Voynich Manuscript

slowtrain · Feb 4, 2012

woops said:
An iguanadon right?

Thats the one.

I'm fairly sure that that was one of those early paleontology fuck ups and it never had those thumbs/they were the horns of some other beast or something, but still pretty cool.

woops · Feb 5, 2012

you're right, the 'thumbs' were actually on top of it's reptilian nose, but the boffins at the Natural History Museum were like ???

Mr. Tea · Feb 5, 2012

woops said:
An iguanadon right?

And an iguana as well! Also ink caps.

In a somewhat different vein, the Where's Wally? books are brilliant too. Though I'm sure that goes without saying.

luka · Feb 5, 2012

slowtrain · Feb 5, 2012

Mr. Tea said:
And an iguana as well! Also ink caps.

In a somewhat different vein, the Where's Wally? books are brilliant too. Though I'm sure that goes without saying.

And the I Spy books.

I still remember feeling the Treasure Hunt had this terribly sad and empty atmosphere even as a kid.

IdleRich · Feb 7, 2012

Another (almost) untranslatable document

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

These things are brilliant. I love the way that the original (the Voynich one) is associated with Roger Bacon and John Dee - is it just me or is John Dee (supposedly) at the root of every weird thing that happened in the middle ages?

IdleRich · Feb 7, 2012

"In a somewhat different vein, the Where's Wally? books are brilliant too. Though I'm sure that goes without saying."

Didn't the Where's Wally guy copy it totally off this though?

IdleRich · Feb 7, 2012

Actually I think Wally/Waldo was nicked off that Japanese guy who did Anno's Journey and the rest of the series. He travelled through Europe and you had to find him on each page which had loads of other interesting stuff such as characters from fairy tales etc

woops · Feb 7, 2012

wow, the script from this Rohonc Codex is really cool

slowtrain · Feb 8, 2012

IdleRich said:
Another (almost) untranslatable document

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

These things are brilliant. I love the way that the original (the Voynich one) is associated with Roger Bacon and John Dee - is it just me or is John Dee (supposedly) at the root of every weird thing that happened in the middle ages?

There is that great bit in Foucaults Pendulum, where this dude (can't remember his name? Kelley?) is writing works for Shakespeare, who is writing works for Bacon, who is writing works for Dee, who is just sort of overlording the whole thing.

IdleRich · Feb 8, 2012

"There is that great bit in Foucaults Pendulum, where this dude (can't remember his name? Kelley?) is writing works for Shakespeare, who is writing works for Bacon, who is writing works for Dee, who is just sort of overlording the whole thing."

It would be Kelley who was an associate of John Dee - but that's Francis Bacon who is sometimes believed to have written Shakespeare's stuff - the rumours about the Voynich Manuscript (at least according to the wiki article) attribute it to Roger Bacon who lived a couple of hundred years earlier.
John Dee and Kelley and Francis Bacon were sixteenth/seventeenth century - it seems that the manuscript was created before that - John Dee's name onlhy apppears in the story as someone who might have owned it at one point after (Roger) Bacon wrote it and sold it into Europe. More likely he just turns up cos it makes a good story better.

slowtrain · Feb 8, 2012

IdleRich said:
It would be Kelley who was an associate of John Dee - but that's Francis Bacon who is sometimes believed to have written Shakespeare's stuff - the rumours about the Voynich Manuscript (at least according to the wiki article) attribute it to Roger Bacon who lived a couple of hundred years earlier.
John Dee and Kelley and Francis Bacon were sixteenth/seventeenth century - it seems that the manuscript was created before that - John Dee's name onlhy apppears in the story as someone who might have owned it at one point after (Roger) Bacon wrote it and sold it into Europe. More likely he just turns up cos it makes a good story better.

Oh yeah, I was just talking about Dee always crops up around these things.

woops · Feb 9, 2012

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?12246-Where-can-I-find-shoes-Lisk&p=277386#post277386

Mr. Tea · Feb 17, 2012

slowtrain said:
Oh yeah, I was just talking about Dee always crops up around these things.

Dee is a fascinating character and probably deserves his own thread.

I was talking to my girlfriend about him the other day and she accidentally called him Jack Dee by mistake. We had fun imagining a sketch featuring Jack Dee as John Dee: The Most Sarcastic Alchemist In The World.

Mr. Tea · Jan 17, 2014

Voynich is not a hoax, contains real information, according to new analysis.

“In our analysis, we used an information-theoretical measure that quantifies the amount of information that the distribution of words bears about the sections where they appear in the text. Words that are uniformly scattered contribute little or no information, since their distribution cannot tag any specific section of the text. On the contrary, words that appear only in certain contextual domains contribute much information, because their distribution identifies those specific sections,” Dr Montemurro and Dr Zanette wrote in a paper published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

“The semantic networks we obtained clearly show that related words tend to share structure similarities. This also happens to a certain degree in real languages,” Dr Montemurro explained. “It unlikely that these features were simply ‘incorporated’ into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript was created.”

Pretty cool!

IdleRich · Jan 18, 2014

It does seem to be way more sophisticated than it would have needed to be (or even could have been) if it was a hoax.

Mr. Tea · Jan 28, 2014

OK, permit an ego-spam here: I've put together some thoughts I've had about the Voynich manuscript and the joy of trolling.

(I know a few of you have seen this on FB but there's a lot more of it now). Would be interested in your thoughts.

griftert · Feb 9, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/07/new-clue-voynich-manuscript-mystery

interesting though unlikely sounding thesis advanced here.

Mr. Tea · Feb 18, 2014

So I bought a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus the other day. The new edition is only 40-odd quid on Amazon. Well mint.

sufi · Feb 22, 2014

o wow
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/20/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/

Voynich Manuscript

Well-known member

is not like other people

Let's Talk About Ceps

Well-known member

Well-known member

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich

is not like other people

Well-known member

IdleRich

Well-known member

is not like other people

Let's Talk About Ceps

Let's Talk About Ceps

IdleRich

Let's Talk About Ceps

Well-known member

Let's Talk About Ceps

lala