Starship Asterisk*

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/26/secret-society-revealed-scientists-crack-mysterious-18th-century-code/ wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Researchers Crack Secret Society's 18th Century Code,
Target World's Most Mysterious Book
FoxNews.com: October 26, 2011

<<They're going to need a bigger secret decoder ring.

A team of researchers that made headlines for decoding a secret society's 18th century manuscript is working to reveal the secret behind an even more mysterious book -- one that the world has yet to decode.

Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript has remained one of history’s biggest mysteries: Its aging parchment is coated in alien characters and has for decades mystified scientists. And Kevin Knight, a computer scientist with USC's Viterbi School of Engineering who recently helped crack the Copiale Cipher, believes the same techniques could be used to tackle literature’s great mystery manuscript. “We have decipherment algorithms, but we also have tools that just look for patterns,” Knight told FoxNews.com in an interview. “Those pattern-finders helped us find similar sets of letters in Copiale, and they have already started helping us find patterns in the Voynich manuscript.”

The Copiale Cipher -- a mysterious cryptogram bound in gold and green brocade paper -- is a 250-year-old coded document. By decrypting it, Knight and his colleagues uncovered the inner workings of an 18th-century secret society. The codebreaking team began without knowing the language of the encrypted document. They had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, however, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

After trying 80 languages, the team realized the characters were actually meant to throw them off, deliberately planted to misread readers. With the aid of statistics and algorithms such as expected word frequency, the first meaningful phrases began to emerge: “Ceremonies of Initiation,” followed by “Secret Section.”

Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers the Zodiac Killer sent to the police in the 60s and 70s, the C.I.A.’s “Kryptos” sculpture, as well as the infamous Voynich manuscript. According to Knight, the process has profound implications for unlocking history's mysteries. "Secret societies have had a role in revolutions ... and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered," Knight said. "This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies."

Currently owned by Yale, the Voynich manuscript was discovered in the Villa Mondragone near Rome in 1912 by antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich while sifting through a chest of books offered for sale by the Society of Jesus. Voynich dedicated the remainder of his life to unveiling the mystery of the book's origin and deciphering its meanings. He died 18 years later, without having wrestled any its secrets from the book.

"Is it a code, a cipher of some kind?" asked Greg Hodgins, a physicist with the University of Arizona. "People are doing statistical analysis of letter use and word use -- the tools that have been used for code breaking. But they still haven't figured it out," Hodgins said.

Knight and his team of Swedish and American researchers are wary of the monumental task ahead. "When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. “Not knowing the system is the biggest challenge -- not knowing who wrote it, why they wrote it, and what language they spoke.”

Whatever it is, Knight hopes his findings can shed new light on history: "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered,” Knight said. "This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies.”

But the secrets of the Voynich manuscript may yet remain a mystery. Despite their recent successes, Knight admits that the team has “raised more questions than we’ve answered.”>>

bystander wrote:Personally, I think it's "Much Ado About Nothing".

• What's in a name? that which we call a rose
  By any other name would smell as sweet;

owlice wrote:
More advertising for the movie, hmmm, Art?

orin stepanek wrote:
Hmmmmm! Sounds like this post should be

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be,_or_not_to_be Shakespeare

Mainstream critics further claim that if William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays and poems, the number of people needed to suppress this information would have made their attempts highly unlikely to succeed.

Some Stratfordian academics also argue the Oxford theory is based on simple snobbishness: that anti-Stratfordians reject the idea that the son of a mere tradesman could write the plays and poems of Shakespeare.

An equally simple argument is made by Columbia University professor James S. Shapiro, author of the book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?: namely, the tautology in any theory that "there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship" just because "the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case." He cites, by contrast, "testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else" supporting Shakespeare's authorship.

rstevenson wrote:I hesitate to jump into a debate about Shaky, but being a geometer of note in a past life (high school, that is) I must comment on the idea of a "four-cornered cube". Perhaps in another dimension? Most cubes in our dimensional arena have eight corners.

Rob

owlice wrote:
Ann, I'm sorry to have to point this out to you, but you are not going to be able to prove anything. You do a lot of speculating, and sure, if that's fun for you (and it appears to be), have at it! But please disabuse yourself of the notion that you're going to prove anything here. You're not.

I can’t understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars. (Fred Allen)

neufer wrote:Rather, now that the movie is finally coming out, it was to test the waters to see if there might be any interest in that authorship book that I have been promising everyone that I was going to write for almost 15 years now. Apparently there isn't. If I can't even get past chapter 1: demonstrating that the illiterate Stratford boob couldn't possibly have written the works then there is certainly little point in writing the rest of the chapters and going to the considerable effort of trying to get something published.

Ann wrote:
I, too, think you should write your book, Art. You could make a good argument about Shakespeare not being knowledgeable enough to write the works credited to him. You would need to take care to bolster your argument by quoting passages from the plays where the author is talking about things that the son of a glovemaker with perhaps five or six years of schooling in all probability just couldn't know. Even though I quoted a "snobbishness" counterargument to refute the argument that Shakespeare didn't have the education it takes to write what he did, I nevertheless agree that the question about Shakespeare's education is a really interesting one.

It is also really interesting, and hard to explain, that Shakespeare gave up creating literary works altogether after he had moved back to Smallville - eh, I mean, to Stratford. That is a good argument against the man from Stratford being the writer of the immortal works. The fact that Shakespeare's handwriting was pretty bad, and that no written documents of any sort apart from six signatures remain in Shakespeare's own hand can be used to argue against Shakespeare, too.

Ann wrote:
But you need to address the question of why Edward de Vere allowed Shakespeare to steal his works, if de Vere really wrote them and Shakespeare claimed them for himself. Why would Edward de Vere allow it?

If you can't offer a reasonable answer to that question, I don't think you have a case.

Art wrote:(Sort of like me writing under Neufer".)

Art wrote:
As far as I am concerned Edward de Vere made a Faustian bargain so that his major works would be published and promoted but only if they were edited and written under a pseudonym. (Sort of like me writing under "Neufer.")

[c]Victoria Benedictsson.[/c][/i]

Ernst Ahlgren.

Edward de Vere.

William Shakesoeare.

Ann wrote:
Shakespeare, as an actor, was a living, public figure, and if Edward de Vere used Shakespeare's name as a synonym for himself, then instead of getting himself a nice anonymous pen name he attributed his own amazing top world class masterpieces to an upstart illiterate boob.

Why would he do that?

http://shakespeareauthorship.com/friends.html wrote:
<<[Thomas Greene] was living in New Place in 1609 and possibly for some time before, and in his diary he refers affectionately to "my cosen Shakespeare" numerous times around 1614. Three of his children were born in Stratford, and he named two of them "William" and "Anne," most likely after Shakespeare and his wife. Who was Thomas Greene? He was the son of Thomas Greene Sr., mercer, of Warwick, who in his will of 1590 left eighty pounds and a gray mare to Thomas Jr. In 1595 Thomas entered the Middle Temple (one of the four Inns of Court, the equivalent of law schools); his sureties (kind of like sponsors) were John Marston Junior and Senior, the future playwright and his father. In 1601 he accompanied Richard Quiney to London on Stratford business, where they tried unsuccessfully to see the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke. (Coke was preoccupied because the Essex rebellion had just happened.) Greene was a close friend of Michael Drayton, the poet, and in 1603 he wrote a sonnet to Drayton which appeared in The Barons' Wars; in the same year he wrote a poem in honor of King James called A Poets Vision and a Princes Glorie. Drayton, in turn, later wrote an elegy for Sir Henry Rainsford, Greene's good friend and fellow Middle Templar who he often mentions affectionately in the same diary where he mentions Shakespeare. Some of Greene's papers managed to survive at Stratford, and they include Latin verses and some English jottings about the nature of love.

Greene's literary endeavors (at least those that were published) seem to have been confined to the period 1602-1603, when he was in London finishing up his formal studies at the Middle Temple. He was called to the Bar of the Middle Temple in October 1602, and in August of the following year he was appointed Steward (later called Town Clerk) of Stratford. He held this position for the next 14 years, during which time he negotiated a new town charter (in 1610), bought a lease of tithes (in 1609, as Shakespeare had done in 1605), and was heavily involved in the enclosure controversy of 1614-19, during which he wrote his famous diary in which he mentions Shakespeare. In 1617 he resigned his post and sold his house for 240 pounds and his tithes for 400 pounds, though he complained that he should have gotten more because of his long service to the town. He became a Reader at the Middle Temple in 1621, Master of the Bench in 1623, and Treasurer in 1629. He died in Bristol in 1640.>>

William Shakespeare's masterful use of the English language has captivated audiences for 400 years. He penned 38 plays and 154 sonnets that explored the complexities of the human soul with unprecedented emotional range. His subject matter, from romantic comedies to moving tragedies, was equally diverse. But what all his work demonstrates is a facility for wordplay unrivaled by any writer before or since. Shakespeare's ubiquity on world stages, on film, in textbooks and in our everyday vernacular is a testament to his achievement.