verso-recto

The unique and enigmatic Voynich Manuscript, a six century old pharmacopoeia, which supposedly only returned into the world's stacks after its purchase by a Polish antiquarian in 1912 when the papal college in Rome was forced to auction off some of its collection, may have at least been demonstrated as something other than a hoax, according to one British researcher.

The text still defies deciphering and the abugidas are beyond our compre- hension—even with the aid of bizarre illustrations, but the linguist may have puzzled out ten proper names for plants—apparently as recipes for herbal-cures. Theories abound about what the book could be about, from an encrypted treatise of medicine with secret cures transmitted from antiquity, an undiscovered language to a phonetic rendering of by a European scholar of some Asian text—like the transliteration of Mandarin into pinyin and the Latin alphabet or the addition of invented lower-case letters and punctuation for Ancient Greek texts, which originally had neither, by scholars and copyists—with shorthand and ligatures, that certainly would have appeared inscrutable to readers on either extreme of these aids for reading.  One can browse or download the scanned manuscript from the holdings at Yale, where the book resides.

cosine or god bless you, mister vonnegut

Never discounting the classic novels Kurt Vonnegut Jr. gave the world with Galapagos, Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night and a dozen more, one of the story-teller's simple gifts, long overlooked, may have been in the form of an anthropology thesis—rejected at the time for appearing too unsophisticated, which theorized every arch-of-story, all archetypes, can be represented in eight shapes. Luckily, Mr. Vonnegut later revisited his “man-in-the-hole” and other hypotheses and his lectures and conjectures have caught the interest of others, like the brilliant graphic artist Maya Eilam, who presents these ideas as a beautiful infographic.

devolution or shelbyville-adjacent

The suggestion of one of Silicon Valley's resident tycoons that California governance has become untenable and the state ought to be splintered into six separate republics has picked up some momentum for the populace too impatient for the great quake and letting Mother Earth sort it all out.

Maybe there is some truth to the claim that management is growing impossible and that a unified California is too unwieldy to be run under the former model. The proposed breakup, given enough petitioners to force a referendum on the matter, however, includes a state of Silicon Valley carved out of the adjacent state of Central California which would create the wealthiest enclave in America next to one of the poorest regions. Segregation does not seem to be solution for creating a functional government—jettisoning territories that are of different political persuasions or in different tax brackets, especially when the middle-class is burdened with actually paying into state and federal coffers while the corporations are typically the scoff-laws. Though for very different reasons, this plan reminds me of the upcoming decision of Scotland to leave the United Kingdom and join to European Union as an independent member. What do you think? Is small-time session the answer?

synchronicity

Via the peripatetic Kottke, purveyor of fine hypertext products, cites some stunning pairings of historic events that took place on roughly the same date but to grapple with this coincidence presents some real cognitive dissonance. The growing indices solicited on Reddit point out, for instance:

1888: Nintendo was founded as a playing-card company, Jack the Ripper was active in London, the cornerstone was laid for the Washington Monument and van Gogh painted Starry Night

1971: Astronauts drove a rover on the Moon and Switzerland attained universal suffrage

1977: The last execution in France via guillotine and the premiere of the Star Wars franchise

There are plenty of other jarring, curious moments of history overlapping—like the Monguls fought on two fronts simultaneous: the Crusaders in the Middle East and the Samurai clans in the Far East, woolly mammoths still existed during the time that the Ancient Egyptians were building the earliest pyramids, or the sandwich and the sushi-roll were invented approximately the same time separately by two noble men, one English and the other Japanese, both with a love for gaming and could not be bothered to devote two hands to their food. What other historical worm-holes can you think of? You'll earn a Time Tunnel badge if you can come up with a good one.