Tag Archives: united nations

Donate to a Worthy Cause with Power Word Meal!

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There are always worthwhile charitable efforts going on in the world of puzzles and games, and that’s true in the roleplaying game community as well.

Will of DnD Shorts is partnering with the United Nations’ Share the Meal program for a charity promotion called Power Word Meal, a charity venture with a simple, yet very important edict: no child should go hungry.

Every 85 cents donated means 1 meal given to someone in need. A $40 donation is FIFTY meals.

Tabletop game designers from all over the world are helping amplify the reach of this project, spreading the word across social media and contributing to a special gift for donors.

And there is a bonus for any RPG enthusiasts who donate:

Everyone who donates to this campaign can receive a free PDF bundle including an epic one-shot adventure and a new playable species for Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons, letting you and those you love play the heroes in your games that you are in real life. You are saving real lives while forging bonds and memories across the game table.

Please click this link for more information, and if you’re an RPG fan, just use your email to sign up for alerts, follow the instructions, and share the PDF receipt of your donation to receive your free PDF bundle.

And for those unfamiliar with the world of tabletop RPGs, you might be wondering about the origins of the name Power Word Meal.

There are a series of spells in Dungeons & Dragons based on the idea that you’ve learned a word of power, and that by speaking that single word, you can cause a magical effect. Power Word Stun, Power Word Blind, and most famously, Power Word Kill, are terribly dangerous, terribly effective spells.

Which makes it genuinely lovely to see that idea turned on its head with Power Word Meal, spreading the idea that we DO have the power to help others. Not with a magic word of eldritch might, but with a few clicks, a few screen taps, a few dollars, a few moments of our time.

So please cast Power Word Meal with us and make the lives of some deserving strangers better.

Thank you, and happy spellcasting, everyone!

The Voynich Manuscript: Finally Cracked?

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[Image courtesy of BBC.com.]

A year and a half ago, I introduced my fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers to the Voynich Manuscript, a cryptologic curiosity unlike anything else we’ve seen before. Discovered over a hundred years ago but believed to date back to the fifteenth century, the Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written book that has baffled linguists and puzzlers for decades.

The writing, which reads from right to left, has yet to be identified. It’s unclear if this is some sort of sophisticated code, an unknown or lost language which was then encoded, an invented language, an example of glossolalia (a written equivalent of speaking in tongues), or simply an elaborate hoax.

The only known copy of the text resides in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, although Yale has printed replica texts.

From the Yale University website:

Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome. The book’s language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful.

[One of several fold-out pages in the manuscript.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org.]

But computer scientists at the University of Alberta believe they’ve finally unraveled some of the mysteries behind the Voynich Manuscript.

They designed an artificial intelligence program with the intent of figuring out the language in the manuscript. The AI analyzed versions of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 400 different languages in order to establish different linguistic patterns to compare against the text of the Voynich Manuscript.

And according to the AI, the text was most likely written in Hebrew.

Now that they had a language to work with, they needed to begin deciphering precisely how that language was encrypted.

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org.]

There have been many theories regarding what form of encryption was employed in the Voynich Manuscript. Some investigators theorized that vowels had been removed from the words in the text in order to obscure their meaning further, while others have suggested writing that has been mirrored or otherwise written backwards. Anagrams and other forms of word manipulation are a common theory, and the University of Alberta team went with a variation on the anagram idea.

They theorized that the encoded words were alphagrams, anagrams where the letters in a word are placed in alphabetical order. (For instance, if VOYNICH was encoded this way, it would read CHINOVY.)

Turning loose the AI once again under these parameters, they found that 80% of the words in the Voynich text could be anagrammed into Hebrew words. They managed to cobble together a possible opening sentence for the text:

“She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.”

Is it clunky? Sure. But it’s also a partial translation that has held up to some scrutiny, which is better than most amateur AND professional attempts to crack the Voynich Manuscript have done.

The team is currently hoping to team up with experts in ancient Hebrew and continue the process, but until then, they’re excited to apply their AI to other ancient manuscripts to see what it uncovers.

Although we are a long way from calling the Voynich mystery solved, this is a very intriguing step forward for cryptographers and codebreaking enthusiasts everywhere.

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