A College Student Who Decoded the Data Hidden in Inca Knots (opens in new tab)

> Thanks to his family background, he could speak German, and he had heard that many universities there charged no tuition fees. His missing qualifications were still a problem, but one that the University of Gottingen decided to overlook. “They said that under exceptional circumstances, they could enroll a few people every year without transcripts,” says Spribille. “That was the bottleneck of my life.”

This marks a significant point in America's status as an educational and scientific power in the world.

That story was so much more exciting than it deserved to be. What a great writer.

I would be interested to hear some examples of this. Not doubting you but this would be very enriching.

One obvious example from my own life: Due to <issues> I needed to understand medical research in <area>. There is a huge opportunity in medical research for people who actually have a deep understanding of statistics. Or even an elementary understanding. Protip: just because P>0.5 it does not prove "no effect".

Even more so, there is a question I asked a professor a long time ago.

Does learning make us dumber? As we learn things and take them as absolute truth, we limit our ability to explore new ideas and concepts. The search is sometimes the more important thing.

There’s a reason why Max Planck said:

> “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

And "The colors of the strings also appeared to be related to the people’s first names."

Writing in general began as accounting practices. Put your grain in the common granary, get some token (pebbles) for each measure you put in. Redeem them later. Then they started keeping the tokens in a box. Then they wrapped the tokens in clay envelopes marked with your family symbol. But they had to keep breaking them open to count them, then re-wrapping them, so they started putting hash marks on the outside of the envelope. Then they finally realized they didn't need to put anything in the clay, just the hash marks. Voila, writing!

None so fast. It allows us to corroborate the Spanish records with the actual records kept by the natives. That’s a pretty big deal in terms of finding out what parts of the conquest were fact what were fiction.

No, it can be great.

The Inca had no money: http://www.discover-peru.org/inca-economy-society/ but they had to distribute goods for all the members of society. The knots were probably central to their organization.

If they find older records, it would also corroborate the claims that more Incas died from the diseases bought from the Spaniards, than by violence during the invasion.

These knots are census records.

> Urton says he and other researchers in the field have always had a general sense of what the khipus represented. Many, they could tell, had to do with census data. Others appeared to be registers of goods or calendar systems.

They've known for a while that many kinds of data were recorded with khipus, but (it sounds like) they couldn't read anything but the raw numbers, which were meaningless without context. Medrano has basically discovered a Rosetta Stone, the same data in both a known and unknown language, and it could very well lead to cracking the full language of the khipus.

And don't underestimate census records alone. There's a lot of tremendously valuable information to researchers there.

Disagree.

To me, it looks like a data structure. It would be really cool to find evidence of them using it to calculate taxes or maybe social status, level of political influence, property rights, etc.

...or to figure out whether or knot the interpreter would halt ;)

Not so disappointing if this becomes the Rosetta stone of khipus.