Did You Run Into The Human One Or The Cartoon One? I Feel That Both Would Be Very Intereting To Do Coke

Chi-rho page from the Book of St Chad, which dates from circa AD 730. It contains some of the earliest evidence of the Welsh language in written form

At first glance this seemed pretty outrageous to me. It just so happens that it was at the intersection of two of my great passions, computer science and manuscript studies (one of which I have a career in), so I was super interested to read the study being referenced. After having done so this seems like a pretty standard case of "scientists propose new methodology and speculate on possible results, media reports those possible results as fact, everyone yells at scientists".

(Turns out I have a lot of Feelings about this, so, uh... here’s a read more?)

Nowhere in the study to the researchers make any claim at having cracked Voynich. All they conclude is that, "The application of our methods to the Voynich manuscript suggests that it may represent Hebrew, or another abjad script, with the letters rearranged to follow a fixed order". They're super clear about the fact that all they found was a suggestion, open to interpretation - "The results presented in this section could be interpreted either as tantalizing clues for Hebrew as the source language of the VMS, or simply as artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming and language models".

These researchers are computer scientists, and the study is about computer science. It is mostly an examination of the accuracy of various algorithms, with a section on what happened when they applied the method to Voynich. Getting into a discussion of Medieval Hebrew is outside of their scope (and probably the scope of their funding), so they pass their results on to other experts, saying, "In any case, the output of an algorithmic decipherment of a noisy input can only be a starting point for scholars that are well-versed in the given language and historical period."

This is where lines from the linked Times of Israel like, "Why the Canadians didn’t tap a Hebrew linguist to shore up their claims is confounding to many in academia" really seem off base. First of all, they didn't make any claims, they suggested a possibility. And passing their results on to let experts in other fields run with them is a great way to do science.

And lines like "Like others before them, I think the authors have gone public too early. You can’t declare victory when your proposal, one, isn’t reproducible and, two, doesn’t result in a decryption that makes sense" seem to straight up undermine what I think is a really cool way for academia to function. Skipping over the statement about declaring victory, going public is a great thing to do! It lets other people be inspired by your work and take it in new directions. Jealously hoarding research is really bad for everyone.

I get that "New Methodology in Deciphering Unknown Scripts Proposed" is way less interesting than "Scientists Crack Famous Medival Enigma Using Google Translate Instead of a Medieval Hebrew Scholar". But these researchers did really interesting work and were diligently scientific. We owe them the same when responding. Instead it seems like no one responding even bothered to read the study.

And honestly? This misses all the really interesting stuff that was in the study! Their algorithim is actually really cool and exciting! They managed to get really good results decoding texts where they didn't know the language or the script. And then they did that on texts where they didn't know if there were vowels! AND THEN they did that on texts where they letters might have been scrambled! Friends, that is so cool and exciting!! It makes me want to go try their methods on Linear A RIGHT NOW!

To bring this back to manuscript studies, this is a great example of how important primary sources are. If you read the responses to this study you get a wildly different picture (presented with confidence) than if you consult the text. This is part of why I get so excited about manuscript digitization - not having to rely on transcriptions and commentaries is really important (plus manuscripts are pretty!).

And on a broader scale, this way that the media commonly reports on scientific studies as unequivocal facts scares me. When you remove all the uncertainty and proposals for further research from these findings, they naturally seem absurd and contradictory. I worry that this can undermine people's confidence in what science can tell us. We can change how science is reported on with our responses.

Using AI to uncover the mystery of the Voynich manuscript - Medievalists.net

Modern scientific methods help decipher language and meaning of medieval manuscript.

I like airplane names that play on the call sign as well. My personal favourite is the beloved Deli Mike, TC-JDM. In the phonetic alphabet, the last two letters are "Delta Mike", which is easily shifted to Deli Mike, meaning "Crazy Mike" in Turkish. Her technicians use she/her pronouns for this plane.

Why is she called crazy? According to Wikipedia:

"Shortly after delivery, the aircraft started to have "random" technical issues and failures. Sometimes, the aircraft would turn its external lights on by itself and then back off when someone tried to intervene.[4] Occasionally, the lights of the emergency exits would turn on one by one from front to back "like a Mexican wave", not all at the same time, which according to the cabin crew meant that Deli Mike "was in a good mood". The aircraft also made "small jokes" to passengers and crew. On one occasion, the aircraft started sounding the master caution alarm in the cockpit, causing one of the inexperienced cabin crew members to panic. Frequent problems with the aircraft included the reading light of a completely different passenger turning on when the button is pressed, and the same issue also exists with the button used to call a crew member. One popular story among technical staff states that an employee fixed the faulty flight instruments of the aircraft simply by talking to it.[5]"

"According to technicians of Turkish Technic, the aircraft maintenance subsidiary of Turkish Airlines, "Deli Mike can fly to the other side of the world without any problems if she wants to. If she doesn't feel like it, she won't move even one metre on the ground." The technicians also removed and reinstalled all systems on-board and reset the software of the aircraft in an attempt to solve the issues, without any success.[15]"

I'm going to interrupt my normal posting schedule briefly to discuss naming airplanes. Don't worry, I'll post the regularly scheduled Friday review after this, but first I'm going to talk about naming airplanes.

When I say that I don't mean naming types of airplanes. I mean giving the airplanes names. A lot of airlines do it. Back in the day you had your Clipper This, Flagship That, Star of the Whatsit, so on. Lots of airlines name theirs after places. Aer Lingus names theirs after Irish saints. SAS names their Vikings. FedEx Express gives theirs human names, like Gabriel, Richard, JobEdokat, and Meredith.

The year is 2023 at time of writing. Clipper This, Flagship That, and Star of the Whatsit are now all relics of a distant past where a plane ticket cost more than some cars and airports sold life insurance at kiosks. That age is long past. Delta, United, American...all cowards, their airplanes long unnamed. Though the practice is alive and well elsewhere, for some reason it has largely gone dormant in the United States. There are few exceptions, but there are exceptions, and there is one in particular which stands out from the rest. Just one carrier on a mission and their 289 individually named flying machines.

I would like to present you with a curated selection of things which jetBlue has named their airplanes. There are many more - 289, to be specific. Take a look through them all if you care to. But this is a list of my favorites. Just a bit of appreciation for a true titan of aircraft-naming in an era where the art seems all but lost.

Roses Are Red, This Plane is Blue (N3104J)

Aruba, Jamaica, Blue I Wanna Take Ya (N2016J)

Blue's That Girl? (N997JL)

Don't Hate Me 'Cause I'm Bluetiful (N996JL)

Don't Mind If I Blue (N971JL)

Blue Kid On The Block (N913JB)

1. Fly JetBlue 2. Repeat Step 1 (N807JB)

Shantay, Blue Stay (N794JB)

#Follow @JetBlue (N334JB)

Enough about me...let's talk about blue (N712JB)

Big blue people seater (N705JB)

Bippity, Boppity, Blue (N565JB)

Blue-yah! (N187JB)

Badda Bing Badda Blue (N534JB)

FuhgeddaBlueDit (N3113J)

Boogie Woogie Bluegle Boy (N3062J)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue A320 (N329JB, an Embraer E190)

My Other Ride is a JetBlue E190 (N793JB, an Airbus A320)

And, my personal favorite:

How's My Flying? Call 1-800-JETBLUE (N715JB)

(Although if you can read that, you're probably too close. Incidentally, 'If You Can Read This, You're Blue Close' is an A320-200 with the registration N729JB.)

The ice we skate

Is getting pretty thin

It signifies our youth

And pleasures chucked into the bin

Mercedes and James Hutchinson

HOOKED RUG

1920-1940

Fabric

Fenimore Art Museum

I love algorithms. I'm passionately fascinated by them. But it's always good to remember that no matter how clever they are, they have no judgement. This leads to things like this, where Google's top suggested story about the women's 800m Olympic final is a thread from the utterly repugnant Roosh V forums (I don't recommend reading it). This is why supervision and human intervention are so important. It's very helpful for companies like Google when people report this kind of inappropriate content. I reported this a few hours ago, but at the time of posting it's still up. If you want to help out, it's pretty easy. There doesn't seem to be a feedback link inside the little Olympics applet, but if you just search "800m athletics Rio 2016" and then scroll to the bottom of the page, there should be a feedback button.

I made a game!  It’s a text-based adventure about living with mental illness.  I pulled a marathon coding session yesterday and ported it to javascript, so it’s now you can play it in a browser without having to install anything.  Yay!

As the subject matter might suggest, it’s a little on the dark side.  Writing it was an emotional but very rewarding experience.  Self-expression through code!

Let me know what you think! 

Yeah man it's a huge fucking waste! Rain falling on me and waterlogging all my pretty feathers when I'm just trying to live my little life. The worst and most wasteful part? The fucking seagulls don't even mind! Those smug fucking bullies flap about and get the good garbage while I'm huddling under this tree, the saddest crow that ever lived. At least the fucking owls, may all their flight feathers fall out, take it much worse than I do and are forced to reveal their hideous inner and outer selves to the world. Rain should fall on them but not me. Huge waste tbh.

You Are Not Wasting Time; It Was Given To You As A Gift, Freely and Generously; Is Rain Wasted Because It Falls On Gardens, Grass, Disgruntled Birds, and Umbrellas All The Same?

Unfortunately for safety planners (but fortunately for arson fantasies) not all of the ISS is expected to vaporize in orbit. From NASA's ISS end of life FAQ:

Most station hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize during the intense heating associated with atmospheric re-entry, whereas some denser or heat-resistant components like truss sections are expected to survive re-entry and splash down within an uninhabited region of the ocean.  

What is left of the surviving components will be very hot and could certainly burn down the goat if placed next to it. The trouble here is that this scrap does not have predictable aerodynamic qualities and the atmosphere is a chaotic place. The debris field when the Russian station MIR was deorbited was 1500 km long and 100km wide. The American Skylab missed the target of the Pacific Ocean and dropped debris on Australia as a little whoopsie doodle. So hitting a target the size of the goat would sadly be imposible.

As for missing a target the size of a goat, NASA has concerns:

...a random re-entry cannot ensure that any surviving debris lands in a remote, unpopulated area. The risks to the population associated with an uncontrolled re-entry for space station are not acceptable.

They're still a little twitchy from the media response to that time they dropped debris on Australia I think.

theoretically if we convinced NASA to deorbit the international space station into gavle that would probably light the goat on fire

Wouldn't it burn up in the atmosphere?

My Christmas card from @goddamnshinyrock just arrived and I’m so happy omg