Rosetta Screen 2013-05-09

[RunningBull]

Looks like all of the crystals on the walls are glowing now too. Would be pretty cool if this turns out to be some sort of holodeck.

[Julie]

Oh my! Atsali's stance/expression are kind of interesting though. Kat's in slack-jawed and slack-muscled awe, but Atsali's still got her arms crossed...which makes her expression a little less "Woooooow" and a little more like she's reading what she sees and is potentially disconcerted by it.

But then I could be reading too much into things. I think I'm going to dub today "breakfast burrito" day in my slice of Confusion Corner and hunker down until we get more info...again.

[as363]

I wonder if all that light would be a deterrent to the Vampire girls ? Could be "Crispy Critters' if they show up.

[Dave]

I want a download of this.

It's only accessible by a genetically imprinted Anasazi survivor? No problem. Fry's has everything.

But it uses oauth2 for authentication?

Forget it.

No worries about the authentication. Katherine has a Yubikey tucked safely down in her bra.

The genetically imprinted Anasazi survivor may be a problem, though. All the ones I saw in the shelf at Fry's had the sticker which means that the box had already been opened... the Anasazi survivor had been sold at least once and then returned to the store by an unsatisfied buyer. "Fry's stands behind the quality and warranty" but you know how much that really means...

[eee]

Considering how powerful Glyph is as a language, and considering that a good deal of Sumerian is understood... this bilingual screen could be a very dangerous artifact indeed! If Katherine starts mumbling something about Dingir Xul, run!

Kath: "What's this part here say? 'Darkness beyond Twilight, more crimson than the blood that flows...'"

Atsali: "Should you be glowing like that?!?"

Dragon Slave isn't something you would want to be throwing around in an inclosed space. Even Lina wouldn't do something that crazy.

LINA? Are you SURE???

[bmonk]

No - if it is a "Rosetta Stone", Katharine may be able to. (Assuming she can read Sumerian, instead of just recognising it.)

Kathy is right it just looks like sumerian. This is a link how to write in Sumerian and they only look like what Kathy is seeing.

So a translator will be needed unless she is willing to guess. There are enough similarities that she might.

This is one way to get the thin edge of the wedge into a better understanding of the glyphs.
[throws a lump of clay and a reed stylus into the gaping maw.]

[Dave]

This is one way to get the thin edge of the wedge into a better understanding of the glyphs.
[throws a lump of clay and a reed stylus into the gaping maw.]

We may be about to learn more about Katherine's back-story. In particular, Paul may be about to reveal that she's a country girl, and spent most of her childhood summers hard at work out in the fields of her family's ancestral cunei farm.

(drops a slice of freshly-baked (Unicode 01227F) into the Pun Jar. Tried to do it directly but phpBB wouldn't allow the Unicode insertion)

[Mark N]

I keep wondering if the room that they are in is crystal lined like the one that the Calendar Machine was in. I am also realizing that the shear fact that Kath can use the device showed that she has Anasazi genes which means she has Lanthian genes just like the GG' sand Immortal Politicians.

[bmonk]

We may be about to learn more about Katherine's back-story. In particular, Paul may be about to reveal that she's a country girl, and spent most of her childhood summers hard at work out in the fields of her family's ancestral cunei farm.

(drops a slice of freshly-baked (Unicode 01227F) into the Pun Jar. Tried to do it directly but phpBB wouldn't allow the Unicode insertion)

Would those fields include archeology and linguistics?

tosses in a copy of John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"

[kingklash]

First thing she does, is change the desktop theme. May I suggest something with Beast Wars' BlackArachnia?

[scantrontb]

The ultimate biometric. DNA.

nope... then you'll end up like the movie "Gattaca"... people taking blood samples, etc. and selling them on the black market...

[KnightDelight]

Now they need Monica to translate. Or can Brandi do that? Is this what the library is after? All the stored records contained within. Does it resent the fact it doesn't have everything ever written???

I still suspect there are not simple memory storage but copies of the people themselves stored in the crystals.

Ah, now there's an interesting theory. Charon said there was not even a soul left to ferry across the Styx. Were they all stored in crystals somehow? That would also give more meaning to the spider crystal Lily found. She said it had fantastic capacity. Perhaps enough to hold the soul "matrix" of a human? Mayhaps the people are still influencing things and communicating among themselves in this room. Also, this room may be just one of many such rooms holding many, many more crystals. And they may be waiting to leap forth to inhabit compatible bodies when the opportunity arises. Given there are likely billions of more people alive today than were alive back then, it would be only a small portion of today's population that would be needed, even with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of crystals. In this regard, is the spider crystal meant for Kath, and is there a crystal meant for Lily? One holding what she would need to become human again? Finally, if all this is so, is it a good or bad thing? Could go either way.

On the other hand, what Kath is seeing now may just be a commercial. They gotta fund this thing somehow.

[NOTDilbert]

Suppose the crystal room is a library, meant for posterity. Left there after the final demise of the Lanthians, it would make sense to leave a multi-language manual behind.

If this crystal library is meant also as a warning, it would be imperative to make sure that "those that came afer us" can at least read the terminal, if only to offer a way to access the info in the crystals.

However, the thing that unseats my "warning theory", is the fact that, apparently, ónly the Anazasi can activate portal and terminal.
Why?? There would be nó use in it for modern people. No-one would be able to activate it.

Are the only two Anazasi left, somehow related to some Cycle even bígger than the calendar-machine induced one. Are they some harbinger for something big? (I.e. This crystal vault is Like finding the Prothean blue-prints for a Reaper-swatter, júst in time to stop The Reapers before they close another 150,000 year cycle in a rather definite manner, like in the game Mass Effect?)

Or is it simply like that vault in Norway, where wé, current man, are storing as much genetic info and material (seeds) as possible for posterity? "Just in case" with everything keyed to óur technology, not really meant for some civilization waaaay in the future.

Interesting.....

THAT'S why that picture looked familiar - it looks like the cargo hold of the TITAN in the movie TITAN AE.

[NOTDilbert]

So, what's all this I hear about a Rosetta Scone?

I see what you did there.

Considering how powerful Glyph is as a language, and considering that a good deal of Sumerian is understood... this bilingual screen could be a very dangerous artifact indeed! If Katherine starts mumbling something about Dingir Xul, run!

Kath: "What's this part here say? 'Darkness beyond Twilight, more crimson than the blood that flows...'"

Atsali: "Should you be glowing like that?!?"

"DON"T READ OUT LOUD!" Just cause the Grid keeps out Shabrenigdo doesn't mean his incantations won't work...

[Dave]

First thing she does, is change the desktop theme. May I suggest something with Beast Wars' BlackArachnia?

++win;

I still suspect there are not simple memory storage but copies of the people themselves stored in the crystals.

Ah, now there's an interesting theory. Charon said there was not even a soul left to ferry across the Styx. Were they all stored in crystals somehow?

That's basically where I've been going, thought-wise, although I don't think that it involves the Lanthians who were wiped out by the Chimera. The timing doesn't seem to be correct.

What we've been told (I believe) is that the survivors of the Chimera disaster eventually migrated across the ocean (from what was originally Lanthis - apparently northern Africa?) to the Americas, and founded the Olmec and Anasazi civilizations. My guess is that the Mapimi crystal vault we're now seeing, is an invention of that later culture; it was built long after the destruction of Lanthis.

My hunch is that it's storing the Anasazi who "disappeared" or were "lost". Atsali said that stargates operate by a combination of quantum effects, and use of the Askashic record; Lily confirmed the latter and said (when looking at the crystal spider) that stargates "don't need a buffer" and was curious that there was one at the stargate. Pablo cookie-confirmed someone's conclusion not long ago that poiting is akin to stargating.

So - teleportation seems to be fundamentally an issue of "total information transfer". It apparently could utilize an intermediate buffer of some sort but Anasazi stargates don't normally incorporate one (I infer this from Lily's comment that stargates "don't need a buffer" rather than "can't involve a buffer" so I could be wrong here).

Hence... my guess is that the Anasazi "mysteriously disappeared", by augmenting their stargate system with a huge bank of very-high-capacity crystal storage buffers, and deliberately 'gated themselves into storage. If I'm right, it's not just their memories or their gene-scans which are in the crystals... it's them, "captured in mid-poit" as it were.

If correct, the questions I'll wonder about next are "Why?" and "How did they expect to be retrieved?"

[bmonk]

I still suspect there are not simple memory storage but copies of the people themselves stored in the crystals.

Ah, now there's an interesting theory. Charon said there was not even a soul left to ferry across the Styx. Were they all stored in crystals somehow?

That's basically where I've been going, thought-wise, although I don't think that it involves the Lanthians who were wiped out by the Chimera. The timing doesn't seem to be correct.

What we've been told (I believe) is that the survivors of the Chimera disaster eventually migrated across the ocean (from what was originally Lanthis - apparently northern Africa?) to the Americas, and founded the Olmec and Anasazi civilizations. My guess is that the Mapimi crystal vault we're now seeing, is an invention of that later culture; it was built long after the destruction of Lanthis.

My hunch is that it's storing the Anasazi who "disappeared" or were "lost". Atsali said that stargates operate by a combination of quantum effects, and use of the Askashic record; Lily confirmed the latter and said (when looking at the crystal spider) that stargates "don't need a buffer" and was curious that there was one at the stargate. Pablo cookie-confirmed someone's conclusion not long ago that poiting is akin to stargating.

So - teleportation seems to be fundamentally an issue of "total information transfer". It apparently could utilize an intermediate buffer of some sort but Anasazi stargates don't normally incorporate one (I infer this from Lily's comment that stargates "don't need a buffer" rather than "can't involve a buffer" so I could be wrong here).

Hence... my guess is that the Anasazi "mysteriously disappeared", by augmenting their stargate system with a huge bank of very-high-capacity crystal storage buffers, and deliberately 'gated themselves into storage. If I'm right, it's not just their memories or their gene-scans which are in the crystals... it's them, "captured in mid-poit" as it were.

If correct, the questions I'll wonder about next are "Why?" and "How did they expect to be retrieved?"

Library on the Edge of Forever?

[zachariah]

We may be about to learn more about Katherine's back-story. In particular, Paul may be about to reveal that she's a country girl, and spent most of her childhood summers hard at work out in the fields of her family's ancestral cunei farm.

(drops a slice of freshly-baked (Unicode 01227F) into the Pun Jar. Tried to do it directly but phpBB wouldn't allow the Unicode insertion)

Would those fields include archeology and linguistics?

tosses in a copy of John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"

Given where they are 'Forest Lawn' would have been a better choice. Drops one in just for the heck of it.

[zachariah]

I still suspect there are not simple memory storage but copies of the people themselves stored in the crystals.

My hunch is that it's storing the Anasazi who "disappeared" or were "lost". Atsali said that stargates operate by a combination of quantum effects, and use of the Askashic record; Lily confirmed the latter and said (when looking at the crystal spider) that stargates "don't need a buffer" and was curious that there was one at the stargate. Pablo cookie-confirmed someone's conclusion not long ago that poiting is akin to stargating.

So - teleportation seems to be fundamentally an issue of "total information transfer". It apparently could utilize an intermediate buffer of some sort but Anasazi stargates don't normally incorporate one (I infer this from Lily's comment that stargates "don't need a buffer" rather than "can't involve a buffer" so I could be wrong here).

Hence... my guess is that the Anasazi "mysteriously disappeared", by augmenting their stargate system with a huge bank of very-high-capacity crystal storage buffers, and deliberately 'gated themselves into storage. If I'm right, it's not just their memories or their gene-scans which are in the crystals... it's them, "captured in mid-poit" as it were.

If correct, the questions I'll wonder about next are "Why?" and "How did they expect to be retrieved?"

Nice idea but I don't think they did plan on being retrieved. The buffer may have been to keep the Library out of the loop, or the Askastic record. It's an isolation device.
If the room is like the calendar room that supports my idea more that this is the storage of the ancestor spirits that were communicated with by the Jaguar temples, which were lined with mica crystal. If so then this is the civilizations FAQ site. Where the priests go for answers from the collective memories of the past.
Another point is that this was probably built after the GG girls leveled half the world. It would not have survived the energy pulse if it existed when they did. There would have been massive EMP along with that.

[jwhouk]

It took me a LONG time, but I have a list of all of the appearances of Glyph language in the strip:

1. 2004-02-13 = Thumb in door of Amanda's car; first time we see glyph language (compare to 8/30/11)
2. 2004-03-06 = Monica looks up at the stars (Kokopelli? Tepoz?)
3. 2004-04-12 = Monica sleeps at work - and Tepoz realizes she speaks glyph!
4. 2004-04-16 = Tepoz speaks the name of the language: "DVDiOo" (or the equivalent)
5. 2004-05-28 = "No, she doesn't think you're crazy."
6. 2004-11-10 = The golem girls start to "light up"
7. 2004-11-11 = Brandi, Bud and Jin's "symbols" show up ("W", "oY", "cA")
8. 2004-12-08 = Monica mumbles glyph as she kisses Kevin
9. 2004-12-15 = We learn how to count in Glyph
10. 2005-10-10 = "OQDY" glyph first appears (Rough translation: "Tell me how you became a golem.")
11. 2005-11-04 = Monica uses the "OQDY" command to activate Bud's memory
12. 2005-12-16 = Monica explains that "OQDY" means, essentially, "Activate Creation Memory Goat"
13. 2006-03-21 = Bud's "oY" symbol makes an appearance due to her anger.
14. 2006-03-22 = Again with Bud's "oY" symbol.
15. 2006-08-25 = Bud flashes the "oY" symbol after a discussion about Kevin.
16. 2006-12-22 = Mayahuel "impresses" the Lanthian priests - who have Bia's "glyph" symbol in the walls.
17. 2008-09-08 = Bud uses glyph to "unlock" Shelly's tattoo (the tapestry)
18. 2008-12-26 = Monica activates the tapestry tattoo - which puts her into the middle of the Egyptian gun runners.
19. 2009-01-15 = Bud's angry with Jin, and "oY" comes out again.
20. 2009-07-14 = Monica discovers she's the "fourth light" - the "Oo" symbol (or "Activate")
21. 2009-07-15 = Monica's not sure why she's seeing glyph on her face.
22. 2009-07-16 = Jin poits in - she's the fourth light!
23. 2009-07-17 = But... (We're all the four lights!)
24. 2009-11-26 = "I Won't Let Them." (The "Oo" symbol fits Monica)
25. 2009-12-30 = The girls start their attempt at "fixing" the machine (Jin's "cA" is seen)
26. 2010-01-04 = Bud's symbol glows as she tells Shelly to stick the knife into Monica
27. 2010-01-05 = "Hold onto your ###, bitch!"
28. 2010-01-06 = Bud explains what's happening as Monica's doubt holds tight to Shelly ("oY" and "Oo")
29. 2010-01-13 = Brandi reads the note from Bud - it's the same "unlock" code for Shelly's tattoo!
30. 2010-01-15 = Bud exits (with May in tow) and "rips" the ink off Shelly with a separate glyph command - which is more complex
31. 2011-08-30 = Jin cusses in Glyph (Lanthian?) when she hits her knee on the table
32. 2011-09-02 = May explains that she carved an "Oo" inside Jin after "installing" the Lanthian artifact.
33. 2012-06-29 = Bia's "logo" is seen on her headband - Glyph? Lanthian? - as well on the clasps on her shoulders.
34. 2012-07-03 = Part of Bia's "logo" is again seen from profile
35. 2012-07-17 = Bia's "logo" appears again, this time also on her clasp over her left shoulder.
36. 2012-07-18 = The logo is now in the windows of the... LIBRARY? And Phix is Shelly's... GRANDMA?
37. 2012-07-19 = The logos are still there, now that Monica and Euryale appear!
    2012-10-16 = This is DEFINITELY NOT glyph language.
38. 2012-11-26 = Monica's REAL superpower activates - with the "Oo" symbol!
39. 2013-05-09 = The Lanthian Rosetta "Screen"! With the most "glyphs" that we have seen since the first comic with glyph appeared.

EDIT: Added a few that I'd missed.

[Wyvern]

It took me a LONG time, but I have a list of all of the appearances of Glyph language in the strip...

Nicely done! The wiki page could use that list, possibly in the talk section. We're out of date on that; I think we've seen more interesting appearances of the language since that was updated.