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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Here's a PDF for anyone who wants to take a stab :-)

http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2...

Surprising discovery about the Voynich manuscript - it contains hundreds of pictures of naked women, probably outnumbering the pictures of plants. Maybe the focus on botany is misguided!

Hah, on the page 85 that 'P' character got a bit out of hand. :)

It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. Not sure if that could be possible with real languages.

> It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters.

It's not like many languages out there end (or wrap, even!) their sentences with a couple of unique symbols.

It could be a poem. Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, with the first letter of each sentence of the stanza being with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the first stanza, each verse starts with aleph, in the second beth, and so on.

This observation lends weight to my naked women theory. That extravagent P has arms, legs, a head and ... :P

It's not that unlikely in highly formalized writing. You see similar phenomenon in very formal English registers, where you might see a whole run of sentences begin with "Whereas...." One after another.

It could be quite feasible if the symbol has a similar meaning to an article in English.

Someone should build a web plataform to allow to decode it using crowdsourcing ..

Crowdsourcing? Researchers already collaborate on works like this, so all we would get are unexperienced looky-loos and trolls.

(Or were you being silly :P)

Quantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.

You mean like a large number of people with no qualification and experience went looking for the Boston bombing suspect?

I'll leave it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511

I would argue that this is more of a mob lynching, rather than constructive combined effort.

To look for models that work, look no further than open source. Projects with high amount of interest quite often do better.

i assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say.

on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.

Which kid is that? The one that was already missing before the bombing?

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/falsely-accused-bombin...

yes. he was missing, then falsely accused, then found dead.

Your original post could be construed as suggesting that he killed himself due to the false accusations.

he was a depressive runaway and a racist internet lynch mob was threatening to kill his family for something he didn't do.

i suggested a correlation, i didn't propose it as fact. i'm curious as to what scenario you consider more probable?

It seems entirely possible that he was dead at the time that the lynch mob was hurling accusations at him, unless I'm missing something.

you're right. i was considering the events in the order they were revealed, not necessarily the event they occurred. i'm not sure which it is now.

Au contraire. It is efficient but fairly unreliable :)

I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.

It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the definition of "fairly unreliable" :)

Something like _Voynich Genius_ ?

http://rapgenius.com

Nice.

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