RE: VMs: Can one "prove" a hoax?

["Don Latham" <djl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Jacques Guy
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2003 7:26 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: VMs: Can one "prove" a hoax?


2/21/03 5:49:52 AM, Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>Consider the following:
>Mr. X takes the diary of his young daughter, and
>converts it using a clever scheme into a text that
>looks quite magical, especially since he designs an
>elegant alphabet to write it all up.
>Then he adds drawings of plants, stars and nymphs
>and sells it to emperor R. pretending it is a
>book of deep learning.

>Obviously, this is a hoax.
>However, for me it is something that we could
>decipher and the plaintext could be more or less
>meaningful.


Well, is it a hoax or not? Were the Hitler diaries
a hoax? Yes. But they made perfect sense. We are
back to: is the VMS glossolalia? From the
distributional properties of the VMS, I have
no choice but to say: this is entirely compatible
with a real language. Whether its contents are a
hoax or not, that can, perhaps, only be determined
once we have deciphered it.

I agree with both of you.  Consider that it would be easier to devise a
"one-time pad" to create a hoax from a known text than to invent pages of
glossolalia without benefit of psychosis, if hoax were the goal of
generating the text.
Don

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