He made graphs and compared the knots on the khipu to an old Spanish census document from the region when something clicked.
"Something looked out of the ordinary in that moment," Medrano said. "It seemed there was a coincidence that was too strong to be random."
He realized that, like a kind of textile abacus, the number of unique colors on the strings nearly matched with the number of first names on the Spanish census.
Source: Harvard student helps crack mystery of Inca code
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday January 19 2018, @08:17PM (7 children)
Er, what? Does anyone have any idea what that means, and how did it help him translate anything?
Were the strings part of a census? Why would frequency of Spanish names have anything to do with Incan strings? I feel like a lot is missing from the article.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Friday January 19 2018, @08:30PM (1 child)
It's a load of crap.
There is no information in the article.
The paper "is coming", i.e not even submitted.
And the author can't articulate their findings in a few lines despite not needing to use any specialist language to do so.
Also, as a mathematician, I'll tell you that the result can't be statistically significant and you could find a million correlations as-good-as, if not better, than what he claims to have found.
But it's a nice way to get free press when websites like Soylent link it in without any further discussion, analysis, links or references.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday January 19 2018, @09:31PM
>The khipus were similar and came from a burial site in a river valley on the north coast of Peru. Urton had
> previously discovered that the Spanish document referenced 132 taxpayers in a village.
>Altogether, the six khipus had 132 six-cord groups.
It takes a genius to put two numbers together! I'm glad nobody moved or died between the two sets of data.
From there, I will posit that the knots represent the amount of cash people paid, not their names. Prove me wrong.
> “There were so many different combinations of colors, whether solid colors or two colors spun together,”
> Medrano said. “This looked like there was enough diversity in here to encode a language.”
No, shit, Sherlock! The Incas
How could it possibly be that this medium would have enough diversity to encode a language? I'm so glad nobody thought about it before, not even the TV show I was watching as a kid (in which the Inca girl read khipus every other episode). We are so blessed to have Harvard geniuses who are so highly capable of correctly explaining their passion to journalists...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
Well, for starters, the names on the Spanish census weren't Spanish names, but Incan names. Ie. the Spanish took a census of the Incas.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday January 20 2018, @01:05AM
Ohhh, okay, that makes slightly more sense of it. Not much, but slightly more.
Still seems extremely tenuous.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday January 19 2018, @08:32PM (1 child)
Very odd. Does not appear to be newsworthy at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 19 2018, @08:43PM
Concur. How about a nice crunchy "breaking news" aristarchus submission, instead?
(Score: 5, Funny) by MostCynical on Friday January 19 2018, @09:31PM
headline needs correction.
Should read "Student Pranks Boston Globe"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex