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Re: Fw: Character n anomaly

Hi Gabriel,

Could you please expand on the "unpredictability near..."  I am not
sure what is that referring to.

Currier originally wrote:-

        The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines
        are markedly different from the counts of the same characters
        internally. There are, for instance, some characters that may
        not occur initially in a line. There are others whose occurrence
        as the initial syllable of the first "word" of a line is about one
        hundredth of the expected. </snip>

        The ends of the lines contain what seems to be, in many cases,
        meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don't occur
        anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the
        line to the margin. There is, for instance, one symbol that, while
        it does occur elsewhere, occurs at the end of the last "words"
        of lines 85% of the time. One more fact: I have three computer
        runs of the herbal material and of the biological material. In all
        of that, which is almost 25,000 "words," there is *not one single
        case* of a repeat going over the end of a line to the beginning of
        the next; not one.

I use unpredictable to mean "exhibiting a sequential entropic profile different from other spatially localised contexts".

Note that there are characters that tend to be line initial (f,p,q)  and
line ending (m,g)  (I think that it was what Currier was on about, not
the gallows, but please correct me if I am wrong).

The GSH could be interpreted to imply that gallows characters either begin or end the final word on a line - that's a question for further analysis. However, the GSH (IMO) would make it unlikely that gallows would be used randomly or semi-randomly in a line-end padding section.

There is also indication of the left to right direction from the intensity
of the ink as well (this was clearly seen in some wonderful colour
slides that Jim Reeds brought to the meeting in Teddington.

Were there also any indications (from those slides) of lines being written sequentially top-to-bottom? I'd guess that the answer's almost certainly yes, but it would be nice to have some backup. :-)

I agree that it is better to start looking "disregarding" all spaces,
that is why the spectral analysis stuff was done in the space-less
version.  But still I don't think that there were any indications that
spaces were *not* spacers since the modal token length was
suggested in the spectral analysis plots.

Proper statistical examination should help resolve this to everyone's satisfaction. How different is the average gap between spaces from the average gap between gallows characters? Being able to answer questions like these should move us further on - at least in being able to rule out some of the many possible theories that could be erected upon the GSH. :-)

About "padding"... the last line in a paragraph usually doesn't show
any padding.

Unless I've misunderstood you, it wouldn't need to: padding would be added to line-ends to make the text fit the shape of the containing space.

The question to ask (to which of course I haven't got an answer) is:
what would convince me that the spaces are separating words?

What would convince you that the gallows are separating words? :-)

Before the GSH, I often stared at the pattern of the gallows characters on the pages, trying to take in the overall gestalt by focussing through the page (not quite autostereopsis, but on the way). A pattern I noticed on several pages was a vertical line of various gallows characters indented about 5-8 characters in.

OK, it's an extremely weak observation (as it only refers to a few pages out of the whole series): but it probably explains why I'm sympathetic to the GSH.

BTW where in the UK are you? Good to know when we organise
the next v-meeting ;-)

In Surbiton, just south of London, but happy to travel pretty much anywhere - and would be delighted to be invited! :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....