The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 600 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet and unintelligible language.

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers — including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame — who all failed to decipher a single word. This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into the Holy Grail of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax — a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

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The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on its contents, but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are:

- Herbal: each page displays one plant (sometimes two), and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbals of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the pharmaceutical section (below).

- Astronomical: contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiacal constellations (two fishes for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly 30 miniature women figures, most of them naked, each holding a labeled star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.

- Biological: a dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.

- Cosmological: more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans six pages and contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano.

- Pharmaceutical: many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.

- Recipes: many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower-like (or star-like) "bullet".


More...

Note to self: the following fits in perfectly with R.

Eidetic memory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Photographic memory, eidetic memory, or total recall, is the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects in memory with great accuracy and in seemingly unlimited volume.

It is said that many famous artists and composers, like Claude Monet and Mozart, possibly had eidetic memory. However, Dr. Marvin Minsky, in his book The Society of Mind, claims to have been unable to verify claims of eidetic memory (see sections 15.3 & 15.6) and considers reports of eidetic memory to be an "unfounded myth".

The Guinness Book of Records nevertheless lists people with extraordinary memories. For example, Hideaki Tomoyori correctly recited the first 40,000 decimals of pi in March 1987, and on November 3, 1994, Tom Groves memorized the order of cards in a randomly shuffled 52-card deck in 42.01 seconds.

Mathematician John von Neumann is said to have had total recall. The late Stu Ungar, one of the world's most successful poker and gin rummy players, had a similar (and profitable) gift.

There have been some cases where young children have demonstrated the ability to focus on a picture and then recall it with perfect clarity minutes later. However, these skills are usually lost as they grow older.

Many believe that autistics frequently display this ability, as well as those with similar conditions like Asperger's syndrome.
Autistic savants are a rarity but they, in particular, show signs of spectacular memory; one notable example is Kim Peek, who can recall about 9600 books from memory.

Without going too much into the reciprocality project (http://www.reciprocality.org) I'll say that it's keen. I'm not bought into everything they have to say, but I think they're triangulating on something useful. I've played around with it a bit in the past, and I'm of a mind to play around with it some more. But then there's this bit:


Otherwise, there is an easy way to start. So easy kids that are trying really hard to be natural mappers often discover it. Get yourself an imaginary friend, as smart as you are, but totally ignorant of the world. Whatever you feel you could relate to - you don't have to tell anyone that you find it easiest to talk to the 1960's cartoon character `Astronut' hovering about in his little UFO with a VHF television aerial on his head. Or maybe Sean Connery's canny medieval investigator in The Name of the Rose would be more fun. Explain everything to your imaginary friend. What it's for. Where it comes from. Where it's going.

At first your full attention is required for this exercise, but after a while the logic between knowledge packets becomes as automatic as driving, and your attention is only drawn to unusual situations: pieces of your map that need filling in or contradictions resolving. It works. With your maps building, discussion of techniques is possible, because we all know what we are talking about.

(Go to http://www.reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/Day1.html and search for "imaginary")


I mention this because in the coming days (and weeks?) you may see me talking to Steve. Steve will be observing me from some distant future, or so I've been led to believe. I'm not sure exactly why Steve is observing me -- or, rather, I'm not sure why I'm being observed. I know why Steve's observing me: he's the cameraman. *I* wouldn't want to have to watch me all day long, but maybe the job market ain't so great in Steve's world, I dunno. Steve's a pretty quiet guy, so there really isn't all that much I know about him. (Him?) Maybe the circumstances are a bit more mundane, and Steve is just some alien operative quietly gathering intelligence for the bloody conquest of Earth. Whatever, just don't blame me.

Anyway, I'll be narrating the mundane for Steve for a while. I just figured it would make things less complicated to explain that up front.