#Voynich manuscript images professional
#Voynich manuscript images series

In fact, the correct answer is 23 people in the room. If you ask someone how many people would need to be in a room before there was a better than 50% chance of two of those people having the same birthday, the answer you get tends to be a very large number. Human intuition is very bad at guesstimating the answer for this problem, and even people with a basic grasp of probability theory tend to get it wrong. However, it has far-reaching implications, because it crops up in a wide range of non-trivial real world problems, such as calculating the likelihood of any two unrelated components happening to fail at the same time within an aircraft. On the surface, it looks like a harmless piece of statistical trivia. The birthday problem in its original form involves calculating how likely it is that two people in a room have the same birthday, given a particular number of people in the room. The biases above are a fertile source of dodgy research on their own, but theyвЂ™re aided and supported by a less well known phenomenon. A lot of would-be researchers, however, donвЂ™t appear to be very interested in finding out whatвЂ™s already been discussed and discovered, so the list of languages claimed as candidates for the manuscript gets longer decade by decade. In brief, the odd qualitative and quantitative textual features of the Voynich Manuscript are extremely different from anything that occurs in any known language, and I donвЂ™t know of any serious Voynich researcher who believes that the manuscript is likely to be written in an unidentified language as plaintext (i.e.

#Voynich manuscript images professional

To anyone with some knowledge of linguistics, this is a reliable source of entertainment, though often combined with professional exasperation, as in this example: Typically, the author finds some pieces of evidence that are consistent with their theory that the manuscript was written in Bulgarian, or Basque, or Nahuatl, or whatever, and emphasises those consistencies, while saying nothing about the much larger body of evidence thatвЂ™s completely inconsistent with their pet theory. It crops up everywhere.ДЄ significant proportion of articles about the Voynich Manuscript show this tendency.

That tendency is known as confirmation bias. ItвЂ™s a favourite element of conspiracy theories, such as this famous example, the so-called Face on Mars.ДЄ second favourite element of conspiracy theories in particular, and of dubious reasoning in general, is the human tendency to favour evidence thatвЂ™s consistent with our pet theory, and to ignore evidence thatвЂ™s inconsistent with it.

This tendency to perceive significant patterns where in reality there are only chance resemblances is known as pareidolia. HereвЂ™s an example one of the several Elephant Rocks. WeвЂ™re particularly good at spotting resemblances to human faces, and there are numerous rock formations around the world with names such as вЂњThe Head of the EmperorвЂќ. The classic example is the face of Jesus allegedly appearing in improbable places, such as tacos or slices of toast. In fact, weвЂ™re so good at it that we can spot patterns even when theyвЂ™re not really there. Human beings are extremely good at spotting patterns. (Images courtesy of the Beinecke Library) IвЂ™ll discuss it in brief within this article. Those things are:ДЄll of these problems are on show in a recent paper by Tucker & Talbert that featured in New Scientist and elsewhere this month.

Two of them are fairly well known, but the third isnвЂ™t, and it shows up over and again in research carried out by people who think that the Voynich Manuscript is actually a simple problem. When you produce images and a script with the intention of hoaxing, you have three human weaknesses working strongly in your favour. This article is about how issues involved in producing illustrations and a script for the hoax. WeвЂ™re looking at the problems and decisions youвЂ™d face, and at the implications of various possible solutions.

#Voynich manuscript images series

In this series of articles, weвЂ™re imagining that youвЂ™ve gone back in time, and that you want to produce the Voynich Manuscript as a hoax to make money.