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Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past 89
serutan writes: "Today there is a really unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day that talks about a centuries-old book, written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations, reminds me a lot of a bizarre modern book called the Codex Seraphinus, but for real. Any crypto experts care to take a whack at this?" Update: The image was transitioned and the entry can be found Here - cd
Re:What? No takers? (Score:2)
Re:What? No takers? (Score:2)
Pfeh. Anybody with a UID as low as yours ought to know better.
Re:What? No takers? (Score:2)
Very interesting (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very interesting (Score:2)
Re:Very interesting (Score:1)
> certain things in order to write an algorithm that
> would run on this distributed computing
> architecture of yours.
Actually, I was thinking more of the first step being a simple analysis of the script. For example, we want to see how any given character matches known script in other languages of the time. We'd want to look for patterns that might indicate whether we're looking at a text-based dissertation or comlex mathematic formulae (or both).
You're correct that certain things need to be known, but preliminary analysis need not assume that we're breaking code. The first thing is to match the patterns in the document against known alphabetic/pictographic/numeric patterns. That is a huge task and absolutely worthy of a distributed computing approach.
gotta love... (Score:4, Interesting)
...this quote:
Re:gotta love... (Score:2)
During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed.
Funny, I would have thought those guys had more pressing matters to attend to during that period of time. Maybe they worked on it during their lunch breaks.
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out.
Just think about this dude's wife! She must have gone super-bonkers living with him!
Ah, the fine line between madness and genius...
GMD
Re:gotta love... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, the reasoning probably was, "If we break this code, we could potentially use it or a derivative of it as our own code."
Re:gotta love... (Score:1)
Tell me more about this book. Have they figured out its alphabet? Like, the repeated and repeatable characters? I should think it wouldn't be too hard (heh. easy to say.) to turn it into
So what's the holdup here? Some OCR, some statistical analysis, see if the syntax looks like any other language we know well, and then, as it seems to go, come up with nothing and/or go mad. I like those odds!
Why can't we have a site someplace that says 'here is a problem. OK brainiacs, lets have a solution.' and everyone gives their ideas and other stuff. Hm, ok, so it is sounding kinda like slashdot... only without all the news. and other unique things...
Never read the books! (Score:3, Funny)
Darnitt, you beat me to the punchline... MOD UP! (Score:1)
Another good example would be the cases of scientists going insane/crushing themselves trying to decipher alien math and geometry symbols in Delta Green... The one who disemboweled himself and wrote the solution to the problem he'd been working on in his own cell wall also comes to mind.
Centuries old? (Score:5, Funny)
Wow. They have been working on Perl 6 for a long time.
Re:800 years in the future... (Score:1)
"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu [goatse.cx] waits for the giver [goatse.cx]."
If HP Lovecraft has taught us ANYTHING (Score:5, Funny)
It's that strange books in dead languages with lots of Astronomy illustrations are best left UNDECIPHERED!
I can see it, three weeks from now, a new article:
Well Meaning Hackers Awaken The Great Cthulhu
Re:If HP Lovecraft has taught us ANYTHING (Score:1)
I know who wrote this... (Score:1, Funny)
Just how odd is this ? (Score:2, Interesting)
It is not so strange... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is not so strange... (Score:4, Insightful)
The analyses of the text show that it seem to indicate that it is a real language, not just gibberish, since there is a detectable grammar (just not one we know) and vocabulary. There are more different words than one might expect from the languages of the time.
I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a few spelling mistakes, since it was after all handwritten. The writing isn't always very readable either, but other than the language being unknown, it isn't deliberately encrypted.
It seems unlikely to be a hoax, there's far too much work gone into it. It's probably the work of some unknown genius (or idiot savant).
If we could translate it, it might have fascinating insights into the world of the time, novel mathematical and scientific ideas, or it might just contain his/her daily record of bowel movements.
New Scientist had a feature on it a few months ago.
brought to us by... (Score:1)
They'll combine alien technology with my time travel ideas and return the manuscript to the past so that I can know my theories were correct. You've all been had!
IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:4, Funny)
The alphabet looks rather obviously European-based. First off, much of what I can make out, looks vaguely reminiscent of letters like g, d, m, n, w, and a.
Secondly, that 3-like character near the end of the first line that sticks out like a sore thumb. Around the time this book was written, that character was a part of many northern European languages, including old English. I believe it stood for a
The very first character (which you can see in several places throughout) also caught my eye. It looks like a slightly-modified version of the "feature key" you see on Apple keyboards, which is a symbol of Viking origin [tuxedo.org].
Re:IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:1)
#Al #eks%x a!@r!d@& &q!!e(# co o%!!cu u^tran$#w iq$@Y!za k
Re:IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:2)
eg: given your cipher (which is handwritten, BTW), we find a letter which looks like '#'. That could be a meaningful grapheme in its own right. It could be a contraction of 'tt'. It could be a part of the preceeding or following letter, and have no meaning seperately.
Your theory that this is a cypher written in a natural language with phonetic spelling is one which others have already thought of. It is very plausible, especially given that there seem to be two 'dialects' in the Voynich manuscript. Two people's ideas of phonetic, perhaps? That doesn't make the decryption any easier though. There are several questions which must be answered first, such as
Re:IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:1)
I'll take your word for it, since I have not studied this manuscript. However, I noticed that the letters look very similar to the modern-day Arabic alphabet, although the writing seems to go left-to-right instead of right-to-left. I wonder if the Arabic alphabet was an influence on the person who created this code?
I'll give it a shot. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I'll give it a shot. (Score:2)
Stupid Alias Quote: "It's a Rambaldi Document!" (Score:3, Interesting)
Pictures of The Voynich Manuscript [geocities.com]
Seems a running theroy is this man Roger Bacon [levity.com] may have written the book.
-You must not change the past! Don't do anything that effects anything. Unless you were suppose too, then for the love of God don't not do it.
Re:Stupid Alias Quote: "It's a Rambaldi Document!" (Score:1)
Also, Roger Bacon was who Rudolph II was told wrote it. I don't think that makes it a theory, especially since Bacon has never been known to have used this language before. In fact, because he'd recently lectured near the emperor's beat and because of the emperor's known dalliance in zoroastry (guess they were all occultists back in the day) there's every reason to believe that he was hoodwinked into believing it was Bacon's text. That's a closer approximation of the "running theory", IMHO.
SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:1)
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:1)
I think the hope with finding E.T signals, is that they will be mathematically based, so in theory there will be common ground for communication.
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:2, Insightful)
lolololololol u r rite!!!1 n that would b teh sux0r!!1!!11 >:p
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:2)
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:1)
Second, it is assumed that at the power levels we're currently able to pick up, any transmissions we recieve will be deliberate broadcasts. When communicating with somebody foreign to you, you don't start writing out questions and requests in your own language do you? No. You draw pictures. You use something more universal. Hopefully any aliens would do the same, constructing a message that is made to be deciphered easily, perhaps getting gradually more involved as we are taught their language and whatnot.
So no, SETI is no more pointless now than it was before. You can certainly tell if you've found intelligence without deciphering a message, and hopefully you can decipher a deliberately sent message without much intelligence.
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:1)
As I experienced in a railway cafeteria in Northern Italy, most tourists, when faced with a native who doesn't speak that debased form of English current in the New World, resort to SPEAKING LOUDLY AND SLOWLY.
It is a well known fact that foreigners are not stupid, they are simply hard of hearing.
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:2)
Re:SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:3, Insightful)
Just old J.R.R. up to his old tricks (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just old J.R.R. up to his old tricks (Score:1)
How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm thinking it could just as easily be a numerical star chart done in a base-8 or base-16 numbering system, which would throw off most regular attempts to decrypt it, especially if they're looking for words, rather than numbers.
Re:How about... (Score:1)
My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:4, Interesting)
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library [yale.edu] at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:2)
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:2)
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:1)
Here's [cc.jyu.fi] one example.
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:2)
guess we'll never know until more is known about the script!
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:2)
On the other hand, maybe it's a coded message from Roger Bacon on how to create free energy. ;)
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:1)
And that would probably be the conclusion of most scholars, if frequency and grammatical analysis didn't show it to have characteristics amazingly similar to actual language. That would be easy enough to fake today, but it's not so clear that it could have been done at the time. (Or, at least, that it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish.)
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:2)
it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish
Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.
Re:My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:1)
Sure, that's possible. I highly doubt that the book contains real working spells that allow the reader to open the gates of hell or turn lead into gold.
What makes it interesting is that we haven't been able to decode it, despite all indications that it really does contain some sort of language.
The Codebreakers (Score:3, Informative)
Ellen
Hey, wait a minute... (Score:1)
Online scans of the Voynich manuscript (Score:3, Informative)
http://voynich.no-ip.com/folios/ [no-ip.com]
Re:Online scans of the Voynich manuscript (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, it appears to be related to a womans monthly cycle.
The entire manuscript could relate to reproduction, survival, the seasons, etc.
Could it be the user manual for Stonehenge or one of it's equivalents? [sacredsites.com]
Re:Online scans of the Voynich manuscript (Score:2)
By the way I have figured it out. Voynich ManuScript is abbreviated VMS [unicamp.br] and so clearly isn't meant to be decipherable by humans and is therefore an obvious hoax [museumofhoaxes.com].
Easy (Score:1, Flamebait)
Well, I dare not utter it here, but in the elvish tongue, it means, "One Ring to Rule them All..."
And so on.
Permanent link (Score:2, Informative)
This is a permanent link [nasa.gov] to the APoD highlighting the Voynich Manuscript, for those reading the story after the rollover.
But wait! Try holding it upside-down in a mirror! (Score:1, Flamebait)
Microsoft Spellcheck (Score:1)
Irish??? (Score:2, Informative)
Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?
The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham [evertype.com] script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry
but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.
However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" [sprintmail.com] that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" [liv.ac.uk] racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.
Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were
Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.
*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.
Wait a minute, that's my handwriting! (Score:1)
Its obviously the answer to ... (Score:1)
4 options... (Score:1)
2) red bull
3) red bull
-or-
4) red bull and vodka (your frag count will decrease drastically after this last one, but it can be more fun...)
oops - wrong topic (Score:1)
this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."
Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.
Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric....
I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
Re:this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:1)
If it was an elaborate con, then it was a terribly elaborate con. Analysis of the text indicates that it isn't just random gibberish, but has grammatical structure and linguistic frequency characteristics. Even if somebody knew how to write gibberish in those patterns at the time, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.
That doesn't mean that there's any useful information in there. It could have been written by a madman. But any unbroken code will interest people, if there's evidence that there really is some sort of language underneath.
Re:this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:2)
Re:this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:1)
Re:this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:2)
And considerably more boring. I made it through F.P. by sheer bloodymindedness. The Name of the Rose it ain't.
Armenian? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hmm, better involve the FTC... (Score:1)
I wonder if this could be a hoax. Given the dating, and at least the pics I could see, why couldn't it be? Some smart guy writes a book in some made up language (Ewokese?) to sell to overly gullible royalty or the super rich for tons of money and laughs all the way to the bank. Now Yale has it, scientists puzzle over it, and this guy is probably still laughing. Or perhaps it's from a race of aliens who couldn't draw all that well. The constellations could be from different points of view, and the language could be not human at all. Generally speaking, science and art mix poorly, so why not. They can travel great distances, but drawing the Sun and stars is an issue and they didn't have the gimp.
"unfamiliar constellations" (Score:1)
some chemical analysis of paper and ink is needed (Score:2, Insightful)
by analyzing the inks used and the paper used.
That should give them a great starting point.
The analysis should include some form of dating.
I was really surprised to hear of this manuscript
and that it has not been deciphered.
Are we looking too deeply or not deeply enough (Score:1)