Public
Feb 22, 2015
Crackpot email of the day
I have a webpage on the Voynich Manuscript. It's the most mysterious manuscript in the world. It is 7 x 10 inches in size and about 200 pages long. It was found in a chest in a Jesuit college in Italy. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania went insane trying to figure it out. People keep coming out with theories explaining it.
Today I got this email:
The Voynich Manuscript Book is from another World... similar to ours. The Book was magically written by God, and the original author awakened and found the manuscript like it is. Nobody on this Earth wrote it except God.
My personal opinion - I know because I have been working with God for a few years now.
Okay....
Here's my page on the Voynich, which I never finished:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html
I have a webpage on the Voynich Manuscript. It's the most mysterious manuscript in the world. It is 7 x 10 inches in size and about 200 pages long. It was found in a chest in a Jesuit college in Italy. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania went insane trying to figure it out. People keep coming out with theories explaining it.
Today I got this email:
The Voynich Manuscript Book is from another World... similar to ours. The Book was magically written by God, and the original author awakened and found the manuscript like it is. Nobody on this Earth wrote it except God.
My personal opinion - I know because I have been working with God for a few years now.
Okay....
Here's my page on the Voynich, which I never finished:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html
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Cool, I didn't know that.Mar 30, 2015
Mar 30, 2015- +Bill Reed - you might be interested in the tale of Charles Howard Hinton, who married Mary Ellen Boole. He invented some cubes to help people visualize the fourth dimension. Later he was arrested for bigamy, sailed to America, joined the mathematics faculty at Princeton, and developed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the team there:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/symmetry-and-the-fourth-dimension-part-11/
Quite a family, the Booles!Mar 30, 2015 - +John Baez
Yes, I knew of Hinton. The whole Hinton branch is kind of interesting.
Alicia Boole Stott, another daughter of Boole, is known for inventing the term Polytope for 4-D convex solids and did some geometric work in collaboration with H. S. M. Coxeter.
Mary Everest Boole, Boole's wife, was a spiritualist and teacher.
Quite a family indeed!Mar 30, 2015 
The Voynich manuscript is in a few Tamil dialects:
https://twitter.com/alysdexia/status/465916019274301440
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1yt8cb;/i_am_stephen_bax_researching_the_voynich/chd3wca.
+John Baez unblock my Autymn D. C. account. I left my arguments on why EM radiation pressure can't do net work or propulsion (https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/2niejXnkjKu; in short, there is no net displacement of charges or masses in a wave; then I cited how a radiometer depends on atomic propellant to work.); they sat there for a few days; then apparently you deleted them and then me. If this LightSail (https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/e6QEbgyJrqa) doesn't work, as I predict, then you shall be compelled to listen to me.
I don't remember which other problematic comments I posted on; but in that month you still posted on black hole trash which I confuted on Quora (http://www.quora.com/What-role-if-any-do-supermassive-blackholes-play-in-the-formation-of-galaxies/answer/Autymn-Castleton), Wikipedia, and Usenet; you solicited the size of a black hole if earth became one, but the size along with other black hole parameters depend on classical (nonrelativistic) expressions that assume celerity is infinite. If special relativity were factored into these, all black holes and singularities should collapse and they'd be seen as the fictional blunder they are, and scientists, experimentalists and theorists alike, and reporters shall be seen as the liars they are.
"the hoax theory is one popular theory; it could explain the low entropy in the text, lower than any European language. But it hasn't been proven."
Theories are proven by definition.40w
+John Baez the obvious problem with crackpots like that is that they have only been working with God "for a few years," and they should keep their mouths shut and pens dry so that those of us who have been working with God for at least a few centuries can get a word in edgewise... lol18w
