

The Codex Seraphinianus: Man and woman copulate, turn into alligator - silentbicycle
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200705/?read=article_taylor

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joshu
I actually bought a copy of the Codex years ago. I found one on Ebay for a few
hundred dollars.

It is truly an amazing thing -- it's like an encyclopedia from an alternative
universe. The pictures are incredibly detailed.

It's too bad the fake language probably doesn't code for anything.

More pictures here: <http://www.io.com/~iareth/codindx.html> and
<http://www.archimedes-lab.org/Serafi/C_serafini.html>

~~~
silentbicycle
Well, the page numbering system is internally consistent. It's in base
20-something, IIRC. Though all I figured out about the writing system was that
it has a second (like upper-case) form used for titles. There's a Rosetta
Stone-ish page near the end
(<http://evertype.com/pics/bookpics/RosettaView.jpg>), which seems almost
mocking by the time you get there.

(Edit: <http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html> . It's base 21, more details
there.)

I had it for a few weeks on university library interloan, once upon a time.
Looking at individual scanned pages on the web cannot do justice to immersing
yourself in _hundreds of pages_ of this gigantic black silk book.

~~~
joshu
IIRC the letters in the words repeat way often than one might expect.

~~~
silentbicycle
Maybe they're syllabic (which would be reasonable, given the number of
distinct symbols), and the language uses repetition of a syllable as a case
marker, or just as a stylistic flourish? Perhaps it's used for emphasizing
standalone nouns: Scis-issors-ors (scissors), vehic-icle-ickle (vehicle),
o-sho-cean-shan (ocean). Likewise, if you're carving it in a building, why not
write 'museum' as MVSEVM?

I know it's a conlang, and Serafini is probably just putting us on, but the
ancient Mayan script does some pretty remarkable calligraphic somersaults,
too.

~~~
edmccaffrey
Way too many glyphs to be syllables.

If I were doing something like this, I would assign new glyphs to each letter
(as not to break the image of a fantasy world), and then encode the whole
thing with a one-time pad. Doing so can give you all sorts of weird-looking
words that have actual value.

Does anyone know how many unique glyphs there are in his book? For that
matter, how many are there--including both uppercase and lowercase--in French
(I don't know how many accented characters there are)?

And if there are still too many to be such an arrangement, it is possible that
each letter was assigned multiple sets (a set being uppercase and lowercase)
of glyphs and picking a random number between 0 and twice the total number of
letters in French, counting accented letters as unique letters (manually
picking the proper case).

I'm not saying that he did this, but it's what I would do.

~~~
silentbicycle
It's been a few years since I saw the book, but the total number of glyphs
seemed a lot closer to (for example) the number of hiragana + katakana than
the number of kanji.

(Also, I don't know if you picked just French at random, but Serafini is
Italian.)

------
Hexstream
This could be the base of a wacky MMORPG.

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cdibona
It's funny how this story pops up now and then on different sites. It has a 3
year recycle rate, hopping from geek aggregator to geek aggregator. It is a
great book though, my wife found ours at a thrift store in palo alto, for
somthing like $50.

I'd seen it originally in the mid 80s and was kind not obsessed enough to buy
it on ebay but looking it up in rare book rooms to try to find a leather bound
edition. Great book to have ,though.

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asciilifeform
I am reminded of the "Encyclopedia Butlerica":

<http://www.weirdart.com/pages/ency.html>

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ableal
Alligator can be seen here: <http://the-crime-in-your-
coffee.anagkh.net/?p=664>

P.S. If you haven't read any Jorge Luis Borges, I'd advise considering that a
bug to be fixed a.s.a.p. ;-)

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pookleblinky
Interesting.

Liberal arts majors still have nothing better to do with their lives.

~~~
pookleblinky
I meant that in the sense of "spending thousands of dollars and months of
one's life to take a course that revels in incomprehensibility and
subjectivity, leavened with stereotypical calls to abandon rationality in a
manner eerily reminiscent of a random scene from an Ayn Rand book"

It's just that, good lord, who of us would choose a course like that over a
real class?

~~~
simonb
If this were reverse engineering of some obscure long out of use protocol it
would be heralded as great hacking/fascinating detective work/interesting
puzzle.

