Yesterday, the Internet Solved a 20-year-old Mystery
onthemedia.org
onthemedia.org
"{OR Please see that we all have blood pressure in the normal range & see that none of the rest of us have to take blood pressure medication}"
Now, there's a prayer.
(The alternative was: "Please see that we all have bodily perfection in the next realm, see that none of the rest of us have to bear painful memories." Which is more likely, I suspect.)
This was the way that the Qur'an was originally passed down. Originally, the Qur'an was meant to be a recited work. Furthermore, at the time, Arabic writing wasn't so much a complete orthographic system as much as a reminder of the roots of words[0]
This works well in Semitic languages, in which the consonants denote the general meaning of the word, and the vowels change the specifics.
For example, one might write "SLM", which can be expanded to any of the following (capitalization for emphasis)
1) iSLaM = "submission" (literally)
2) moSLeM = "one who has submitted"
3) SaLaaM = a greeting, similar to "peace" (etc.)
The writing is not enough to reconstruct the entire text, but it's good enough for someone whose job it is to recite the work, and simply needs a little reminder.
[0] In fact, not only did traditional written Arabic lack vowels (much like Hebrew), but I am told that even consonants were difficult to distinguish from each other.
Edit: relevant discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6572466
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> (...) please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.
Even know what the basic thread of her thoughts, its the discovery and how to further that discovery that is the fascination. That is was prayers actually made it easier and leads to other methods to work it out.
> ... attention is of the very essence of prayer. As an expression of sentiment emanating from our intellectual faculties prayer requires their application, i.e. attention. As soon as this attention ceases, prayer ceases. To begin praying and allow the mind to be wholly diverted or distracted to some other occupation or thought necessarily terminates the prayer, which is resumed only when the mind is withdrawn from the object of distraction.
-- http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12345b.htm
So there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, and if you're starting to lose some of your faculties and of this is a device that helps you actually accomplish the prayer that's great... but if you're all like "oh, great, this will get me my prayer points faster", you've missed the point of the entire exercise.
Many forms of prayer, especially the repetitive ones, are devices for focusing attention (e.g. the rosary). There are also parallels in Eastern forms of meditation that employ chants or mantras (e.g. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ).
However since you asked. Most christian faiths would say yes. The form is less important than the intended meaning for a prayer. And God would be perfectly capable of understanding the index form since He is considered to be Omniscient. QED: index form is perfectly fine.
Other religions may differ as to whether the form is less or more important than the intended content so I can't say whether principle transfers or not.
Legend has it that a certain prime follower of this religion could finish the entire scripture tens of thousands of times while getting on to a horse.
But if I were among the faithful, the answer that it's the intent and level of attention that counts seems the most reasonable. A computer using TTS to recite prayers at high speed wouldn't count for anything at all; a prayer wheel would, if the person turning it were using it meditatively (vs., say, turning the thing while thinking about what to eat for dinner).
http://www.reddit.com/r/theroom/comments/1vklp3/i_think_i_ha...
They rediscovered the card a couple days ago and the string of characters only results in the content itself. https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFU...
The solution was someone recognizing the pattern, not arbitrary Googling, which I find far more interesting.
If we consider the actual words to be a latent variable, then we can use an n-gram model to compute the maximum likelihood estimate (sorry Bayesians) using dynamic programming.
There is also the Bayesian approach where you treat it as a Bayesian network and use belief propagation to compute the marginal posteriors over each letter.
EDIT: took a while to figure out the ML approach.
It uses a bigram model and Viterbi decoding. With the right corpora (the repo includes the King James Bible and some Lutheran hymnals, as the woman was reportedly Lutheran) it's easy to decode "OFWAIHHBTN" into "our father who are in heaven hallowed be thy name".