"... now what.. I'll have to go back talking about the origin of "guy"/Fawkes again? no... I'll skip this solution and continue with the Voynich!

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[Verdatum]

yeah, don't worry. You can read it. It's total garbage. Not a crack at all. TFA was debunked back in February. (in case you miss the link above: http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-cipher )

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[SydShamino]

yeah, don't worry. You can read it. It's total garbage. Not a crack at all. TFA was debunked back in February. (in case you miss the link above: http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-cipher )

That's a pretty lame debunking. He repeats that the letter distribution is wrong, calls a few things "wobbly", points out that a non-botanist, non-Italian speaker translated a medieval Italian word into a plant that wasn't used there, and as an aside "doubts" that she cracked a line of text.

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[Verdatum]

Perhaps, but it's a pretty lame paper. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. CLaiming that as an outsider, a person cracked something that linguists and cryptographers have been attempting to decrypt for well over 50 years is an extraordinary claim, and that paper is no extraordinary proof. Also, you're being a bit dismissive of the letter distribution reasoning. Italian, even ancient Italian, is not some lost language. Philologists know the letter distributions for the whole gamut of spelling grammar and vocabulary changes, thanks to period texts, and predictable language shifts (for example, see Grimm's law). If the character frequency matched up to any known language, this would've been uncovered by now.

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[bmearns]

Sure nuff, it's an OTP. There, you can still amaze your friends.

And of course, there's always Qwghlmian to try to decipher.

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[cpscotti]

Perfect! Qwghlmian wins the prize!
And since TFA is totally rubbish, why not just take as an axiom that the Voynich Manuscript was first spotted at Inner Qwghlm...
or well.. we can do just as "they" did.. come up with something new..

Re:So there is no "unbreakable" code?

[bmearns]

And since TFA is totally rubbish[...]

That can't possible be the Tata Football Academy, so I'm assuming you're referring to the Texas Forensic Association. You're right, they're total lamers.

Possible hoax,,,

[Last_Available_Usern]

I know it seems outlandish for something of that time period, but isn't it even remotely possible that someone could have created this document just for the purposes of confounding scholars? Perhaps it started as a joke for a collegue and got out of hand, or just happens to be the work of a mad man. Perhaps there is nothing to decode.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget scholars. Confound the laity and the common man.

Make up a fancy book that you can claim to read, practice fortune telling or medicine! Earn a living through fraud.

The only mystery is how you would get someone with a practiced hand and good penmanship to slog through helping you.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[b1t r0t]

Or even more likely, confound the rich nobleman with a taste for shiny objects. Take a couple of months to whip up something that looks like a rare lost book, then offer it for sale and get years worth of money. Though admittedly, even if it was totally made up, it is still an amazingly beautiful work of art.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[MBGMorden]

It's certainly possible, but it's incredibly long and detailed to be a hoax.

I'm reminded of a scene from Star Trek DS9 when Dr Bashir is trying to cure an engineered disease and has the following exchange with Jadzia (paraphrased):

Bashir: "There is no cure. The Dominion saw to that. These people have been suffering with this disease for hundreds of years and I arrogantly thought I could cure it within a week.".

Jadzia: "Maybe that was arrogant, but it's even more arrogant to think that there is no cure just because YOU couldn't find it one."

I've always thought that little bit of dialog held wisdom, and applies to us on a generational level and even as a species. Just because we haven't been able to crack it doesn't mean it's a hoax.

While we're speculating though, I've always though that it may just be in a made up language that was then ciphered. Even in high school some friends and I had a very basic "language" of maybe a few hundred words that we would use to talk about things without others knowing what were were talking about. I can't remember most of the words know but mixing that with English just as a trivial little game we were able to communicate decently. Someone (or group) with more time and motivation could do much better. Heck Klingon and Tolkein's Elvish are remarkably well fleshed out for fictional languages. Such a move would prove difficult to crack indeed.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, next time could you be reminded of something a bit more pathetically nerdy? Star Trek's a bit too mainstream for me.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[Anonymous Coward]

It's lacking on the art level. The botanical drawings are awful and unskilled. The only thing they have going for them is repetition and the crazy.

Now the fold-out "solar systems" are awesome but awesome in the amount of crazy on display. The ambition to add fold-outs to the book.

I don't think nobility, or any scholar in a house of nobility would have gone for this book or recommended it's purchase. Possibly an alchemist might have had it on his book shelf to pad his his reading repository.

The thing reeks of hookum and fraud. Unfortunately to prove that's what it is you would need not only a biography of the fraudster but proof that this was his book and or documentation of it's creation.

The only part of this book that doesn't appear to be a creative but unlearned person making things up is the hand writing.

Re:Possible hoax,,,

[bmearns]

The only mystery is how you would get someone with a practiced hand and good penmanship to slog through helping you.

I'm on it...

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, this article can't be serious. Anyone with a bit (and I mean a BIT) of knowledge about cryptography knows this can't be true, for all the motivations that many have already posted above.
And, I'm Italian, and we study Italian literature for 10 years in school, and I can swear that the italian language wasn't that different than the actual one 700 years ago. I mean, a letter frequency analysis would have already solved this.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[dave420]

There were many different kinds of Italian even 400 years ago, so you're not necessarily right.

FFS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Da Vinci was Leonardo's address, not his name. Sort yourself out.

Re:FFS...

[Hognoxious]

In those times it wasn't uncommon that your address - at least the town - was also your name. Godfroi de Bouillon, John of Gaunt, von Blücher.

 

Re:FFS...

[Anomalyst]

Blücher

Horse whinnies in backgroud.
and that's FRAONK-en-steen

It seems highly repetitive

[srussia]

Hypothesis: Leonardo Da Vinci had a son (perhaps named Bartolomeo). As punishment for Bart's mischief, Leonardo ordered him to write 300 pages' worth of "Non rivelero il segreto di mio padre" using Da Vinci's secret script in mirror image.

What the heck? It's that time of the year...

[east coast]

besuretodrinkyourovaltine

Re:Where's the oblig xkcd?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not slacking off - my code's compiling. Oh wait - wrong xkcd.

security through obscurity

[mevets]

Doesn't work, you would think he would have been smarter.

Unless...

[jDeepbeep]

Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

That is, unless the manuscript is using a collection of ciphers (one for each section perhaps?), in which case, one key won't unlock everything.

Just a thought.

Not xor

[John Guilt]

Back then, with the Great Chain of Being still lurking in the background, and the influence of 'as above, so below' mysticism (which, admittedly, had a good influence on Newton and everyone else deciding that universal 'laws' [no inverted commas for them, though] guided the universe), it is quite possible that they believed that understanding the nature of base metal and the process whereby base it could be changed to gold would be the very image of understanding that whereby the soul could reach an higher level of being.

I don't hold with that---whenever a guru, however called, starts to invoke q.m. to justify her latest outrage against sense I reach for my notional Browning---but (as indicated parenthetically super) it does seem to be a phase in getting toward a less particularist point-of-view: maybe we _have_ to go through a 'life is like the stars are like chymistry' phase before we can advance (yes, I still believe that some things are better than others) to 'there is no intrinsic difference between the motion of the stars and planets and those down here on Earth' to '...between organic and inorganic chemistry' to 'it's all basically physics'.

(Did I mention I was a physicist?)

I've had this great idea...

[iapetus]

We take an infinite number of monkeys, and an infinite number of parchments, and eventually one of them will write a new play by that Shakespeare fellow...

Re:I've had this great idea...

[tsm_sf]

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? Stupid monkey!

Not far in fact

[DrYak]

In fact, the working hypothesis of TFA's Author is that the manuscript may have been written by a young - still child - Leonardo, playing around with anagrams and trying to make an imaginary book out of common plants.
Not that far from children playing "Druids & Dicotyledon 1st Edition"

what

[bistromath007]

How did it not occur to this dipshit that if the "code" were just Italian anagrams, Italians would've figured it out a long time ago?

Re:what

[gregarican]

They got stuck because they were too busy talking with their hands and saying "Heyyyy!"

Re:what

[Rod Beauvex]

*points at you while driving by on his scooter* Caio!

Re:what

[Gaffod]

"Dipshit", how insightful indeed. By the way, maybe no one should try to solve it at all, since it's been centuries and someone must have tried your idea, whatever it is!

Re:what

[sjwt]

That would be the same reason why 5 years ago a German Freind of mine pissed him self laughing when their was all the hype about the newly discoverd "spear of destiny". He pulled out an old 1960's highschool german medevil history text book and told us all about it a good week before the documentry was on.

Boring...

[joh]

Have you ever looked at that book? Look at the pictures and you'll know that there's nothing to decode. It's just phantasizing, all made up. There's no reason to waste any time with the text, especially since many people have tried and nobody found any kind of sense in it.

It's still beautiful, mind you.

Re:Boring...

[uncledrax]

Yeap.. it's probably some background work for an early Italian role-playing-game written in the old equivalent version of 'Klingon'...

Re:Boring...

[Anonymous Coward]

"theres no reason to waste any time with the text"

even if its a work of pure firction (which then why the code?) the ability to imagine is one of the few things that separates us from animals and is a very redeeming and valuable thing. works of fiction have motivated and inspired people for thousands of years. this one has never had that opportunity.

Re:Boring...

[joh]

"theres no reason to waste any time with the text"

even if its a work of pure firction (which then why the code?) the ability to imagine is one of the few things that separates us from animals and is a very redeeming and valuable thing. works of fiction have motivated and inspired people for thousands of years. this one has never had that opportunity.

Duh, this is not an encoded work of anything -- all of it is made up. The script, the characters, the "words"... there is no content and no meaning, it's just pure art. Of course you can never prove this as a matter of principle, but the evidence is beyond sane doubt.

Leonardo, not daVinci

[Jeremy Erwin]

Let's try to stay well clear of pot boilers. Art historians refer to the renaissance polymath as "Leonardo," not as "Mr. Da Vinci." Sidmilarly, Dante, rather than "Mr Alligheri" wrote the Divine Comedy.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[Anonymous Coward]

Art historians refer to the renaissance polymath as "Leonardo," not as "Mr. Da Vinci."

But what if we need to differentiate him from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[CorporateSuit]

But what if we need to differentiate him from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

I'm finding it difficult to come up with a situation where that would be neccessary.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[canajin56]

But what if we need to differentiate [Leonardo da Vinci] from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

I'm finding it difficult to come up with a situation where that would be neccessary.

Ya, Donatello was the Turtles' inventor, not Leonardo!

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[ceoyoyo]

Sure, but us English speakers make a point of assuming that everything works according to our system so when we meet a chinese person named Lu Hong we refer to her as Ms. Hong or, if we're friendly, Lu. Same goes for Leonardo da Vinci.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[Jeremy Erwin]

Sure, but us English speakers make a point

"Us make a point?" That's hardly English.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[ceoyoyo]

You'd be surprised. I come from a place where a bag of groceries can get boughten.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[KingAlanI]

This can be useful.
Played it off of a Philosophy prof for laughs once.
She showed the class a painting of some scene related to the life of Socrates (I forget, don't not sure if it was of the execution).
I commented on the painting having a level of detail that was quite impressive for someone painting while in a turtle suit.

I happen to be a linguistics major

[Naznarreb]

I happen to be a linguistics major, and I don't want the manuscript to ever be decoded. To me, the manuscript is a symbol of the complexity of language and the depth of human ingenuity and creativity. The fact the best minds of the last 100ish years haven't cracked it reminds me that there is always some further mystery waiting to be solved and that we should be leery of anyone who claims to have all the answers.

Re:I happen to be a linguistics major

[b4dc0d3r]

Even better would be to have it solved, and point out all of the wrong-headed approaches taken by earlier attempts. Everything you state will be preserved, except the ingenuity will be enhanced. 100 years is a long time to look at a problem, especially when solving it requires knowledge of how people worked centuries before. Being able to solve that is an incredible testament to ingenuity, especially with a fresh approach like this from a non-expert.

If this remains unsolved, we can point to it and say we don't know everything. If it is solved, we get to wonder what else is out there that we don't know that we don't know, which to me is even more interesting.

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It is obvious!

[filesiteguy]

If you take the third letter of every fifth page divided by the square of the absolute answer to life the universe and everything and add it to a nice, hot cup of tea, you'll get that the book simply lists technological achievements and political issues discussed by anonymous contributors.

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wikipedia article

[memnock]

the 3rd reference:
Manly, John Matthews (1931). "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS". Speculum 6 (3): 345-391. doi:10.2307/2848508+.

has a "+" at the end of the doi that doesn't belong there. i think the article's editor is part of the conspiracy.

She's also inconsistent

[A nonymous Coward]

In one linked prior page, she says

Some people have considered the possibility that Wilfred Voynich forged the Voynich Manuscript. Wilfred Voynich’s business was in buying and selling old manuscripts and again it is unlikely that he would have copied from French and Italian manuscripts written after Roger Bacon’s death or seen early Tarot cards like the Visconti-Sforza pack.

Then three paragraphs later, she says

If Wilfred Voynich considered Roger Bacon a suitable 13th century author of the Voynich Manuscript, ...

She can't have it both ways. Either Voynich was too smart to have made such a clumsy mistake, or he was not. She makes it clear that both of these are her own opinions: first she disagrees that he would have been so clumsy as to fake it in a Roger Bacon style, then she says he considered Roger Bacon a possible author.

First two lines decoded (from the article)

[noidentity]

In case you don't want to read the article, here are the first two lines they decoded:

Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down

Da Vinci makes sense

[Pedrito]

I'm no handwriting expert, but doing a quick google image search lead to a number of images of Leonardo's work with handwriting to compare against and frankly, it looks like a dead-on match to me. The little X thing he does in place of "ver" not only looks the same, but has the same little incidental serifs and stuff. The occurrences of "l" look the same, the "i"s that look like alphas, the funky "P". Again, I'm no expert, but either the writer was da Vinci or someone copying his writing style.

The fact that she used tools available on the web to help her out in areas where she's not an expert, ought not be held against her. Personally, I think it shows that she's pretty damn clever.

Re:Da Vinci makes sense

[Verdatum]

Regardless of how much it does or does not look like Da Vinci's hand, I very much agree with your second paragraph. She sounds like a lovely armchair investigator; happily and quietly posting her suppositions on her own website (though the website begs for a CV; it'd be nice to know in what field and from where that Ph.D originates). I find it no different from my enjoyment in tinkering with the Millennium Prize Problems when I have no business doing so.

The problem I have is with the story submitter. Would it have been so difficult to discover that this paper specifically was debunked 10 months ago, and what was written like the first few days of a breakthrough has yet to come to any fruition. I think it's a little mean to force her to stand up to slashdot peer review. Worse and plain irritating for the summary to be so exaggerant of the claim. If it was like "Here's a cute theory, she thinks it was Da Vinci, and believes she has a couple lines translated!" then a fun discussion would be had by all sans the unwarranted excitement.

Re:Da Vinci makes sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps all the obvious "personal" quirks are simply how text was written back then and you are missing all the more subtle ones. Try comparing it with other mideival text.

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Wet ink

[Anonymous Coward]

The book was written well before the times of the roller ball pen. the "Mirrored Images" described are probably ink from other inserts that are missing smearing onto the previous page. This is only half the manual, and they have probably not taken the time to look at the impressions on the page to determine the ORDER of writing, as well as what was actually written on the page and what was simply "pressed" onto it.

Symbolagram

[cez]

Well.. perhaps not totally on topic with your post (which I see insight in), but since you are one of the few here with an open mind, I figured this is a descent place to add my thoughts. Without thorough investigation and analysis, I would not say she's totally right, but perhaps she is onto something.

Everyone here assumes Da Vinci's love of anagrams ended at words... who is to say there are no symbolic anagrams... hieroglyphic anagrams or the like that wouldn't disrupt Zipf's Law as another poster mentioned("the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in a word frequency table"). I believe open minds lead to greatness, it is hard to argue Da Vinci's greatness nor your open mind. I salute you sir... and I coin a new term in the process!

Symbolagram Coming Soon ;)

Cheers

Yes...

[sarkeizen]

If you apply a loose decoding scheme (that is, sometimes certain rules apply and sometimes they don't) to a tiny subset of the text then you increase your likelihood of producing a internally consistent system. Personally I don't know much about medieval vegetables but looking at modern pictures of a few of those decoded wasn't very compelling. From there people seem to be arguing for an equally loose interpretation of the pictures (or supposing of the way the older plants looked) which sounds a lot like the arguments I heard about remote viewing drawings...and about as compelling.

Re:John Dee and Edward K, it all makes sense now

[vertinox]

Actually... After remembering while reading the Wiki article on the manuscript where it is suggested that John Dee did in fact sell the book to Emperor Rudolph.

Considering how much of Dee's traveling companion, Edward Kelley, was a dubious fraud, he might have wrote the book to earn them some traveling money.

Simpler explanation

[Locke2005]

The manuscript is not written in anagrams at all; it is simply the work of a medieval Italian dyslexic who also spells poorly.

Unfortunately..

[Anonymous Coward]

..Professor Sherwood is now in a straightjacket, drooling and twitching, and screaming about http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/2008/07/flesheating_slug_invades_wales.php

Distributed Deciphering

[don_carnage]

Is the Voynich Manuscript in its entirety available for public review? I've only seem short page excerpts. Perhaps the right person hasn't seen it yet. (See Mayday Mystery).

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[EvilIdler]

Look for a scan on the Internet. You can find it in its entirety in a torrent somewhere :)

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing is out there. I found a full pdf of it a while ago.

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[FCD1]

Is the Voynich Manuscript in its entirety available for public review?

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SetsSearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=ITEM

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[nscott89]

It is available on Wikimedia Commons here.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[don_carnage]

Great, thanks for the link!

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[don_carnage]

Another great link. Thanks!

Re:Distributed Deciphering

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Search for "Voynich" at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu

Here's the translation

[SnarfQuest]

One pages translation:

Somebody set up us the bomb.
Main screen turn on.
All your base are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
For great justice.

Uh, What Did She Say?

[Spencerian]

I followed along with the original article's premise, which was intriguing enough... ...Until she started to cite Dan Brown's horribly written book, "The Da Vinci Code," which purports itself to be a "sourced" novel.

Right. And Wikipedia's data cannot be wrong, and Oswald really acted alone.

Not that the writer has to be Christian or even a theologian, but mixing her research alongside (jaw-droppingly bad and easily refuted) fictional information (the "Priory of Sion" was made up in 1954 or so) just asks someone to call BS on her whole entire study.

That would be too bad, since she might have stumbled onto the first decent lead in the decoding riddle.

Wikipedia does not issue reports.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Wikipedia’s report". Maybe she'd like to request membership in Anonymous, or talk to the board of directors of the Internet.

The broad leaf plant is Ransoms (Bear) Garlic

[tlambert]

The broad leaf plant is Ransoms (Bear) Garlic, sometimes also called "wild garlic".

Here is an almost identical modern illustration:

http://www.kitchengardenseeds.com/cgi-bin/catview.cgi?_fn=Product&_category=145

It was commonly used as a folk medicine in da Vinci's time, which would have made it of interest.

-- Terry

Bile

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so many crypto experts here, you think with all this brainpower we would have been able to crack the VM before? I mean the vitriol and bile here is pretty bad. The document, if you read it only points out a hypothesis, and makes suggestions for others to confirm or challenge it. That is scientific discourse, the replies here to that which are dismissive and heated do not represent a scientific attitude, nor are they in any way helpful, which begs the question, have any of you done better? What's stopping you?

This Just In: RIAA File Lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

The Voynich Manuscript decoded is actually the lyrics to "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" by Steam

Picking nits.

[bmearns]

Alright, the "Wikipedia's report" just about knocked me down, but now you're getting inspired by Dan Brown? It would not be ironic at all if "Leonardo da Vinci is established as the author", unless perhaps the manuscript turns out to be a ridiculous action/adventure story about Dan Brown. Otherwise, it would be coincidence, at best. The fact that there's a website called "Italian Anagram Dictionary" truly amazes me. Variation on rule 34, I guess. Is "collelation" a word?

Expense

[SmallFurryCreature]

If the book is as old as it is claimed, then it would be as making a fake golden iPhone today just to confuse people a hundred years from now. Paper hasn't always been a throw away article.

Neither is it really that easy to create random writing that still looks legit, try it. Hell, even try it with just hitting random keys on yourkeyboard and still have it look like a real language. now do it for 200 pages, written by hand on expensive paper.

Anyway, it would be a first. There are plenty of known encoding tricks, where people encoded something purely for the challenge, but pure gibberish just to fool people? I don't know of any big example (as in 200 pages of work).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

Leonard Nimoy is smiling.

Let's take a look at what one of the more lucid channeled sources has to say on the matter. (Why not? We're already off the reservation with this manuscript.)

Q: (L) Well, that settled that! Let me ask a couple of quick questions
for my kid. She wants to know the source of the Voynich Manuscript.
A: Disinformation.
Q: (L) Who put it together?
A: Various sources.
Q: (L) Why?
A: Monetary gain.
Q: (L) So, somebody just faked up an ancient manuscript to sell it for
big bucks?
A: Yes.
Q: (T) Well, they did it with the Hitler diaries. (L) Her next question is:
how are some people able to walk on fiery coals, pierce their bodies
all over, or lie on a bed of nails without pain or permanent physical
disfigurement.
A: Mentalism.
Q: (L) What causes some planes, people and ships to disappear in
the Bermuda Triangle? Where do they go and what happens to
them?
A: Already covered this.

-FL

The author does not know italian

[aBaldrich]

First of all, his screenshot has 3 words, not 5. And this is not the florentian dialect ("he would have used the language of Dante" - Author says) He claims "Povere leter rimon mist(e) ispero" means "Plain letter reassemble mixed inspire". 1) "ispero" means "I hope" not "they inspire". It is a gross error. He cant have taken a 1 year course and do this. 2) "leter" is by no means florentian. latin "littera" > florentian "lettera". With double t. ALWAYS. And it is in singular, plurals end in "s". 3) "rimon" is not florentian too. It can be split in prefix "ri-" that means "again", suffix "-on" that is present mood, third preson plural. I cant immagine any connection with the italian equivalent of "reassemble". 4) Leonardo at age 14 and 15 was an apprentice at Verrochio's. He painted. How would an apprentice painter get 200 pages of precious paper? 100% crap. Sombody mentioned Zecharia Zitchin?

What fun!

[jim.shilliday]

To convince anyone that the page she discusses has something to do with Leonardo's astrological chart, it seems to me she also needs to explain this: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006202&srchtype=ITEM . It's another page with the same animal in the center, the same word under it (complete with what Sherwood interprets as an inserted "r" above the word), fifteen tub ladies (dressed this time), all holding stars in their outstretched hands instead of on "strings." No babies in sight that I can see.

MOD PARENT UP

[Scrameustache]

The broad leaf plant is Ransoms (Bear) Garlic, sometimes also called "wild garlic".

Here is an almost identical modern illustration:

http://www.kitchengardenseeds.com/cgi-bin/catview.cgi?_fn=Product&_category=145

It was commonly used as a folk medicine in da Vinci's time, which would have made it of interest.

-- Terry

Wow, that is indeed what that is. I didn't know about broad leafed garlicks. Good information you have there, I thank you for your insight.