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Another Possible Voynich Breakthrough
bmearns writes "Over the past few weeks we've been hearing a lot about a possible breakthrough in decoding the infamous Voynich manuscript, made by a team of botanists who suggested that the plants depicted in the manuscript may have been from the New World and the mysterious writing could be a form of an Aztec language. But the latest development comes from linguist Stephen Bax, of Bedfordshire University, who believes he has identified some proper names (including of the constellation 'Taurus') in the manuscript and is using these as a crib to begin deciphering the rest of the text, which he believes comes from the near east or Asia."
It says "Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine"...
...yet another researcher reports their findings that one of the Rorschach inkblots may definitely be a picture of a face...
Let's then have a look at all the plants pictured in the manuscript where the theory does not hold up. What a dumb theory but here's the way to prove it then and that is if that grand theorizer can decode the text to render semantically sound meaning ... and we haven't seen that just yet ...but just another dumb theory and I got plenty of those myself, thank you.
Anyone else get the feeling that this is pretty much the only ongoing legendary Discovery Channel special mystery that actually got solved. Atlantis? Who knows? Stone henge? Not really solved. Nostradamus? Super debatable. But finally, what seems like yet another impossible eternal mystery is FINALLY being solved! And in my lifetime! I can't even think of any other comparison similar to this.
Where if you read it you die seven days later or something?
This guy just looked at the pictures, found a few he thinks he knows, and assumed the text with some similarity MUST BE IT.
"He said he had managed to find the word for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars (seen as part of the zodiac constellation of Taurus)"
Up next he'll find the word "leaf" next to a picture of a leaf, and the word "copyright" on the last page...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
http://cms.herbalgram.org/herb...
When I was younger, early 20s back in the 1990s , once of my best friends started to slip into schizophrenia (it ran in his family). He constantly jotted drawings and writings on paper, which grew increasingly more bizare. Started with pictures of aliens and UFOs (Which he'd say where just him having fun) but over time turned into numerological type things (My first letter is T my second is C, I am top cat, my age adds up to 9 which upside down is a third of 666 etc etc etc) and increasingly more paranoid mystery theories. He'd draw charts explaining the relationships between things.
And since he was a biology student, he drew lots of plants. Particularly his favorite, marihuana.
Whats to say this isn't the mad scrawlings of a schizophrenic mad man, 500 years ago? It'd certainly fit the pattern.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
cant tell if expert or 'expert', but look: http://www.ciphermysteries.com... found some more german critics http://scienceblogs.de/klausis...
I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation than the idea that New World lanuages somehow made it into a book that was (according to Wikipedia) was written in Europe between 1404 and 1438.
You have nothing to fear from them. They want to be our friends.
There's going to be a lot of embarrassed "experts" when some one finally gives pig-latin a try.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
It's da healin' of da nation for sure man!
Iguanas. Thing on the bottom of page 145 with the women bathing really looks like an iguana.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
The entropy and other statistical measures of the Voynich language is different from Indo-European languages. Zandbergen goes through this in some detail. To quote
and
There is actually a lot more of this in this and other papers. The Voynich language, for another example, has a lot more repeated words than (say) English. I seem to remember that the closest match in terms of word repetitions was with Vietnamese, and there was some speculation that it might be an invented script for that language, but that didn't pan out in detailed examination. The upshot is that it is just not realistic to just assume that Voynich is a common language written in some weird script (and, also, that these substitution games have been played before).
Anyone who's ever read documentation written by an engineer should immediately realize that the Voynich Manuscript is the user's guide for the Antikythera Mechansim.
My friend Debbie Ann is so promiscuous, instead of an appointment book she needs a package manager
...based on the illustrations (plants, herbs, astrological symbols, and MANY butt-ugly naked women), this was the medieval version of "How to Seduce Women and Add Inches to Your Penis"
It's nihilistic to pretend that Columbia's voyage wasn't an inflection point in history. Even if you disregard everything else, the millions of dead North American aboriginal people are evidence.
Yeah, I don't even like Columbus (read the piece about him on The Oatmeal if you haven't already), but I'm sick of this revisionist history. Europeans didn't invade until after Columbus, and all your other examples are statistically irrelevant. The impact of Vikings in Minnesota in AD 1000 was nonexistent, just like your examples of Incas in Europe or landing on the moon first or whatever you were alleging.
Along comes Columbus, and it's all "O hai, can has enslavement of your people and give you smallpox?", and in response it's, "Kthx for all the dirty blankets, in return have some free syphilis!"
It's pretty well known by now that at the very least Eriksson reached North American centuries before Columbus, but that doesn't change the fact that Columbus' voyage and success ushered in a new era of colonization, which none of the previous encounters had. The Vikings may have reached Minnesota, but Americans don't descend from them now do they?
Look at the bright side... you will be able to use hacking skills to get your girlfriend's phone bricked. You might actually manage to actually talk face to face with a real live female, just like we used to do in the sixties!
We only have one side of the native American genocide. Actually less than that, we have a historical narrative from the Catholic Church which has proven to be falsified in places...one version of one side of the story. I get what you're saying, but really, there's alot that you might not know.
Ex: The Portugese and Dutch Monarch, and very soon after VOC, the Dutch East India company, starting in the early 1500s had regular contact with Japan, and was even given an official 'trading pass' allowing Dutch traders access to ports that **no other country in the world** had access to..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
It's not one document or theory. Of course around the 1500s-1700s there is evidence of an uptick in biological contact...that doesn't mean it is statistically significant or proves the Catholic Church narrative to be true.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Don't forget the African settlers. But discoveries, like inventions, don't really mean anything on their own until someone popularizes them.
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I think the material it's written on is evidence against it being a hoax. Vellum was and remains an exquisitely expensive writing material, designed to last. Combine this with the fact that the writer would have had to have an understanding of statistical analysis of written text (used to suggest whether written characters have meaning or are gibberish) and it adds up to an expensive, laborious hoax by a person with an understanding of both plant biology and statistical cryptanalysis. It just doesn't sit right with me.
C'mon, I'm disappointed. It's been solved ages ago.
https://xkcd.com/593/
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/02/19/2059247
Well it was Lee Adama who wrote it originally. It was copied so many times until the 15th century when the Galactica was changed into a wooden ark because the copiers thought the galactica was a boat.
And the CAG kept getting mentioned. (eg gollcag). So it must be their legacy after all and we are the cylons.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
there was no one event of discovery...just Catholic Church bullshit
This has nothing to do with Catholicism. You can equally read about Cook's "discovery" of Hawaii, and last time I checked he was Anglican at the service of an Anglican country.
Discovery of America, it's all about European etnocentrism: it didn't exist until we knew about it.
People who keep pointing that Leif Eriksson got there first are usually only driven by the fact that they don't find Columbus white enough, because if one is to be that pedantic about who got to America first, it is clearly someone from Asia/Polynesia somewhere between 10-30K years ago.
I possibly cracked it during Absinthe experimentation.
Check connection towards Muziris and something will come up. The top side of scripts used have resemblance with local scripts in that area. Hortus Malabaricus is one of the most interesting books around.
Now that you mention this I am convinced that any language where such a repetition is possible has to be made up. I always knew there was something wrong with English, all these inconsistent spelling rules and the weird grammar, no way could a language where the following is a real sentence be anything but fiction:
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
and even worse
"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher"
English has to be the worst prank the Brits every played, all the accumulated time of learning a clearly fictional piece of language or maybe we should not assume that the perceived weirdness automatically disqualifies a language.
I'm using Classic and when I click through to this article it's forcing beta, so: Fuck beta.
There is no debate about Nostradamus, all of his "predictions" are vague and subject to interpretation, just like every other psychic/soothsayer/charlatan.
Don't forget about the giant squid, which they finally did capture on video.
Maybe the <code> tag will help...
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B - R - A
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B - R
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A - B
A - B - R - A - C - A - D - A
A - B - R - A - C - A - D
A - B - R - A - C - A
A - B - R - A - C
A - B - R - A
A - B - R
A - B
A
Nope, still doesn't seem overly magical.
Right. Olmecs. That's what I meant, not Inca.
Here's why the Olmec face stones & recent genetic studies point to pre-Columbian African colonies in the Americas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Or just google image "trade winds" and see for yourself how they got there.
Accurate history is important. If we know that history is innacurate, it should be corrected. That's what I'm saying...correct the mistakes.
Are you saying we shouldn't correct mistakes in our history?
'discoveries' and 'inventions' are too nebulous of concepts anyway...first, the explorers we're talking about didn't 'discover' anything...the continents were populated by humans for millenia...they were the first to explore and map..its not a creative process like making a radio. Also, it's wrong to equate the two concepts because 'invention' as commonly used implies an economic motivation of some type, or at least a patent.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Have you ever read the front page? The complete lack of editing isn't a competency problem, it's a technical one.
The botanists are wrong? I should read the article first...
You seem to be slow:
The invasion by the Europeans and the apocalypse for the native peoples happened after (thanks to) Columbus's voyage in 1492. None of that insignificant shit you mentioned is relevant to this, nor is your apparent belief in some sort of Catholic church conspiracy theory.
What? Do you believe *some other voyage* around 1500 kicked off the land rush and colonization of North America and the holocaust for natives?
Because, you know, none of that earlier shit did this. Your Vikings in MN didn't. Your Incas in Russia (or whatever your unexplained rantings were about) didn't. None of that served as an inflection point in history, unlike the Columbus voyage.
Again I really don't see what this has to do with Catholicism. The claim of "discovery" of things that are already known by many people except Europeans has been done by people of all religions.
Whatever
Again I really don't see what this has to do with Catholicism. The claim of "discovery" of things that are already known by many people except Europeans has been done by people of all religions.
Indeed... in 1492, every Christian in Europe was Catholic... at least formally, so it's somewhat disingenuous to make this a "Catholic" thing. "Gold, glory and God" were the reasons for exploring the New World. I doubt evangelization was always a priority for the explorers, but it certainly was for the missionaries who accompanied them. However, the Spanish Crown were really the ones driving all this and their interests were definitely more political and financial than religious.
Furthermore, the Spanish monarchy wasn't particularly representative of the Church's interests. Among other things, they were responsible for the Spanish Inquisition (whom no one expects!), whose excesses were as much a result of politics as anything else, and were actually no worse than civil governments at the time (and in many cases, much less severe). While the Spanish Inquisition a lot of mindshare in the "evil" category, Queen Elizabeth gets a pass despite executing more people per capita over religion.
Anyhow, the actual missionaries on the ground in the New World were struggling to help keep the explorers/conquistadors from mistreating the natives, but their pleas back home to the Monarchy weren't always given much attention. The priests and religious on the ground were definitely not there to exploit the locals but to spread the Gospel. The conversion (not forced!) of millions in the new World through the 16th century is a testament to the fact that the Catholic efforts were a net positive despite what a lot of the Spanish did, which was truly greedy, inhumane and even genocidal.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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