Neatorama |
- How Coca-Cola is Bottled
- Ground-Level Traffic Lights Warn People Who Text While Walking That There's a Train Coming
- Every Zombie Apocalypse
- 21 Kitchen Hacks That Make Cooking So Much Easier
- Be the Belle of the Cosplay Ball With This Pokemon Gown
- That Escalated Quickly
- A Learning Machine Made of Drawers and Beads
- Street Justice: Woman Expresses Her Displeasure at Sexual Harassment
- Versus - Fighting Will Get You Nowhere Fast Fellas!
- This Pizza Box Is Made Out of Pizza
- Puppy Joins Litter of Kittens
- 50 Nerds of Grey is Here to Turn You On and Off Again
- Five Smart Tables That Do More than Just Host Meals
- These Pics Prove The Rock Is Truly A God Amongst Men
- Kitten Rescued from Tree by Crowdfunding
- Manga Versions Of Our Favorite New Wave Artists From The 80s
- Black Velvet Nebula Cake
- Gear Up For The Summer Movies Of 2016 With These Amazing T-Shirts
- Kylo Ren with Better Dialogue
- The Kid Who Played Gregory Goyle In <i>Harry Potter</i> Movies Is Now An MMA Fighter
- Not What They Seem - Bob And The Black Lodge
- The “Scandalous” Women of the ’90s
- Love Walt Disney World? Now You Can Live There!
- Cracking the Voynich
| Posted: 30 Apr 2016 04:00 AM PDT Well, it was “bottled” in 1965, in recycled bottles, too. Here we get to see the process, all grooved up with hepcat teens doing their thing. If you are old enough, you’ll even sing along with the instrumental tune… “Things go better with Coca-Cola, things go better with Coke.” Can you imagine the mind-numbing job of looking at bottles go by, checking for nicks and chips, all day, every day? I’m hoping those guys get to drive a truck or something at least one day a week. I know there weren't many chipped bottles, because the grocer would examine them before he's give you the deposit money. Two cents a bottle. Watching these machines do their job on thousands of bottles at once is hypnotic. That’s what it took to bring you such a groovy drink. -via Digg  | ||||||||
| Ground-Level Traffic Lights Warn People Who Text While Walking That There's a Train Coming Posted: 30 Apr 2016 02:00 AM PDT
Do you like to type out text messages on your phone while walking? That's fine, so as long as you don't get hit by a train. Tragically, that happened to a 15-year old girl in Augsburg, Germany. She died. So the city of Augsburg took action. It installed traffic lights at train crossings on the ground, where they would fall into the peripheral vision of texters. The Daily Mail reports on this and other efforts around the world to prevent texting accidents:
-via The Contemporist | ||||||||
| Posted: 30 Apr 2016 12:00 AM PDT The U.S. military is the world’s premiere fighting force, but only in real life. They are no match for the undead. Not even when they team up with NATO or another group of allies. That’s a necessary plot hole in any zombie apocalypse story. It’s like killing off a child protagonist’s parents, because otherwise they’d be protecting the child and preventing dangerous adventures. One of these days, someone is going to produce a film in which military strategists are the heroes who actually save the world from a zombie infection. That would be cool. This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic. | ||||||||
| 21 Kitchen Hacks That Make Cooking So Much Easier Posted: 29 Apr 2016 11:00 PM PDT You want to keep your pot on the stove from boiling over? Place a wooden spoon over the top. This pops the bubbles as they rise to the top and before they spill over.
Would you like to shuck a strawberry without mutilating it? Shove a straw through the bottom to core it like an apple. These are just 2 of 21 handy kitchen hacks rounded up by BuzzFeed. Check them all out, including how to peel a mango with a glass and how to get perfectly clear ice cubes. | ||||||||
| Be the Belle of the Cosplay Ball With This Pokemon Gown Posted: 29 Apr 2016 10:00 PM PDT We've seen a litteral Poke Ball Gown before, but if you want to cosplay in full formal style while actually appearing as a character, be sure to head over to RageCostumes' store where you can get your hands on this incredible Venusaur Ball Gown that's sure to turn heads whether worn at a convention, a ball or an upcoming prom. Of course, with skills like this, if Venusaur isn't your favorite Pokemon, you might just be able to ask RageCostumes to custom-make you a Pokemon Ball Gown with your favorite character. Or just get this Princess Leia Gown (previously seen on Neatorama) instead. | ||||||||
| Posted: 29 Apr 2016 09:00 PM PDT The movie Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy includes a surreal battle scene between rival news crews. After the fight, Ron Burgundy remarks that it was very odd for an argument between reporters to turn into a bloody brawl: He says, "That escalated quickly." In 2012, this line became the subject of a popular image macro meme. People usually quote it when they see someone overreacting in a wonderful or terrible way. Google Trends, which tracks web trends, reports that the use of "that escalated quickly" escalated quickly at the time. You can participate in this trend by purchasing our t-shirt inspired by the meme. NeatoShop products are worn by the smartest, hippest, most attractive people in the world (in fact, they're invisible to everyone else). -via David Thompson | ||||||||
| A Learning Machine Made of Drawers and Beads Posted: 29 Apr 2016 08:00 PM PDT Can a machine learn from experience? Of course they do, we have artificial intelligence computer programs that learn from experience, from people, and from other computers. But all that had to start somewhere. In 1961, Donald Michie built a device called MENACE, which stands for Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine (Noughts and Crosses is known as Tic-Tac-Toe in America). It was made out of a bunch of matchboxes and a supply of glass beads. In 2010, artist Julien Prévieux built a nice version of that same machine, called MENACE 2, with tiny drawers that resemble a library card catalog and a huge supply of colored beads. But what’s really mind-blowing is how it works. Many young engineers have recreated the project, but it’s new to me, and is a nuts-and-bolts lesson in how machines learn.
To explain the process, we are led through a game of Tic-Tac-Toe and the consequences of winning or losing. Oh yeah, it’s slow and tedious, but it works, and eventually MENACE will defeat almost any player (although I wonder if there's been games played between two such devices). You can see how electronic computers can do this much quicker, but you’ll also see how the human brain is still much better at learning. -via Metafilter | ||||||||
| Street Justice: Woman Expresses Her Displeasure at Sexual Harassment Posted: 29 Apr 2016 07:00 PM PDT In an elevator in China, a man gets handsy with a woman. After he's had plenty of warning, she delivers a right cross, then a groin kick that puts him on the floor. She follows up with a knee to his face. It's a lovely, heart-warming scene. The origin of this video is uncertain. Mashable reports that some people think that it's fake. But a Chinese news outlet has confirmed that the woman is an actress named Du Qiao. She says that it's real:
-via Ace of Spades HQ | ||||||||
| Versus - Fighting Will Get You Nowhere Fast Fellas! Posted: 29 Apr 2016 06:00 PM PDT Versus by Zerobriant Man, it seems all the superheroes in the world are at odds these days, and the versus films and storylines just keep rolling out. When are they going to learn that working together is the only way to rid the world of evil forces and make countries like America great again? Of course, this bickering and battling is a reflection of our society as a whole, with Cap battling to retain his privacy and Supes representing the immigrants who immigrated to our land seeking a better life. Is your heart made of iron, Mr. Stark? Do you no longer remember what it's like to be an outsider Mr. Wayne? Bring the battle to your everyday life with this Versus t-shirt by Zerobriant, it's the fresh way to fight for your right to be geeky! Visit Zerobriant's Facebook fan page, official website, Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more hard hitting designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| This Pizza Box Is Made Out of Pizza Posted: 29 Apr 2016 06:00 PM PDT The owner of Vinnie's Pizzeria, Sean Berthiaume, must have been channeling Xzbit earlier this week when he thought to himself, "Yo Dawg, I heard you liked pizza, so I put your pizza in a box made from pizza." But lo and behold here is the world's first ever entirely edible pizza box that really works as more of a pizza sandwich than a functional box. This isn't Sean's first brush with pizza glory. In fact, just last year he introduced the pizza-topped with slices of smaller pizzas. One thing's for sure, when we finally enter a true world of pizzaception, it will be served up at Vinnie's. | ||||||||
| Posted: 29 Apr 2016 05:00 PM PDT A Chihuahua puppy named Bobby was only two days old when his mother was hit by a car and killed. The Michigan Human Society took him in, but he was so young, what to do? They had a cat in residence with a litter of young kittens, and they just gave Bobby to her. Gwen the mother cat took to him like he was just another kitten. Six weeks later, Bobby has settled into his new family just fine. The cats and puppy are all living with a foster family until they are old enough to leave Gwen and find forever homes. -via Buzzfeed | ||||||||
| 50 Nerds of Grey is Here to Turn You On and Off Again Posted: 29 Apr 2016 04:00 PM PDT There are those who think geeks aren't very sexual, but the reality is that the average person just doesn't understand their special kinks. Fortunately for the geeks looking for hot reading material (and those looking for new pickup lines to catch the geek of their dreams), there's a Twitter account called 50 Nerds of Grey just ready to get you as hot and bothered as an overloaded server. Best of all for fans of the IT Crowd, the mere fact that it has Moss as the profile picture makes it nearly impossible to read without hearing his charmingly nasal voice in your head. Via Geek Girls | ||||||||
| Five Smart Tables That Do More than Just Host Meals Posted: 29 Apr 2016 03:00 PM PDT Imagine a coffee table in your living room with an embedded computer. One that you could put your drink or even dinner on and not worry about ruining. One that you could even order dinner from! Use it for playing music, surfing the web, watching TV, or playing games with your friends. There are even touch screen models that won’t mind a few drinks set on top. Check out five different models of these smart tables, with different features and different prices, at Housely. | ||||||||
| These Pics Prove The Rock Is Truly A God Amongst Men Posted: 29 Apr 2016 02:00 PM PDT The man formerly known as The Rock but now known as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not made from the same stuff as you and I, and he's capable of performing feats no normal human could handle. Most foodies can only dream of scarfing down 4 double dough pizza pies in one day, but that's just how Dwayne Johnson does cheat days. Wish you could befriend and tame horses so they'll pose with you in pictures? The Rock has been there, done that and has the picture to prove it. The Rock is also a superhuman caring machine, and between buying his mom a new car, saving his puppy from drowning and visiting a young fan at the children's hospital just to make her day he has definitely earned his halo! See 23 Ridiculous Things The Rock Does That No Normal Person Can here | ||||||||
| Kitten Rescued from Tree by Crowdfunding Posted: 29 Apr 2016 01:00 PM PDT A 6-month-old cat named Boots became stuck high in a tree in Melbourne, Australia, early on Wednesday morning. The RSPCA and the local fire brigade declined to help. The cat’s owner couldn’t afford to hire a professional animal rescue service, and the tree branches were too spindly for anyone to climb. | ||||||||
| Manga Versions Of Our Favorite New Wave Artists From The 80s Posted: 29 Apr 2016 12:00 PM PDT In the 1980s Japanese comic artists were just as obsessed with the New Wave music scene as the rest of the world, and their obsession spilled out onto the pages of manga magazines. Drawing these musical characters in a manga art style magically transforms those famous faces into something fresh and new again, like a caricature only less jarring. In fact, our favorite New Wave heroes look oh-so right when rendered in that sometimes cute, sometimes creepy manga style. These amazing illustrations are from a 1980s magazine called 8 Beat Gag, a magical manga mag where we can see Robert Smith transformed into some sort of yeti and Siouxsie Sioux beating Girlschool in a footrace. See Amusing Manga Of The Cure, Siouxsie Sioux & More From The 80s here | ||||||||
| Posted: 29 Apr 2016 11:00 AM PDT Suddenly, I want to throw a birthday party for someone, anyone, so I can try this cake. Alas, it may be beyond my abilities, and it's certainly beyond my existing utensils. Baker and food artist Heather Baird was impressed by the Veil Nebula and created a cake to resemble the images. It’s a black velvet cake (using extra black) with white confetti sprinkles for stars. The outside is black fondant painted with gel food coloring. You can find the complete instructions (and more pictures) at Sprinkle Bakes. -via Laughing Squid | ||||||||
| Gear Up For The Summer Movies Of 2016 With These Amazing T-Shirts Posted: 29 Apr 2016 10:00 AM PDT RED VS. BLUE - CIVIL WAR by ALIENBIKER23 2016 is going to be another blockbuster year for the motion picture industry, and as usual all the high profile flicks are coming out during the summer. If you're as excited as we are to see all the great movies coming soon to a theater near you then you should grab a new tee from the NeatoShop and head to the theater in style! There are some epic movie events on the horizon Because Caps and the Man of Iron are at each other's throats Family War by Andriu Bringing a cataclysmic civil war to their superheroic cinematic universe But the civil war is only the beginning of the blockbuster summer fun Spidey & Friends by ClayGrahamArt Because some old friends are back to teach us about the bear necessities With characters that look more like they do in the book, sending the old ones off into the sunset Jungle Moonwalk by daletheskater Wonderland's battling belle Alice is back and she looks mighty different too Although the Mad Hatter looks the same kind of different as he did in the last installment And speaking of looking different, the ghost busters are back only now they're girls Keepin' It Real by Manny Peters Art + Design Which was troublesome for some fans, but really could have been far worse Anti Bat Squad by Batang 9Tees And speaking of worse, the Ninja Turtles are back to make us miss the 90s versions even more Because not even free pizza can make us forgive Bay for what he did to our beloved TMNT But the bad reboots don't stop there, because Independence Day is back and cheesy as ever Blown To Bits by Steven Lefcourt And speaking of cheesy, they're making a documentary about the guy who founded McDonald's RONALD MCDONALD DUCK by BeastPop Which has nothing to do with the crude food movie coming out called Sausage Party Sausage Party is rated R, but the new movie about Nemo's forgetful friend Dory is perfect for kids That superhero movie about the squad of psychos sent on suicide missions is not for kids But the big friendly giant is coming back to town to entertain the kiddies The Notorious BFG by Inner Coma Clothing Co. There's a new movie adaptation of the WoW MMO coming out Malfurion - Not Your Mana Potion by ArryDesign Which may manage to get addicted guys and gals to leave their PCs long enough to see it A new movie about that war in the stars will fill us full of nostalgia once again And, last but certainly not least, can you guess who else is back? If you're looking to get geared up for movie night then the NeatoShop is the only place to go, because it's the one stop shop with thousands of designs that will make you lose your mind! The NeatoShop is a movie lover's paradise, because for just a little more than the price of admission you can bring home a geeky tee you'll wear with pride for years to come. So get geared up at the NeatoShop today! | ||||||||
| Posted: 29 Apr 2016 09:00 AM PDT Auralnauts have re-dubbed the lines from Kylo Ren scenes in The Force Awakens, giving him the depth of character that you suspected all along in a young emo Sith wannabe. The movie could have used a bit more humor, after all. And it reveals a connection to another popular fantasy world you didn’t know about. They packaged this video as Kylo Ren outtakes, but it’s much funnier than just flubbed lines and breaking character. There’s even a musical number slipped in the middle. -via Geeks Are Sexy | ||||||||
| The Kid Who Played Gregory Goyle In <i>Harry Potter</i> Movies Is Now An MMA Fighter Posted: 29 Apr 2016 08:00 AM PDT The cast of the Harry Potter movies have moved on to the next phase of their lives (meaning adulthood), and those eight movies are now just a fond memory and an entry on their IMDB page. But for some those movies gave them a stigma they've been fighting to shake off ever since, as they try to prove how grown up and manly they are now. Daniel Radcliffe admitted to a drinking problem and took multiple roles that required him to get naked, and Jamie Waylett, who is pictured above playing Vincent Crabbe, was arrested for participating in the 2011 London Riots. And what about Josh Herdman, the guy who played Draco Malfoy's other cronie, Gregory Goyle? The 28-year-old Herdman is now trying his hands in the Mixed Martial Arts arena, battling like a badass to prove he's not just "that kid from the Harry Potter movies". -Via Esquire | ||||||||
| Not What They Seem - Bob And The Black Lodge Posted: 29 Apr 2016 07:00 AM PDT Not What They Seem by Barrett Biggers The owls sit in the trees and stare off into the night, watching and waiting to see what cards fate will play for the people in the town of Twin Peaks below. Some will find an ace up their sleeve, able to elude capture and save face, while others will find playing a One Eyed Jack to be more of an ordeal than a boon, as they struggle to stay alive after playing what is essentially a wild card. But the truly in tune, those who listen to logs, have giants to help them and dance in the Red Room like there's no tomorrow, they know what to say when the owls ask "who?" Only the wisest geeks will see this Not What They Seem t-shirt by Barrett Biggers for what it is- one damn fine Twin Peaks themed tee! Visit Barrett Biggers's Facebook fan page, official website, Tumblr and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more fantastically geeky designs:
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama! | ||||||||
| The “Scandalous” Women of the ’90s Posted: 29 Apr 2016 07:00 AM PDT Monica, Marcia, Tonya, and Anita were household names in the 1990s for widely varying reasons, to the point that we didn’t even need to use their last names. What they had in common was the media circuses that grew up around them. The tabloids relied on them for headlines, no matter how shallow. Every facet of their lives were picked apart, but only the most outrageous bits were printed or aired.
And all this happened decades after the beginning of second-wave feminism. Looking back at those headlines now, twenty years later, we might be horrified by the way women connected with a scandal, no matter how tangentally, were treated. But then again, how much has really changed? Sarah Marshall writes about the scandalous women of the ‘90s from the viewpoint of a later generation at Fusion. -via Metafilter | ||||||||
| Love Walt Disney World? Now You Can Live There! Posted: 29 Apr 2016 06:00 AM PDT Do you love Disney theme parks so much you wish you could live in them? Six year old me would totally agree, but nowadays I'm not so sure I could handle dealing with all the people who visit Disney theme parks on a daily basis. However, if you're someone who wants to live like a Disney Cast Member without having to work then you'll love Disney Golden Oak, the new gated community located inside Walt Disney World in Florida. The designs for the 290 single-family homes at Disney Golden Oak are inspired by Caribbean and Mediterranean architecture, because when you pay at least 2 million dollars for a home it had better not look like ToonTown. Read Yes You Can Actually Live At Disney World! Here's How here | ||||||||
| Posted: 29 Apr 2016 05:00 AM PDT
The breakthrough, when it finally came, happened in a most unremarkable way. Stephen Bax was in his home office late at night. It was April 2013, and he’d spent the previous 10 months poring over reproductions of a 15th-century manuscript bursting with bizarre drawings: female figures in green baths; astrological symbols; intricate geometric designs; plants that seemed familiar but also just slightly off. Strangest of all—and the reason Bax, a 54-year-old professor of applied linguistics in Bedfordshire, England, had become obsessed—were the 35,000 words in the manuscript. Written in an elaborate, beautiful script, the language has never appeared on any other document, anywhere. Ever. At his day job at the University of Bedfordshire’s Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment, Bax focuses on English language learning. Decoding ancient manuscripts is not in his purview. But ever since he’d heard about this mysterious book, he’d been fixated on it: scouring the web, talking to scholars, analyzing 14th-century herbal manuscripts at the British Library. And he was fairly confident he’d identified a few words in the document: juniper, cotton, the constellation Taurus. But before he could go public with his findings, he needed more. On this particular evening, he was looking at the first word of script on a page numbered f3v, which contained an illustration of a plant that looked like hellebore. According to the scheme Bax had worked out, the word spelled out kaur— a word he wasn’t familiar with. So Bax did what anyone would do: He pulled up Google and typed “hellebore” and “kaur.” Then he pressed enter. The Voynich Manuscript—a soft-bound, 240-page volume—has baffled cryptanalysts, linguists, computer scientists, physicists, historians, and academics since it was rediscovered in the early 20th century. To date, no one has deciphered it, and no one knows why it was made. Experts don’t know what to make of it: is it a cipher, a code, a long-lost language? There’s been plenty of speculation, both inside and outside academia. Over the past century, the case of the Voynich has been cracked and debunked, cracked and debunked again, and even—rather convincingly!—exposed as a hoax. Even the book’s acquisition is a mystery.
For a book dealer, it was like stumbling onto treasure. Back in London he dubbed his acquisition the “Roger Bacon cipher,” after the 13th-century English monk and scientist, and put it up for sale. A letter that came with the book suggested Bacon was the author; whether Voynich actually believed it, or whether he simply believed that associating the book with Bacon would help him fetch a higher resale price, is unclear. “I think he’s best compared to a used car dealer,” says René Zandbergen, a space scientist who lives near Darmstadt, Germany, and runs a Voynich website in his spare time. “He was selling secondhand books and making sure that this [one] would get the best price he could get.” By 1919, Voynich had sent copies of the manuscript to experts who might be able to determine the book’s purpose. One of those men was William Romaine Newbold, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking a magnifying glass to the text, Newbold noticed strange irregularities at the edges of the letters. He believed the tiny lines were Greek shorthand—and that each letter contained as many as 10 of them. The letters themselves, he thought, were meaningless. But the shorthand might hold the key to decoding the manuscript. Newbold converted the script to letters, and then anagrammed until he found readable text. His translation seemed to corroborate Voynich’s hunch: The manuscript had belonged to Bacon, and the illustrations showed that the friar scientist had made incredible discoveries. One drawing, Newbold believed, showed the spiral-shaped Andromeda Galaxy—hundreds of years before astronomers would discern the galaxy’s structure—and others showed cells. Newbold surmised that this meant Bacon would have had to have invented both the telescope and the microscope. If his contemporaries had known what he was up to, Newbold theorized, they’d have accused him of working with the devil. That’s why he had to use a cipher to record his findings. Word of the manuscript spread. In 1931, John M. Manly, a Chaucer expert at the University of Chicago—who’d been “dabbling” with the manuscript for years—published a paper that erased Newbold’s findings: Those irregularities at the edge of the letters weren’t shorthand; they were simply cracks in the ink. But Manly’s discovery only fueled the public’s desire to understand the mysterious manuscript. Before long, experts from every field had joined the effort: Renaissance art historians, herbalists, lawyers, British intelligence, and teams of amateurs. Even William Friedman, who had led the team that solved Japan’s “unbreakable” Purple cipher in World War II and had since become head cryptanalyst at the National Security Agency, took a crack at it. He never got close to solving it. There are lots of questions surrounding the Voynich manuscript, but the most essential is: What is it? Because of the numerous illustrations of plants, many believe the manuscript may be an herbalist’s textbook, written in some kind of cipher or code—and the two terms are not synonymous. Technically, a code can only be cracked if you have—or can figure out—the guide to that code. A cipher is a more flexible algorithm, say, where one letter is substituted for another. (For a simple example, a = p.) There are a number of ways to crack a cipher, but one common technique is frequency analysis. You count all the characters, find which are most common, and match that against a similar pattern in a known language. More elaborate ciphers might require different kinds of frequency analysis or other mathematical methods. What Friedman saw—and what makes the Voynich so compelling—is that the text isn’t random. There are clear patterns. “There’s a set number of characters, an ‘alphabet’ with letters that repeat,” says Elonka Dunin, a Nashville video game designer and author of The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms who created her own page-for-page replica of the Voynich (just for fun!). But she has doubts that the book is a cipher. “Ciphers back then were just not that sophisticated. With modern computers, we can crack these things quite quickly.” But a computer hasn’t yet, and that’s a red flag. Back in 1959, Friedman came to the same conclusion. Never able to crack the code, he believed the text was “an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type”—in other words, a language made up from scratch. Some agree. But others think the words might be a language of another kind. Which brings us to Bax. It took a split second for Bax's Google results to confirm that kaur was a name in Indian herbal guides for black hellebore. It was a match! “I almost jumped up and down,” he says. “All of the months and months of work were starting to show some cracks in the armor of the manuscript.” That night, he couldn’t sleep. He kept going over the research in his head, expecting to come up with a mistake. If he was right—if certain words were identifiable as plant names—then his findings agreed with Friedman: The book was not a cipher. But unlike Friedman, Bax didn’t think the language was made up. He was convinced that it resembled a natural language. He’s not alone. One study of the Voynich, published in 2013 by Marcelo Montemurro and Damián Zanette, noted that statistical analysis of the manuscript showed that the text has certain organizational structures comparable to known languages. The most commonly used words are relatively simple constructions (think the or a), while more infrequent words, those that might be used to convey specific concepts, have structural similarities, the way many verbs and nouns do in other languages. However, there are quirks. In most languages, certain word combinations recur frequently; but according to Zandbergen, that rarely happens in the Voynich. The words tend to have a prefix, a root, and a suffix, and while some have all three, others have only one or two. So you can get words that combine just a prefix and a suffix—uning, for example. Further, there are no two-letter words or words with more than 10 characters, which is strange for a European language. That’s enough to put some people off the idea that it could be a natural language. When Bax started working with the text, he treated it like Egyptian hieroglyphics. He borrowed an approach used by Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, who in 1822 used the proper names of pharaohs—easy to identify because they were marked with a special outline—to work backward, assigning sound values to the symbols and then extrapolating other words from these. This was something that, Bax says, no one had systematically attempted on the Voynich.
Bax worked for a year and a half, deciphering crumbs of letter-sound correspondences. Eight months after he confirmed hellebore, he published a paper online detailing his method. He cautiously announced the “provisional and partial” decoding of 10 words, including juniper, hellebore, coriander, nigella sativa, Centaurea, and the constellation Taurus. "University of Bedfordshire professor cracks code to mysterious 15th-century Voynich manuscript," the local paper blared. Quickly, news organizations around the world joined in. Nothing major happens in the long saga of the Voynich without media hype. The last time it had happened, in 2004, a British computer scientist named Gordon Rugg had published a paper showing that the whole thing might be an elaborate hoax created expressly to separate a wealthy buyer from a lot of money. And where there’s media controversy, there’s contention among Voynich obsessives. Rugg says his theory was like “someone grabbing the football and walking off the pitch in the middle of a really fun game.”
Bax doesn’t claim he’s cracked the code. “I’m prepared to see that some of the interpretations I’ve suggested are revised or even thrown out,” he says. “That’s the way you make progress on something like this. But I’m pretty convinced that a lot of it is solid.” He’s determined to prove it, by stoking more dialogue within the obsessive community. In addition to the Voynich Wikipedia page, there’s an entire Wiki devoted to the book’s oddities and the efforts to crack it. Mailing lists started in the early 1990s are still going strong. Reddit, too, has taken an interest, and when Bax did an AMA after publishing his paper, it got 100,000 pageviews. Bax himself has set up a website to document his efforts. He actively encourages participation, fielding comments from visitors eager to help him decode the book. One such volunteer is Milan-based Marco Ponzi, who had been researching Tarot card history when he found Bax’s paper. Ponzi began commenting on Bax’s website, suggesting there might be parallels between certain diagrams in the volume and images that appear in the Tarot. “Since Stephen is so rigorous and so kind, I feel encouraged to propose new ideas,” he says. “I don’t know if I have contributed anything really useful, but it is very fun.”
What will be revealed when—and if— it is? Bax believes the manuscript is a treatise on the natural world, written in a script invented to record a previously unwritten language or dialect—possibly a Near Eastern one—created by a small community that later disappeared. “If it did turn out to be from a group of people who have disappeared,” he says, “it could unlock a whole area of a particular country or a group that is completely unknown to us.” Other theories put forth that the secrets locked inside the Voynich’s vellum pages could reveal a coming apocalypse—or merely the details of medieval hygiene. Some people think the script could be the observations of a traveler who was trying to learn a language like Arabic or Chinese, or a stream-of-consciousness recording of someone in a trance. The most bizarre theories involve aliens or a long-lost underground race of lizard people. It’s possible that the book will never tell us anything. To Zandbergen, whether it has huge secrets to reveal doesn’t matter at all. He just wants to know why the book was written. Whether it’s the work of a hoaxer, an herbalist, or a lizard person, the Voynich is important all the same. “It’s still a manuscript from the 15th century. It has historical value,” he says. But until the truth is revealed—and probably even after—people will keep trying to crack the Voynich. After all, who doesn’t love a good puzzle? __________________________
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A bizarre medieval manuscript written in a language no one can read has baffled the world’s best cryptologists, stumped the most powerful code-breaking computers, and been written off as a masterful hoax. Can the hive mind finally unlock its secrets? 
The story starts with a London-based book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered the book in 1912. From the beginning, Voynich was evasive about how he acquired the tome—he claimed he’d been sworn to secrecy about its origin, and the story he recounted changed often. In the one he told most frequently, he’d been at “an ancient castle in Southern Europe” when he found this “ugly duckling” buried in a “most remarkable collection of precious illuminated manuscripts.”
The first proper name Bax identified was a word next to an illustration of a group of stars resembling Pleiades. “People before us suggested that that particular word is probably related to Taurus,” he says. “If you assume it says Taurus, the first sound must be a ta, or somewhere in that region—ta, da, Taurus, Daurus.” The process seems insanely daunting at first: “On the basis of one word alone, that’s just complete imagination,” he says. “But then you take that possible ta sound and you look at other possible proper nouns through the manuscript and see if you can see a pattern emerging.”
Bax’s proclamation came with its share of controversy, too. People in the Voynich world have seen a lot of so-called cracks over the years, none of which have panned out, so when the news stories appeared on Bax’s paper, Dunin, the video game designer, just laughed. “The media just picks it up uncritically and says, ‘He must have solved it.’ He didn’t,” she says. “He’s saying, ‘I saw this, and this looked intriguing,’ and that’s perfectly valid. But it’s not a crack.” Others criticized his methods: Some had issues with the idea that the first word on a page is a plant name, because many of those words start with one of only two letters. Some found it weird that his translation has three different characters that stand for the letter r.
“Marco is bringing his expertise in medieval art, iconography, and Italian manuscripts—which I don’t have,” says Bax. “This is one of the beauties of doing it through the web.” Indeed, it’s become an international collaboration. Bax has asked other readers to add their own observations in the comments section, and spends a lot of time responding to queries and participating in the discussion. In the future, he hopes to host conferences and seminars about the book, and to set up a site where he can crowdsource efforts to decode other Voynich sections. If the method works, he expects that the manuscript could be decoded within four years.
The above article by Erin McCarthy is reprinted with permission from the May 2015 issue of mental_floss magazine.| You are subscribed to email updates from Neatorama. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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Keep a civil tongue.