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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?"
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.