f13.net

They don't actually know if it's alien or what, but the legendary Voynich Manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript), which to me resembles a roleplaying manual sourcebook from another dimension, could actually have a meaning and not be just a prank as many who have failed to decode it had concluded in the past.


Mind, these quotes and claims are not from The Onion. At all.

Source: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-voynich-text-hoax.html

 

The whole study is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0066344




(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Voynich_Manuscript_(32).jpg)

I always thought that the pictures in this looked like they would be some sort of manual on herbalism and possibly witchcraft or ancient "doctoring" (which many times were one in the same, if methods were scrutinized).  We will probably find that it's pretty bland stuff, once they get it all translated out.

The thing is that, if I remember correctly, it shows plants that are not supposed to exist on Earth.

Also, about bland:

[SFW?]

No, I meant the text is probably pretty bland. 

I seriously doubt it's alien though. 

Oh I doubt that too. Just to clarify.

In that lower picture it looks as though the same word (golfedg?) is repeated several times per line.  I guess this is possibly the work of someone that got ahold of some magic mushrooms or was seriously psychotic.  I've seen similar rants and drawings done by schizophrenics.  I'm sure that disease existed many years ago, too.

So they basically found the 15th century equivelent of Time Cube?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMZtdLra24E

Oh look, it's the full Voynich Manuscript: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/books/Voynich.pdf

sample:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39720/books/page_52.png)

Obviously a guide to making the Philosopher's Stone.  All the great Alchemists keep their notes encoded.

I am not sure that means anything. I saw some exotic animal-books recently - from the time of Maro Polo - and while the images of rhinoceros were decently realistic (although with excessive 'armor plates') the book also featured unicorns. Including a description of the uses for its horn.

So it might be authentic and contain what passed as 'truth' for the author. Or maybe it was just an intellectual exercise by someone who liked ciphers and language.

Surely you're not suggesting that unicorns aren't real...  :oh_i_see:

Clearly it's the log of a 15th century scientist who was abducted by aliens/fell through a portal/discovered a stargate, and was transported to an alien world.  There, he learned the native language, and tried to keep a log of all the wondrous sites he witnessed.

Clearly.

I sense sarchasm there. Can you prove that's not what actually happened, Rishathra?

The onus is never on anyone to prove what hasn't happened, but rather to prove what has happened. Skeptics are always the de facto winner until proven otherwise.

So, your question is sorta goofy.

Edit: This is why religious zealots (and just people who generally believe shit blindly) are a dying breed.

FIFY




Sorry!

As Sagan popularized, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Except I WAS making fun of the religious zealots' faulty logic.  :why_so_serious:

Probably a case of a fake language made up by schizophrenia with a good dose of hypergraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia). The repeated words are an interesting 'tell', if you ask me. The delusional construct is so abstract that the 'rules' of language itself dissolve in the mind of the author.

Not sarcasm.  More like that would be totally cool if that's what it was, but yeah, most likely it's just some schizo.  In fact, my first thought when reading about it was 'cool, aliens!'

(http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQiet_bv3eE-QlcEAuoWTCxXWFGgoVaJYcfqovXchLajoX-zUYm)

That's my favorite episode ever.  I was young enough that it genuinely creeped me out.

IT'S A COOKBOOK!

I've seen those claims before, but until something substantive comes out of it I don't see what the point of it is.  The fact that letters seem to match real language patterns suggests it's not in any kind of complex code, but since it doesn't match patterns of any known language, and we don't even know what the topic is, we still can't know what it means, if anything.

The most worrying thing for me in the book is less the text and more the illustrations.  I don't know enough about botany to be able to back this up myself, but I've spoken with people who are pretty confident that a lot of the illustrations are just composites of various types of plant parts combined in weird ways, which suggests to me either the book is based on fantasy/hearsay, or deliberate intellectual dishonesty, neither of which really instill me with a lot of hope in the book being translated.

Skeptoid did an interesting article about it, (http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252) if you want a good read (their take on these kinds of things is generally pretty interesting, I think).

I don't know what it is, but I know it needs to be the plot device for a Ubisoft game.

It's worth noting that PLOS ONE is not exactly at the pinnacle of scientific integrity. It isn't tabloid science by any means, but they cut some corners on the peer review process in some ways and also charge authors to publish, which to my mind creates a bit of a conflict of interest.

Well, there's that and then there's the crazy Pink Floyd video illustrations. 

I think that possibility has been investigated, and the conclusion was that because the script and "language" didn't seem to evolve over the course of the writing, it is probably not the product of a schizophrenic.  The letters and "words" are pretty much the same regardless of where they appear.

--Dave

(http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/voynich_manuscript.png)

I'm genuinely kind of curious about the alien thing, now.  I'm not super informed about the topic, but this is the first time I'd heard it mentioned in relation to this book.  Is it just "we don't know, therefore aliens" or is there an actual theory somewhere?  Do they think an alien wrote it, like, on parchment, with a quill pen or whatever?  Or someone went to an alien world and wrote about it, but for some reason could only write in Elvish?  There aren't pictures of aliens, or alien planets, or flying saucers, or anything obviously matching with the modern popular image of aliens, and we don't know what the text is saying, so I'm not seeing the alien connection... where is the alien connection?  WHERE IS IT?

(http://i.imgflip.com/26am.jpg)

I love weird stuff like this. The fact that it exists is awesome, and if it's a hoax then kudos to the hoaxers.

There you go:

http://ancientvisitors.blogspot.com/2012/04/voynich-manuscript-could-be-ancient.html

http://skepticalhumanities.com/2011/02/19/is-the-voynich-manuscript-the-product-of-an-alien-intelligence/

http://reinep.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/new-analysis-voynich-manuscript-seems-to-be-written-in-alien-code/

http://thehairpin.com/2011/02/aliens-left-their-book-behind-in-the-1400s

http://bruhaspati.com/mysteries/mysterious-voynich-manuscript-written-in-alien-code.html

http://ancientvisitors.blogspot.com/2012/04/voynich-manuscript-could-be-ancient.html


... and so on.

To balance out things a bit, here's a woman who claims to know the plants in the book and understand some of the code.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RxLFL80NB8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f92RAhdgpx4

It could simply be a very unimaginative and uncreative schizophrenic.

Hehe I love that. Whole world full of smart people going, "What is this document, might not ever know!"

Then some random women on youtube is all like, "Hey guys, its not really that hard, here is my logical argument and evidence..."

Uh-oh. She had to rethink her theory. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Kstg2YvyE)

I've always found this interesting. For the amount of dead languages in our history, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a detailed manuscript of something, with Voynich-A and Voynich-B being a sort of rosetta stone for each other. And that could make sense if the stack of papers was originally two separate books that someone hastily or mistakenly put in the wrong order before binding, interspersing the pages and therefore mixing pages from what were actually two separate books.

I understand some think it's a hoax, and skeptoid talked about marketing collateral. But 240 pages of first-use parchment seems like an Ocean's Eleven level of absurd over-investment in a scam or to peddle service. We're not talking reams of paper from Staples here, nor anywhere near the density of literacy we have nowadays.

Having said all that though, I'm thinking this is a travelogue of Atlantis  :grin:

Admit it.  You're stalking this woman aren't you.

Ehr.. no. Not at all. She is the kind of  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL1f9lrPGJM)crazy I don't like one bit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13HVPRSmtl8).

She gives off a definite Amish vibe.  Has the missing-teeth lisp and everything.