Surprising discovery about the Voynich manuscript - it contains hundreds of pictures of naked women, probably outnumbering the pictures of plants. Maybe the focus on botany is misguided!
It could be a poem. Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, with the first letter of each sentence of the stanza being with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the first stanza, each verse starts with aleph, in the second beth, and so on.
It's not that unlikely in highly formalized writing. You see similar phenomenon in very formal English registers, where you might see a whole run of sentences begin with "Whereas...." One after another.
Quantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.
i assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say.
on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.
I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.
It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems
that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the
definition of "fairly unreliable" :)