I’m Almost Entirely On Board For This, But What About Christmas In Prison By John Prine?  Knowing

I love algorithms. I'm passionately fascinated by them. But it's always good to remember that no matter how clever they are, they have no judgement. This leads to things like this, where Google's top suggested story about the women's 800m Olympic final is a thread from the utterly repugnant Roosh V forums (I don't recommend reading it). This is why supervision and human intervention are so important. It's very helpful for companies like Google when people report this kind of inappropriate content. I reported this a few hours ago, but at the time of posting it's still up. If you want to help out, it's pretty easy. There doesn't seem to be a feedback link inside the little Olympics applet, but if you just search "800m athletics Rio 2016" and then scroll to the bottom of the page, there should be a feedback button.

I think the CD is a shield.

A present I made for my dear friend @ave-puella.  You may recognize it as a short Temeraire fic she posted a little while back.  It’s done entirely by hand, and was my first time attempting borders and illumination.  I’m still figuring out gold leaf, but it was super fun to work with (there’s also some gold work on the border of the third page).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Temeraire universe, there are dragons, hence the second page border.

It was a heck of a lot of work, but was entirely worth it for her face and incredulous ‘what did you do?!’

At first glance this seemed pretty outrageous to me. It just so happens that it was at the intersection of two of my great passions, computer science and manuscript studies (one of which I have a career in), so I was super interested to read the study being referenced. After having done so this seems like a pretty standard case of "scientists propose new methodology and speculate on possible results, media reports those possible results as fact, everyone yells at scientists".

(Turns out I have a lot of Feelings about this, so, uh... here’s a read more?)

Nowhere in the study to the researchers make any claim at having cracked Voynich. All they conclude is that, "The application of our methods to the Voynich manuscript suggests that it may represent Hebrew, or another abjad script, with the letters rearranged to follow a fixed order". They're super clear about the fact that all they found was a suggestion, open to interpretation - "The results presented in this section could be interpreted either as tantalizing clues for Hebrew as the source language of the VMS, or simply as artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming and language models".

These researchers are computer scientists, and the study is about computer science. It is mostly an examination of the accuracy of various algorithms, with a section on what happened when they applied the method to Voynich. Getting into a discussion of Medieval Hebrew is outside of their scope (and probably the scope of their funding), so they pass their results on to other experts, saying, "In any case, the output of an algorithmic decipherment of a noisy input can only be a starting point for scholars that are well-versed in the given language and historical period."

This is where lines from the linked Times of Israel like, "Why the Canadians didn’t tap a Hebrew linguist to shore up their claims is confounding to many in academia" really seem off base. First of all, they didn't make any claims, they suggested a possibility. And passing their results on to let experts in other fields run with them is a great way to do science.

And lines like "Like others before them, I think the authors have gone public too early. You can’t declare victory when your proposal, one, isn’t reproducible and, two, doesn’t result in a decryption that makes sense" seem to straight up undermine what I think is a really cool way for academia to function. Skipping over the statement about declaring victory, going public is a great thing to do! It lets other people be inspired by your work and take it in new directions. Jealously hoarding research is really bad for everyone.

I get that "New Methodology in Deciphering Unknown Scripts Proposed" is way less interesting than "Scientists Crack Famous Medival Enigma Using Google Translate Instead of a Medieval Hebrew Scholar". But these researchers did really interesting work and were diligently scientific. We owe them the same when responding. Instead it seems like no one responding even bothered to read the study.

And honestly? This misses all the really interesting stuff that was in the study! Their algorithim is actually really cool and exciting! They managed to get really good results decoding texts where they didn't know the language or the script. And then they did that on texts where they didn't know if there were vowels! AND THEN they did that on texts where they letters might have been scrambled! Friends, that is so cool and exciting!! It makes me want to go try their methods on Linear A RIGHT NOW!

To bring this back to manuscript studies, this is a great example of how important primary sources are. If you read the responses to this study you get a wildly different picture (presented with confidence) than if you consult the text. This is part of why I get so excited about manuscript digitization - not having to rely on transcriptions and commentaries is really important (plus manuscripts are pretty!).

And on a broader scale, this way that the media commonly reports on scientific studies as unequivocal facts scares me. When you remove all the uncertainty and proposals for further research from these findings, they naturally seem absurd and contradictory. I worry that this can undermine people's confidence in what science can tell us. We can change how science is reported on with our responses.

Using AI to uncover the mystery of the Voynich manuscript - Medievalists.net

Modern scientific methods help decipher language and meaning of medieval manuscript.

@upennmanuscripts (the greatest blog in all the land <3) was talking about manuscript-influenced fanart and it made me nostalgic for when I made this

A present I made for my dear friend @ave-puella.  You may recognize it as a short Temeraire fic she posted a little while back.  It’s done entirely by hand, and was my first time attempting borders and illumination.  I’m still figuring out gold leaf, but it was super fun to work with (there’s also some gold work on the border of the third page).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Temeraire universe, there are dragons, hence the second page border.

It was a heck of a lot of work, but was entirely worth it for her face and incredulous ‘what did you do?!’

Great news for you about the Ethiopic Canon

they should put more words in the bible

Heh, I love this take on this, it’s far more hilarious than my game was.  If anyone is interested in actually playing it, you can download a windows installer from https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7bqhY0xzEu3ckxadVA1d2ZleU0/view?usp=sharing.  If you’re worried about downloading strange files from the internet, that’s very wise of you!  The source code is here: https://github.com/isaach/sdabto.  This will also let you run it on a mac or linux machine.  Click the ‘download ZIP’ button and then run it with python 3 (which you may have to install) from the command line for some text-based good times!  Well, not really good times, as @ave-puella mentioned.  

If anyone actually wants to play this game and is having trouble getting it going hit me up and I’ll help you run it.  I really love hearing people’s reactions to it.

first person computer game: mental illness

> ‘command: walk out front door’ is not allowed. the future is terrifying. staying at your start point inside the house is your best bet.

> good job! lying on the couch and staring at the opposite wall for two hours has boosted your energy. you can now throw away the jar of peanut butter you had for dinner last night. 

> the quest you are following no longer exists. a full day has passed and your priorities have changed. go to the menu to read your new quest. 

> minus one mind point. your last save was two months ago. click ‘ok’ to repeat the ‘get a diagnosis’ quest while under the influence of an unmemory potion. 

> oops! the villager doesn’t understand your explanation of ‘weird brain fog.’ now they treat you with suspicion. looks like you have to go to the next village for your errands from now on. 

> you have collected five good days! check your menu for your new treasure, ‘memory of when i could function’. it might come in handy in the future! 

> cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘cry’. all quests will be put on hold until ‘cry’ is complete. 

> cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘spontaneous desolation’. all quests > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘negativit > cube unlocked! you have > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘only taylor swift songs make me feel anything’. all quests will be put on hold until > cube unlocked! you have accessed action: ‘scream’. all quests will be put on hold until ‘scream’ is complete. 

> this is your new companion, GARGOYLE. he will accompany you on the quest ‘pass as functioning’. keep an eye out for his secondary weapon: whispering ugly truths only you can hear.

I am of the opinion that if Pierre Trudeau were running Canada in the Smartphone era, he would be social media’s favourite world leader.

As @eightfourone pointed out, goalies are not allowed to be captain under NHL rules (part of rule 6.1 says "No playing Coach or playing Manager or goalkeeper shall be permitted to act as Captain or Alternate Captain."). This is because the official role of captain has nothing to do with leadership, it just designates the player that speaks for their team to the officials. You'll see them at centre ice between games getting the refs to clarify why they made a call, or relaying messages to their bench from the refs (Often when a specific kind of penalty that is coming up too much in the game the refs will ask the benches to pay more attention and cut it out). As such, picking the person who has to slowly lumber to centre ice in all that goalie gear slows the game considerably.

The role has taken on all sorts of other baggage related to team leadership and has become a go-to for teams who can't figure out how to actually fix their problems. Just fire the coach and replace the captain and hey! You did things! It can't be the front office's fault anymore.

These charts do a GREAT job of showing the statistical bias towards the captain being the most skilled player instead. Fan bases and media invent all kinds of narratives about how it would be a snub otherwise.

To bring this back to goalies, this all led to a truly surreal situation back in the day where Roberto Lunogo (who else) was the captain without being the captain in any way:

On September 30, 2008, prior to the start of the 2008–09 season, Vancouver Canucks general manager Mike Gillis and head coach Alain Vigneault named Luongo the 12th captain in team history, replacing the departed Markus Näslund.[5] The decision was unconventional, as league rules forbid goaltenders from being captains.[79] As such, Luongo became only the seventh goaltender in NHL history to be named a captain, and the first since Bill Durnan captained the Montreal Canadiens in 1947–48 (after which the league implemented the rule).[5] In order to account for the league rule, Luongo did not perform any of the on-ice duties reserved for captains and did not wear the captain's "C" on his jersey. Instead he incorporated it into the artwork on the front of one of his masks which he occasionally wore for the early months of the 2008–09 season.[80] Canucks defenceman Willie Mitchell was designated to handle communications with on-ice officials, while defenceman Mattias Öhlund was responsible for ceremonial faceoffs and other such formalities associated with captaincy.[5] Centre Ryan Kesler was chosen along with Mitchell and Öhlund as the third alternate captain.[5]

↳ THE CAPTAINS OF THE NHL: BY THE NUMBERS