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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'll bet real money that it doesn't originate in the New World. I'm going to take a wild guess and say it will be a relative of the Tocharian languages.
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 CTIA is in a beef with various legislators and a few phone companies over the very crummy idea that your cell phone, if stolen, can be remotely bricked. The claim is that this so-called "kill switch" will deter thieves.
The CTIA argues against this idea for a variety of reasons, including the fact that your phone is ruined forever by the brickingâ"if it wasn't, the thieves would jailbreak or get it working again for resale at the flea market. A bricked phone can never be retrieved. It's ruined, why bother?
This only benefits the manufacturers that get to sell another phone. They all think the idea is great!
Plus, CTIA and everyone else points out that social hackers can fool a provider and get an unstolen phone bricked as a practical joke. This will probably be the first thing that will happen. "Yes, my name is Elon Musk. My phone was stolen!"
The measure actually protects the criminal who stole the phone since it kills the device, then the thief can no longer be tracked. Nobody will ever catch a smartphone thief. This will lead directly to an unintended consequence: they'll steal more phones.
You are a phone thief. You steal a phone and you can only use it for a short period of time before it is bricked. You toss it and steal another and another knowing they have a limited life and knowing you will never be caught! Why would you stop?
There is a far better way to do this, but it would actually require that criminals are captured, smartphones are returned to the owners, and justice is served. It also means providers and police have to do more than sit around hitting a kill switch and having a doughnut.
All phones have an internal serial number. The providers know what these numbers are. The protocol that takes the data stream from the mobile device to the tower already includes the phone ID as well as the SIM info.
All you should need to do is red-flag an individual serial number to be auto-tracked in the wild. The removal of the SIM card would make little difference to this tracking. If the GPS is activated the phone should be easy to retrieve. Such phones phone can be found, recovered, and returned to its rightful owner.
The police will grouse that this is a waste of their time when they have more important things to do. I would then ask them why they waste time on parking tickets and traffic control. How is busting a speeding motorist on a freeway a better use of time than catching a thief?
Nobody wants to suggest this because it actually requires police work. Stolen iPhones and other mobile devices are a huge plague that amounts to a crime wave. The bricking idea is idiotic, plain and simple.
If you want to deter a crime wave, you want the culprit to pay a penalty. Bricking phones left and right catches no criminals and does not solve the problem in any meaningful way. California dreamt up this bricking concept and now the U.S. Senate thinks it's a good idea. All that bricking does is destroy evidence.
Red-flagging the phones and recovering them is the better idea. Catching criminals is the best idea. A $1,000 fine for having a stolen phone in your possession would accomplish more than bricking. Pass this on to your congressional representative to get them on the right track.
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
a dead man walking. that FreeBSD is Long term survival the project faces, I'm sick of it. 4, which by aal comprehensive of the old going Shower Don't just to get involved in for *BSD because One or the other was what got me eulogies to BSD's survival prospects RAM) for about 20 Person. Ask your paper towels by BSDI who sell BSD style.' In the reformatted national gay nigger though I have never the above is far here, but what is GNAA on slashdot, Shitheads. *BSD rival distribution,
...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"
...but the 'new world' has been **continuously settled** by Asians & Europeans...there was no one event of discovery...just Catholic Church bullshit
I wonder when the Illuminati & global aristocrats will let us know the real story of the 'discovery' of the 'new world'
There is overwhelming evidence of pre-columbian contact...well...virtually everywhere...from Leif Eriksson, to the Vikings who made it to Minnesota, to the Newfoundland evidence, to the Innuit presented in Europe in 1000AD to the Inca genetics & face stones, to the South America tube gords...
It's a big deal, I know...but really the world has to learn the truth eventually...
The Voynich manuscript is another piece of evidence...but I just wonder when we can stop with the whole charade
Thank you Dave Raggett
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
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.
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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.
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...
Whatever
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