What is Digg?96 Comments
- datagod, on 10/12/2007, -7/+57It is the original release plan for the Sony Playstation 3.
- rolypolyman, on 10/12/2007, -7/+53I ran it through an open source decrypter... it says:
"I am the widow of the late Charles VIII of Sweden former king of Sweden who died mysteriously as a result of Cardiac Arrest. Since after my husband's death my family is under restriction of movement and that not withstanding, we are being molested, policed and our bank Account both here and abroad are being frozen by the Swedish Government. Following the recent discovery of my husband's Bank Account by the Government with Swiss Bank in which the huge sum of 700 million kroners was logged. I therefore decided to contact you in confidence that l was able to move out the sum of 28.6 million kroners, which was secretly defaced and is sealed in two Metal Boxes for security reasons." - zyang, on 10/12/2007, -6/+46no, it's just my algebra notes from high school. sorry about the hand writing guys. move along, nothing to see here.
- burke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22Except that you'd need a decrpytion algorithm. Unless you know how it's encrypted, or can take a few reasonable guesses, you can't really decrypt it. Where these clusters excel is in bruteforcing known encryptions.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18"One problem with the hoax theory is that certain word statistics (Zipf's law) found in the manuscript are characteristic of natural languages. In other words, it is unlikely that any forgery from 16th century would "by chance" produce a text that follows Zipf's laws (first postulated in 1935)."
- buckyboy314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13The article discusses various statistics that closely resemble natural language trends. Unless someone scrambled an existing text and substituted letters, it would not show such strong patterns.
- CaptainSpeaking, on 10/12/2007, -9/+21I was referring to the manuscript...
"600 years old..."
;) - GreenfireStorm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Usually you try to find common strings of text and try to make sense of that 'most used word'. I know that's the *really* basic stuff we learned for fun in school.
Look up Cryptology online and you'll find some really neat stuff, it's an interesting career and a cool hobby. (I know of one large project that was dugg a while ago that is working on decrypting some Enigma codes. I'm sure you can find some stuff about that.) - jadacyrus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Personally I don't think it's a hoax. If the author was intelligent enough to include drawings of astrological and zodiacal signs as well as the milky way galaxy why then would he follow that up with 235 pages of absolute gibberish? Even if it was an obsessive compulsive person doesn't mean that this person would necessarily just create this as a hoax. For all we know it could have been this persons own language he invented himself if he was intelligent enough. It seems like too much trouble to go through just to confuse people in the long run. That's just my 2cents tho.
- Petrarch1603, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8More details here: http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_13.htm
- manfrin, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14THEY'RE GATE ADDRESSES!
- godofpumpkins, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7if Wired says so, it must be true.
truth be told, Wikipedia mentions Rugg's results, and calls them unconvincing. Just because you can come up with something that looks like an unknown language using a random algorithm, doesn't mean that the unknown language is random. - stonebear, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Things have not changed that much in 600 years. In those days, people who could write numbered very few among the general population, and were on par with computer programmers today. Sensitive writings were often encrypted for much the same reason contemporary computer code is; to protect one's innovations and revelations from theft by rivals, criminals and the authorities. Highly personal techniques were considered the most secure, and it would not have been unusual for a "natural philosopher" to invent something like this for his notes, which only he would ever be able to decipher.
- Jams, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Personally I don't think this will ever be decrypted as its thought to be a fake. Also AFAIK it hasn't been dated etc. as no access is allowed to the original which is kept by some university in the US.
The other problem is, given enough time you can create a meaning out of any arbitrary string of characters/numbers etc.
PS. There was a really good documentary on TV about this here in the UK, i think it was made by the BBC. - robojames, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Another, which is in latin, but still weird:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili
Some more books that are intentionally gibberish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake - foovo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Stupid hobbitses, tricksy hobbitses, always keeping it from us
- DrEbola, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Here's a mathematical physicist's take on it. (Includes pictures of naked women)
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html - firekrakcer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Or Daggoth Ur
- Zjm7891, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8Spam mail... similar to the ones recieved from Nigera...
- overcooked, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It was probably written in an obscure way for a reason. If the book is around 600 years old then it dates from the early 1400's about the same time that the Spanish inquisition was started. So it may have been written in this way to avoid being taken to task over heretical teachings. However then, as now, I am sure they could have demanded you hand over the encryption keys or just find you guilty anyway for having obscured it.
In fact if the book was written in this way for the reasons of protecting intellectual property or prohibited information its a kind of interesting to see how far we have come in the last 600 years - ksgant, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8Did anyone ever think that it was written by someone insane? That the writings are just total jibberish and written by someone who "thought" he was writing in a real language, yet was totally delusional about it? Perhaps the reason that no one has decyphered it yet is because there's nothing to decypher.
They had insane people back then like they do now you know. - halmcelroy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I dont see how a decryption algorithm would help either. Its not like the text was originally in english and looks like this after encryption. Since you dont know what the result would look like, there is nothing to decipher. We need a rosetta stone of sorts to tell us what those symbols mean, and then we would atleast get a start.
- CLIFFosakaJAPAN, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4The Zodiac Killer of the San Francisco Bay area in the 60''s and 70's would taunt the Police with his Cryptic Letters, saying that if the Code was broken, it would reveal who he was. The Letters were sent to the CIA, NSA, and Naval Intelligence. None were able to break the Code and was considered a Fake and Gibberish to throw off the Investigation, but one day, my High School Teacher and his wife broke the code on their own and although it didn't reveal who the Killer was, it shed light on what he was feeling and thinking. Perhpas one day, some regular Joe Blow will crack this (Voynich Manuscript) Code
- boycy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4hmm proof is a pretty strong word there...
- chaosmachine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3it was written in a language only known to a small group of monks.
- ShatterWulf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3P.S.-there are thousands of dead languages that have existed in the course of the world, this is just proof of one of them.
- illuzionmod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Looked at it in a mirror, thought I was on to something there for a second. Hmm actually some stuff seems kind of readable when using a mirror. Maybe it´s 500 year old 1337-speech."
Sad part of that statement is that in 600 years from now someone will see something that someone wrote that was like OMG ph33r m3 1 4m l33t!!!111oneonechucknorrispwnt
And people will think we were completely nuts. - jslice, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3do any of you that commented know anything about cryptography?
it is possible to break codes you know nothing about, and this frequently happens. the only problem is, this is a language we dont understand. And from what ive read about this in the past, there are actually 2 different character sets used, that switch about half way through.
given the drawings in the text and the connections to John Dee, and the time around which it was produced, this was likely a alchemy text and/or astronomy text.
and this is old news, way old news. - pjsk8, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I know about this manuscript. It's one of the ancient manuals on the much sought-after female orgasm (which was considered to be a myth at that time).
- zirth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Looked at it in a mirror, thought I was on to something there for a second. Hmm actually some stuff seems kind of readable when using a mirror. Maybe it´s 500 year old 1337-speech.
- psilvestri, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Lets be realistic. This is obviously the recipe for refining the raw SPICE so it can be used by the Spacing guild to fold space. Duh.
Long live the fighters! - illegal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1how come noone knows the translation?
- martron3000, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6STOP ! Don't read that manuscript--you'll unleash the wrath of Yog-Soggoth !!
- gadlaw, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Looks like the work of a obsesssive compulsive person who didn't have the education to actually use words but only letters in various sequences. He had the general idea of what a book should look like and that it should be roughly divided into chapters. The author also knew to doodle illustrations, getting only a few that actually looked like actual plants. An obsessive compulsive person from a family wealthy enough to indulge him. They can't break the code because there is no code. Also, crop circles are the result of people with ropes and boards going out into fields.
- trunkster, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Be funny if some kid was just playing around (and had good handwriting I suppose..) and wrote up something. Now hundreds of years later we are trying to figure out what it means.
- davidleeroth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1One of the letters looks like this : http://www.adventisti.lv/blog/wp-content/images/command-key.jpg
- blincoln, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6"just doens't make sense they couldn't decifer a single word."
It's almost impossible to decipher text when you know next to nothing about what it deciphers to. No one even knows what language it supposedly represents - if any at all. - plasticated, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Its the document Jobs wrote to the devil, exchanging his soul for the information on how to take over the world (which turned out to be the ipod business plan). You can see an extensive use of the Apple 'hash' symbol.
- asquith, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Go here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/stoke/features/2004/02/voynich.shtml
- freebirdpat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It could be music sheet notes as far as anyone knows.
- Jimzip, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2That's probably what happened.
I've read a book about the manuscript, and it seems that it was viewed by many people as a very important and expensive document way back a couple of hundred years ago. It's been bought and sold to various people all over the world, and not one of the people who have studied it, some of which nearly dedicated their entire lives, have figured out what it means. The writing isn't the only part of it, there are many pages of drawings, weirdly depicted people in pools etc.
Anyway, I stopped reading the book about half way because I got bored, it was detailing the history of the manuscript and not drawing any conclusions.
Jimzip :D - Raithmir, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2News just in, Dan Brown said to have come up with idea for new book.
- Poco, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Don't you think that GOD would want people to understand what he writes? Otherwise, what's the point? Clearly he would have written it in modern English 600 years ago with the understanding that it would appear now and we would want to read it.
- hobophobe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Finnegans Wake is not "intentionally gibberish" unless your definition of gibberish is to write a story in puns using over 60 languages.
Is it meant to be read like a normal story? No. Is it gibberish? No.
Gibberish is when something is _meaningless_ - Murdats, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1it could potentially be something written in a fictional language
such as how tolkein created an entire elvish languagee, someone could
quite likely have done the same sort of thing here - Pander, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Linear A isn't Indo-European, so it's not even pre-Greek. It's more like Old Italic languages, but not understood or translatable.
- ZiggyNoick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I was not saying that it was absolutly a hoax, but by most probability it was one, and the argument given by the guy was very convincincing (made in a time when mysterious texts were being bought up like mad, a hoaxed one would be profitable, and would be the glorified equivelent of the image of jesus in burnt toast, it could be anything anyone wanted it to be).
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"written down by a kid back in the middle ages."
You mean one of those kinds from a medieval primary school? Must have been a public one, then. - Osjpr, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Don't you love how people say something without knowing sh*t about what they are talking about.
- NewEvolution, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This one's on my list, along with ancient Greek Linear A.
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