Re: About Turkish (what is the importance to the VMS)

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    BRAVO, Julie!!  I've had some of the same thoughts.

Julie Porter wrote:

> >Why is it of importance for VMs list?
> In the past the list has entertained a wide variety of speculation. One
> might ask Why is Dr Dee of import to the list? While I would dealrly like
> to see evidence that Dee was involved. So far the evidence seems to be
> against.

    I agree, although I just never have been interested in Dr. Dee and Mr. Kelley.

> Personally I think the Vmss was written by the equivilent of Rozencrantz
> and Gilderstern. Some really 'Bright' guys (or gals) who are having a bit
> of fun to mess with the head of the caligraphy professor (or the sister
> supeierior).The 'No one reads this stuff anyway' type attitude. Perhaps the
> Vmss was written by a couple of 'sisters' who wanted to do the same thing
> the 'boys' were doing. What if they did not have proper instruction?

    This is a bit much, I think, although that's not too far from what the Codex
Seraphinianus is!  -- but even Luigi Serafini didn't do it overnight.  Plenty of
people on this list have talked about having invented their own alphabet (I once
did) and becoming proficient in it (I never did).  People have done amazing things
in altered states of consciousness.  I could fill two bookshelves with books that
been 'channeled' (written unconsciously).  A major religion is based on one of
them (won't say which one -- don't want to have to go into hiding!).   There are
the unconsciously-produced languages, Helene Smith's 'Martian' and Kirk Allen's
[Rogert Lindner's patient] 'Olmayan' -- and, I personally believe, Edward Kelley's
'Enochian'.  Kirk Allen also entered a science-fiction-like 'alternative universe'
-- as past-life regressors do, and as the out-of-the-body adept Robert Monroe
did.  VMs pictures resemble much visionary art -- and some of that combines text.
EVEN WITH ALL THAT, though, I think that the complexity and combination of these
elements precludes the VMs's being a quick joke.

    Incidentally, I'm looking at the book about Helene Smith.  Not all her
drawings of 'Mars' were child-like.  There is a set of 'Martian' plant drawings
that are quite Voynich-like. I'll try to scan them and put them up.

> I think I noted it before here. I totally spaces out on My college Physics
> final. I covered the entire answer sheet with pictures of Isaac Newton and
> Tyco Brahe. What would someone make of that?  I did manage to pass the
> class as I was a TA for the Proff in a computer class. It was actually this
> reason I took the advanced physics, without the calculus. I thought I could
> crib off the computers. I can just see rozencrantz and guilderstern signing
> up for Advanced Herbology. Over thier heads they conspire to make the
> paper. I could have just as easally turned in a blank test, rather than an
> illustrated one.

    You're certainly gutsy!!  That's really cutting the Gordian knot.

>  I may not be able to take the derivitive of an interegal, but I know what
> they are. I just found all the notation and formal 'nonsense' of the math to be
> booring. Especially if I could solve the problem empirically whith brute force.

    We engineers have always done it that way.  We just use brute-force iterative
methods to solve complex math.  (Although we now have Mathematica to do that too,
although I've never used it.

> Sometimes the fundamentals do not change no matter how much we want them too.
> A funny incedent, when I was at apple. My boss came in to ask me what I was
> up to. I replied I was attempting to program postscript to take the
> fourrier transform of an image. He replied that he had a PhD in signal
> processing. and that I was probably working at a level beyond his theisis.
> The diffrence here was that I was down in the trenches woring with it on a
> daily baisis. He on the other hand hardly had the reason to use it. To me
> it was a tool. No diffrent than a hammer.

    So darn true.  Also, if I may say so myself...  I've never had courses in
mathematical statistics or information theory; before this list, the entropy I
knew best was that of classical thermodynamics.  I'm still learning on Bennett's
chapter on language.  Compare me to Jim R. and Jim G.  As a mathemician it makes
me an idiot, and as a crippie, about the lowest form of life on the planet.  And
yet...   I'm the one who finally solved the VMs entropy quandry!  Before that,
everyone was mostly asking, "How could a [low-entropy] Polynesian language have
wound up in medieval Europe.  As so often, a matter of asking the right question.

> In effect my notes when I work on such problems, are encrypted. I have
> designed my own signal processing language (based on postscript) I tend to
> think in terms of stacks and key value pairs. The only problem is that It
> is hard to express myself to people with a basic knowlege of a diffrent
> language. I do not know if I could consciencly define this language to
> others.

    The only recorded speech of the great thermodynamicist J. Willard Gibbs was,
simply, "Mathematics is a language."  And that isn't even one language, as you
just noted.  And... as Carl Sagan pointed in his chapter "Maxwell and the Nerds"
in "The Demon-Haunted World" (a book I'd recommend to anyone), the only full
expression of most scientific ideas is mathematical.  This is why science ceased
to be comprehensible to the general public a long time ago, and why the
fundamentalists can keep on making stupid claims about science that were disproven
a long time ago.

> What does any of this have to do with Voynich? I do not know. Sometimes
> data, any data, can help solve a problem. There was an interesting artical
> in Scentific American regarding the use of small amounts of random noise in
> signal detection. I think this falls into the category of simulated
> aAnealing. Now I do not know what simulated is.

    I used this a long time ago; as I recall, it's a mathematical optimization
technique.

    Mais je divague deja trop...

> Returning to the subject at hand.
> I noted when I mentioned that from a typgraphical standpoint, the rivers in
> the text caused by the spaces and re-inking of the pen, seem to have
> uinique structure. If I had more time I would love to do some analysis with
> the positions of the pen strokes in the Vms. I got almost no feedback from
> the list so I sort of let things drop.
> Did anyone give this any thought?

    One fellow has a web page on this subject, but I don't remember who.

Dennis