Sean B. Palmer writes about web standards, hypertext, Unicode, and constructed languages like Toki Pona, and shares small code projects.
HN links it for his CSS pixel notes, a 12-line bash IRC bot, and a Toki Pona translation tool.
If you look closer at "michiton oladabas"[0], you will notice a smudge above the first "i" and a spot above the middle "a". So let us read it as "míchiton oladábas". Now reverse it, treating "ch" as one letter, like in Czech spelling. You get "sabádalo notichím" or "notichím sabádalo". Both mean "was investigated by 'no' Tichý" in Early Modern Czech. In 2003, I posited that a Mr Tichý, an early researcher of the Voynich Manuscript scribbled this Czech "cipher" on its last page.
Pros:
* The manuscript has been traced back to the library of Georg Baresch (1590–1622) from Prague. It may have belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) or to his physician Jakub Horčický (1575–1622), both living in Prague.
* The accents are exactly where they are supposed to be in Czech.
* Tichý is a popular Czech surname. "Tichím" is now spelled "Tichým". AFAIK, "sa" is a dialectal variation of "se".
* What would you write on a book you have investigated?
Con:
* What the heck is 'no'?
The hypothesis was met with cold reception on the VMs mailing list and I never cared about it too much but I still find it more credible than the reading in this article.
[0] http://inamidst.com/voynich/michitonese
> No one was applying this past that to then come to the claim the pixel size changed at different degrees, which is the implication that the author of this article seems so upset about. Everyone knows the CSS pixel stays the same size across the entire screen, we don't need to discuss that. We certainly don't need enormous articles like this written to correct a problem no one had.
Actually I think this article was (re?)posted in response to another article[1] that made the front page today[2] which did claim that pixels were angular measurements. So certainly some people have had that problem
To be honest, since this article is from January this year and the other is (seemingly) from 2009 I'm not sure why it's come up today, but that's the Internet for you!
[1]: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668395
In my experience, there is not a real use case for RDF or the other Semantic Web standards. You always have to write domain specific code to actually drive an application with RDF - so why not ditch RDF and write a domain specific data store too? How does RDF contribute, if it neither automatically drives any part of your application, or facilitates linking or relating of mulltiple datasets?
This guy expresses the problem well: http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/ditching
The distinction is also in CSS specs[0] since version 2.1: “The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. <…> 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch).”
[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units
See also http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx (been featured on HN some time ago)
Looks like you're probably right. I googled him and found http://inamidst.com/sbp/, which says "I’m taking care of Aaron’s sites and data, so email me if you have any queries about that."
I initially wondered about it because it was actually really disturbing when I considered the fungible nature of websites and the possibility of someone posting "past articles" as Aaron.
Speaking of pixel measurement of the moon: According to CSS, the moon is 24.3 pixels wide [1], due to the fact that pixels are display-density-independent.
[1]: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx