Skepchick Quickies, 2.21
- Is the Voynich Manuscript the product of an alien intelligence? Spoiler alert: no. But the story is interesting nonetheless. (From Bob.)
- Going undercover at Christian pregnancy centers that lure women in with false promises of medical care. (From George.)
- On women’s and men’s tears. (From nowoo.)
- At Science-Based Parenting, some thoughts on students and diversity in engineering week.
Someone should ask Michael Drosnin what the Voynich Manuscript says. Would the result be nonsense squared?
” Boehner’s tears, and Glenn Beck’s, are trivial — tears of maudlin sentiment, because they have mythologized and melodramatized the importance of their own lives. It’s repellent. ” — so…damn…true
I have heard that these Xian crisis pregnancy centers are often connected to Xian adoption agencies. So they want to encourage desperate women and teens to bring their pregnancies to term SO THAT they can then arrange for the baby to be adopted by a nice Xian family. Naturally the adoption agencies don’t arrange adoptions for free, so it is in their interest to encourage women to dedicate their bodies and health (including their future health) to the production of adoption-ready babies.
Going farther than that, apparently pregnant teens who have agreed to bring their pregnancies to term and to give up their babies for adoption are offered a place to live during the pregnancy with a nice Xian family. Who, if the woman begins to think she might like to keep the baby after all, tell her she is selfish, doesn’t have the resources to raise a child, and, because she’s a slut (getting pregnant like that!) and (if she was considering abortion) evil, she is not capable of being a good mother.
I can’t find the link where I originally read a woman’s narrative about her own painful experiences in this regard. Does anyone else know it? When I type some likely search terms into Google I just get links to Xian Crisis Pregnancy Centers!
Thanks for the mention, Jen!
I deciphered the last line of the Voynich Manuscript, btw. It’s “The Artistocrats!”
B
Not to go a little off-topic here, but us bench-warmers on my softball team used to discuss whether there was crying in softball. Now, we knew there is no crying in baseball, but softball is not baseball, so there might be crying in softball. I don’t think we ever came to a satisfactory conclusion, which was good because we could always bring it up again when we got bored with the game. (There definitely is a lot of boredom in both baseball and softball, though not nearly as much as in golf.)
When people are asked to make up random sequences, the results are pretty non-random. For example, way too few repeated items. I wonder if any of the statistical analyses of the Voynich manuscript have looked at this. Making up random words in a made up language or alphabet would be should fail the same way.
I don’t know what would happen if a book code or other encryption technique would do to this. Modern cryptography applied to real text looks very random.
Maybe they used Evelyn’s random number book or a similar technique.
Thanks for the mention!
My daughter’s tenth birthday party involved dragging several of her friends through an engineering open house. They had a blast! From doing laser tag in electrical engr. building to being shook up on an earthquake table in the civil engr. building to making spaghetti towers in the mechanical engr. building.
At least one of those young ladies is planning on majoring in engineering.
That article lists a lot of awful things done at those pregnancy centers. But one of the worst happened to a friend of mine. She was a young college student who was about eight weeks pregnant and unmarried. She hadn’t decided whether she’d keep the baby or abort. When she started bleeding, she got worried she was miscarrying or worse, so she looked for affordable health care. One clinic advertised cheap and free care by professionals, so she went. They performed an ultrasound, told her everything was fine, and went on and on about about all the baby’s features and even showed her fingers and toes. She snapped a picture of the screen, which the nurse frowned at, until H. said that she wanted to show her boyfriend a picture of their first baby. Two weeks later she spotted again, but was able to get in to see a doctor at the county hospital. The ultrasound they performed looked nothing like the first, so she showed them the picture. Apparently the first “clinic” had actually shown her a video of another woman’s sonogram who was about 20 weeks pregnant, which would would look much more like an infant than an 8 week blob. Apparently they were so afraid that H. would abort that they gave her false information. And maybe every woman who comes in see a fake sonogram, just in case a woman would decide to abort because of abnormalities.
@rjblaskiewicz: COTW
@rjblaskiewicz: Hehe, COTW seconded.
So as soon as we find some lady idiots who have “melodramatized the importance of their own lives” we can stop taking women’s problems seriously?
Fuck christian “medical” centres, I have more to say but it’s just more swearing.
There’s a really good documentary called “12th & Delaware” about a Xtian pregnancy center across the street from a Planned Parenthood that I saw on HBO last summer. It will be airing again on 4/1. It also was released on DVD earlier this month.
@Tortorific:
I second the motion.
Honestly… people praying on pregnant women… absolutely fucking despicable. Reprehensible… all those other words that mean abhorrent, as well.
@Buzz Parsec:
Here’s a link to a study which came up with a way to generate just the sort of patterns found in the Voynich manuscript:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html
Re the Voynich manuscript, I would be remiss if i did not post this