(13-05-2026, 03:54 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't remember anything along these lines. But do you know anything at all about how or why the prediction is made?

(08-01-2016, 04:34 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are also stars with an ink dot at the centre. They can be light-painted or unpainted; not all light-painted stars have a centre dot. These observations dismiss the hypothesis that the dot is used as a reminder to paint (or not to paint) a star. Looks like a marker for some other purpose.

Likewise, star tails are probably markers. Pelling once suggested them to represent letter "y" in a hidden fashion, but I don't consider this a plausible explanation. Usually tails look downwards, but there is at least one tail looking upwards (last star in f103r).

(13-05-2026, 04:21 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Some people suggested that stars are just a way to represent certain markers or even characters: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In which case there will obviously be a correlation between the star type and the contents of the paragraph.

(08-01-2016, 04:34 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are also stars with an ink dot at the centre. They can be light-painted or unpainted; not all light-painted stars have a centre dot. These observations dismiss the hypothesis that the dot is used as a reminder to paint (or not to paint) a star. Looks like a marker for some other purpose.

Likewise, star tails are probably markers. Pelling once suggested them to represent letter "y" in a hidden fashion, but I don't consider this a plausible explanation. Usually tails look downwards, but there is at least one tail looking upwards (last star in f103r).

(13-05-2026, 03:52 PM)Labyrinthinesecurity Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the recipe section, I annotated the stars showing a tail and the stars without a tail.

I then trained a simple statistical model to predict whether a paragraph maps to a “tail” star using only internal text features (no external information, no hand labeling tricks).

The model correctly identifies tail paragraphs about 86% of the time (balanced accuracy), which is far above chance (50%).

(I also ran permutation tests where we randomly reshuffled the data within each folio, preserving structure but destroying signal. In those tests, performance dropped to about 52%, which is basically chance. This suggests the model is not just exploiting simple artifacts like folio grouping or class imbalance.)

Is anyone aware of similar studies? I'd be interested to know if star morphometrics correlate to textual contents.

Thanks!

• The red paint is opaque and probably late, like all strongly colored paint on the VMS. The mostly transparent light yellow paint (apparently used on the stars of Cosmo and Zodiac, nymph hair, etc.) may be original.
  
• The red and yellow colors mostly alternate, but there are some hiccups, and some unpainted stars.  My hunch is that the stars were originally alternating yellow and unpainted, with some hiccups.  Much later the Painter set out to paint the unpainted stars with red, but when he got to the hiccups he either broke the alternation or left a star unpainted.
  
• Surely each parag was meant to have a star besides its head line.  But the Scribe may have written the text first and then he drew all the stars on the page.  That would explain why the stars are not aligned with the lines.
  
• Some stars are more than one line away from their corresponding head lines.
  
• There are three big blocks of text on f108r, f108v, and f111r, where apparently the Scribe ran a dozen parags together, without any line breaks between them. The number of stars in the margin of those blocks hopefully tells how many parags are in them.
  
• There are a few other cases where the boundary between successive parags is not clear, because the last line of the first spans the whole width of the page.  In some of those cases, the tail of the star points east instead of south, and seems to be indicating the line which should be the head line of the second parag.  But it is not clear whether those tails are original, or guesses by a later owner.
  
• However, most tails point south instead of east, and in many cases the tail is continuous with the outline of the star.
  
• The ray count tends to repeat in stretches, changing only every half a dozen stars or so.  Therefore, that number cannot be conveying much information.  Less than one bit per parag.
  

(14-05-2026, 12:45 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The stars without tails are found on f103r, f103v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (one bifolio) and on f111v, where there are also a number of cases with tails.

That is four out of 23 pages, meaning (rough estimate): 17% without tails, 83% with tails.
With this, an 86% success rate may easily be achieved just by chance.

More importantly, any text property that varies according to this bifolio split will strongly correlate with the appearance of tails. That is: if such a text property exists. The recent work by Colin Layfield, presented by Lisa, suggests that it does.

A meaningful measure of success would come from how well the paragraphs on f111v match, but this is unfortunately a small sample.

Still, there are some interesting questions related to the distribution of stars with/without tails.