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

[jporter@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Julie Porter)]

>On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Julie Porter wrote:
>> 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?
>
>I'm not even going to ask why someone would do signal processing in
>PostScript.
Well, back in '92 the PS printer was powered with a RISC chip AMD 22XXXX
something or other. It was quite a bit faster than the 68020 then in the
desktops. We used to joke the fastest computer Apple sold was the printer.
I think we were at 8MHZ when 4 was pretty fast. (might be misremembering
the magntude.) I think it was sold as the Laserwriter 610. We called it
Viper. I wrote the startup page for many of the LaserWriters made in the
90s. The last one the wide format had a demo page. I managed to do an Apple
and wove the names of myself and the team into the halftone. You needed a
10x loupe to see it.


> On the "rivers":  I haven't finished looking at the "gallows
>bit sequences" work, but when I ran some similar tests myself I had the
>subjective impression that the positions of the gallows characters might
>be related to positions on the page.  It's well known that they occur
>preferentially at the starts of lines, but it also seemed to me (I haven't
>run a count yet) that they almost always occurred in the first word on
>a page, and were much less common at the start of the *second* line.  I
>wonder what would happen if we just took a page, marked the physical
>positions of the gallows characters, and looked at nothing else.  Would we
>see some interesting patterns?
>
>One of the standard "kiddie" encryption techniques is to write the letters
>of a message in specified physical locations on a page, and then add
>random garbage all around to conceal it.  That's decrypted by placing a
>template over the page with cutouts in the places where the message was
>supposed to be written.  I wonder if something like that could be involved
>in the VMS.  It seems like the sort of concealment that might be invented
>by someone in the time and place the book was written.  The flowing nature
>of the writing could be explained by it being copied from an original by
>someone who didn't understand the concealment, and the word patterns we've
>observed could be explained by a human trying to invent randomness on the
>fly.  This theory isn't terribly convincing, and unfortunately I haven't
>(yet) thought of a way to test it, but the underlying concept may be worth
>investigating: that the physical locations of characters on the page may
>be important to their meaning.
Conan Doyal used this in the Boar war. And I think in WWI. I can not
remember if Sherlock himself used it?

>
>Matthew Skala
>mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                   I paid for it, I own it.
>http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/