Posted on 02/10/2011 5:02:38 PM PST by decimon
Lol. Maybe he will.
I think HB may have nailed it, though. I knew is schizophrenic woman who drew patterns very similar to the ones pictured. She only wrote in English, but maybe her IQ and creativity levels were not on par with those of the book’s creator.
That was my first reaction.
A person suffering from Schizophrenia.
I thought it looked like lace patterns.
Well, we know how to drive them absolutely crazy in the future. Write a book filled with gibberish and bury it for 600 years.
Actually, the pictures look like microorganisms or botanical magnifications to me. Maybe some past scientist, making copies of crude magnifications, and trying to keep his notes secret, like Leonardo?
I’d never heard of this book before now.
Deciphering the text would be a perfect job for a supercomputer, or maybe one of those projects that link all the PCs in a network to decode small pieces. I think they did something like that for the Genome Project.
any tome dealing with alchemy/magic written in the 15 century would have meant a gruesome death for anyone found guilty of having penned it or even possessing it. As such, it seems entirely possible that the text is actually encrypted.
Demonstrating poor psychologist skills again?
It’s parchment (vellum), not paper. If it were on paper, yes, paper of that era often had watermarks and they can to some degree help with dating the paper. But parchment is made from animal hides and, sorry to say, has no watermarks ever.
Ink won’t help. Even if they determined the kind of ink, it wouldn’t tell you much—there were only a handful of ways to make ink and all had been in use for centuries so establishing a particular kind of ink rarely tells anything about date. If it were some uniqe, modern kind of ink, yeah, that would tell you something—that its not old. But ten-to-one they’ve already done that testing. They can’t carbon-14 the ink but there are other ways (including eyeballing it) to figure out what it was made from.
If it were written in a regular language and script, it could be dated from the style of writing.
But it’s not.
Again? Just kidding. That's what the wink emoticon was for.
LOL - First thing I thought when I saw the drawings.
Youze found my dairy? Is mah kookebook.
I think I’ll get a journal and create some undecipherable “script”...adding some odd doodling, alongside. Then I’ll find out how best to preserve it and safely secret it away. Maybe I can throw some future society for a loop. (:-D
Dude obviously had the Spirograph Professional Edition Deluxe set.
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To me, this is the most valuable bit in the entire article.
There is nothing so full of promise than the ability of millions of eyeballs to see the manuscript; normal people, exceptionally smart people, even idiots savants. If there is an "outside the box" thinking brain out there, there is a better chance of finding an answer.
I believe the NSA already took a crack at it and came up short.
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