unforum

[noam]

[surfzoned]

Cipher/Meta questions.

[petunia]

Re: In reply

[Sylvia]

new open case: OC 0702

[petunia]

Yay! I forgot to ask though: Who is "Clerk"? He commented on Ethan's blog yesterday.

OC0702: Looks like Greek to me. Badumbum.

[noam]

Just some image analysis so far on OC-0702. The angle made from the horizontal is about 30 degrees. this would mean that the angle between the two red lines is 60 degrees. There are two semicircles in the drawing as well. Could this, if this case is related to the first one, be an indication of something to do with the Simson Line?

I was originally going to say that the small black dots in the cipher are spaces, but I don't think that's the case. Some of these symbols are greek, (I see delta, Theta, something that looks like Xi, Zeta, and others), but some look cyrillic or mathematical.

The author of Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom) was Heinrich Khunrath. It's about alchemy. If you want to read the whole text, it's here.

[surfzoned]

too little sleep

[mortality]

Emailed for background info on OC0702

[THESB]

I've looked through tons of greek and mathmatical symbols but they don't all seem to be represented here. Many of the lines begin with the same symbol, so it seems unlikely that the symbols uniformly represent letters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols


-Just as an idea, here are the number of lines in each symbol (counting rounded lines as a single line) I'm not sure how to count the dots, so they're listed as periods. This may not be helpful at all, but sometimes it helps to look at something in a different way.

3322.132244
3322.3..233.
3322.32422342422224233223

2223.4.32331222233322

22222.1323233.112331
3.322333224232

223343243322432332.
43323332332433223.3

2232.22432123313233.242242233
2222322323232222333

2332223233.32323.243..223

23333321233133222222132
2232323.42332

223221243223333422333323242
3(dot)22322223323222432222133
133343242

(along right side) .111.111.

------------------------------------

[mortality]

Some of them look like Phoenician characters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

And no, I don't think we can be certain that the characters were written in their proper orientation.

Reply from Ethan

[WolfHawk]

Re: In reply

[petunia]

I agree, some do look Phoenician.

I looked for stuff on the Hawthorne Group, Shannon, and the Scarpelli "Black Library" back when I first got into this because they sounded intriguing, but I couldn't find anything. There's at least two RL, OOG Hawthorne Groups that appear unrelated to this.

The circles & slashes on the right side of the new document remind me of something my work computer does when it's booting up... while still in DOS mode, it does this thing to indicate that it's working on something, since it doesn't have an hourglass icon or whatever. What it does is show a succession of straight-line characters (like -, /, |, \) one by one, but in the same spot so it kind of looks like a line that is rotating. (Wow, that's a really long explanation for something that would be really easy to show you, if I just knew how. ) Anyway, it may be something everybody's familiar with, but this is the first comp I've ever seen it on. Basically it goes like this:

|
/
-
\
|
/
-
\
|

Like a hand on a clock. If you were to think of the filled circles on our doc as "|"s and the open circles as "-"s, then the sequence on the document would give us one full revolution.

So I was thinking maybe that might be a clue as to the orientation of these characters. OTOH, I see for example letters than look like an A, and an upside-down A, and an A pointing to the left; but none pointing to the right. So, I dunno.

If I have time I'll try to sort these letters into recognizable Greek, Phoenician and "other".

[mortality]

Imagine you're writing on lined paper. A "dropped" letter, like q or g, extends beneath the line. A "raised" letter, like h or d, stays above the line and extends upward.

[WolfHawk]

[petunia]

Okay, so far I count 32 different characters (not counting the column of circles & slashes on the right side). Some show up many times, a few show up only once, some are rotated versions of others, and some only show up in one orientation.