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

[jporter@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Julie Porter)]

>    BRAVO, Julie!!  I've had some of the same thoughts.
Here we go again ;-)
>
>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.
It was not my choice. The man just will not go away. I was at a clock
meeting last month and there was a book on Elizabethean Alchemists. I
looked him up in the refrence. He was refrenced in the bios of about half a
dozen of them. (but not directly himself) I passed on the book, given the
cost.


>
>> 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.
Have not looked at Seraphinianus. I always though that that was more of a
'Marketing thing.'


>
>    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.
What else was I to do.


>
>>  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.
My definitiam Matamatics == the natural language of the male mind. Latin ==
the natural language of the [western] Female mind.
I got told this was not PC. I still think it holds.


>
>> 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