Current location:	Irvine
Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Frank Zappa - Muffin Man

The Voynich Project
Ever hear of the Voynich manuscript? XKCD had a great take on it today.

Reading into it, it sounds like an amazing puzzle which likely has a solution that has daunted brilliant minds for centuries.

I propose the creation of a massively multiplayer internet project whereinwhich we cut up all the images and artifacts from the manuscript into individual items for discussion. Experts from around the globe could posit their opinions on the images from all their expertise in the world. Getting specific contexts from the images should be able to yield a lot of cultural clues as to the origins of the document. Of course I'd also like to see a rigorous scientific examination of the vellum on which it was written. Not only should we be able to get a reasonable estimate of its original date from carbon dating the paper and ink, but we should also be able to analyse the DNA from the skin to determine not only the species of the animal, but possibly also its country of origin.

With enough cultural clues, we should be able to make educated guesses about the actual language that has been written and if we can do that, then we'll be able to use our contextual information along with the grammatical structure of the underlying linguistic group and make *some* progress on translation.

As soon as we have some confirmed translation, it should be hopscotch to arrive at a complete translation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript