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Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3 Plants and the moon. For thousands of years, people...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2 An i for an i ? Not nymphs: women! There are...

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #1

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1 Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method. ...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

Retired engineer, 73 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge... Read More »

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From the Rugbyologist's blog:  St. Louis Hero Needed

There is a 14 month old child in St. Louis in desperate need of an AB negative blood donor.

Hospitals in St. Louis are in desperate need of AB negative blood.

If you have this rare blood type, please contact Josh Witten immediately either by email or facebook or twitter (@rugbyologist).
Random Noise #16 : Dangerous Knowledge

... holding the paper with one hand, and jumping up and down as she works the pumping-handle with the other, she pushes dynamite down the tube till the paper cylinder is filled to a depth of about three inches.
...
To see this operation - the brass rods flying up and down, damp with nitroglycerin, and dynamite being forcibly jammed down a brass tube - entirely destroys your appetite for further knowledge.
H. J. W.  Dam
From a description in McClure’s Magazine, August 1897, of the Ardeer explosives factory founded by Alfred Nobel.
The Bookworm And The Encyclopedias


A simple math puzzle.

A set of 10 encyclopedias is sitting on a bookshelf in left-to-right numerical order.

Each single volume contains 1,000 pages.    

A bookworm eats its way directly and linearly through them in a straight line.

It starts on page 1 of volume 1.

It ends on page 1,000  of volume 10.

Question:    Not counting any covers, flysheets, etc., how many pages does the bookworm eat ?

I intend to post my answer next Monday,
or before that if anyone comments with a solution that I agree with.
The Silent Ape : On The Origins Of Language

This article is a highly speculative account of how our distant ancestors evolved the capacity for speech, together with the evolved capacities that would later be exapted to the behavioural functions of reading and writing.

I shall not pretend to be an infallible guide. Whenever you have a chance, take counsel with other travelers who have passed along the same route before. Compare their observations with mine and if this leads you to different conclusions, I shall certainly not be angry with you.
The Brightest Candles #2

The brightest candles are the people whose light remains long after they are gone.

Imagine all the people
living life in peace
you may say I'm a dreamer
but I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
and the world will live as one.
John Lennon ( 1940 - 1980  ) Imagine
New Hominid Discovered :  Anoiapithecus brevirostris

Edit: were you looking for - New Hominid discovered in Denisova Cave?

New Hominid Discovered :  Anoiapithecus brevirostris

A study published in PNAS describes a male partial face with mandible of a previously undescribed fossil hominid, Anoiapithecus brevirostris.   The scientific name is derived from l'Anoia, the region where the fossil was found, and from the description 'reduced facial prognathism', or  'short face'.