Summary of Voynich Day presentation on Line Patterns

[pfeaster]

I wrote a quick script to check the different sections, and I get the impression that q-starting lines and m-ending lines are anti-correlated. E.g. Q13/Bio has many q-starting lines and few m-ending lines (the ratio is about 3:1). Q20/Stars shows the opposite: 1 q-starting line for 3 m-ending lines. All sections show a strong unbalance, so the two features are unlikely to appear consecutively in any one section, but could be expected to be frequent if one considers the text as a whole, since both features are overall frequent on the average.

Thanks for this!  Yes, if those two features vary so much by section, that would account for the "anomaly" in a (sadly) less interesting way.

The next-most-anomalous case I'd noticed before was that lines ending [n] are followed by lines beginning [Sh] about 140% as often as they "should" be -- but maybe that's equally an illusion based on differences among sections?

If these few cases of apparent line-break combination patterns turn out not to be significant, that would make tavie's "Vertical Impact Effect" all the more striking and mystifying.  Lines seem to run from left to right and secondarily from top to bottom, and yet the start of each new line would be constrained significantly by the start of the previous line -- but not at all by the end of the previous line.

Are there any "Vertical Impact Effects" associated with the ends of lines?  Or do adjacent lines appear to be linked by their starting points, but not by where they end up?