VMs: Spending lots of money...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 02:25 30/01/2004 -0800, Rene wrote:
> To add some (slightly more) serious content:
> I would hope that nobody gets the idea of
> funding VMs research with anything like the
> millions mentioned recently. Obviously, this
> money would not be given to us.
> And then someone would take our toy away.
>
> It's like giving your cake to someone else, in
> order that he can tell you how good it tasted.
> OTOH they might not crack it. And I wonder how
> many people on this list would be disheartened
> by that :-)

I have a great deal of faith in our statistical and computing tools to 
crack systems of which we have some prior knowledge. However, there's 
another type of uncertainty, known as "Knightian uncertainty": the early 
20th century economist Frank Knight observed that economic forecasting 
assumed that all possible futures had been imagined (and had probabilities 
assigned) - but that, in practice, plenty always remained unimagined, 
wrecking forecasters' best-laid plans.

Here, I believe that the repeated inability of our tools to cast useful 
light on the VMs is a strong indication that we're exposed to "Knightian 
uncertainty" - despite all our imaginative insight, the VMs remains a black 
hole into which our gaze disappears. Hiring a supercomputer would therefore 
most likely achieve nothing. :-(

Personally, I'd be happy to spend a million on cracking it (any Microsoft 
VPs out there? :-o) - spending (say) $100,000 on a multi-modal physical 
examination (of the inks, paints, vellum, pollen, binding stations, etc) 
might well help date and/or physically locate the document, as well as 
possibly separate out the various hands definitively (and perhaps determine 
their precise sequence) and determine its binding history.

With the rest, I'd set up a concerted one-year collaborative historical 
research programme to try and understand more about the history. Despite 
the authors' attempts to obfuscate the VMs' pictures, I think there are 
plenty of tantalising historical clues which remain open - and that the 
first step to cracking the language/code/cipher is to understand the 
document itself.

For example, the way I read the VMs, I'm comfortable with a Northern 
European (specifically Milanese) origin for it: and I'm also comfortable 
with the myth / legend / story that seems to indicate that it was owned by 
a Bishop buried at Glastonbury - who I've argued before was most likely to 
be Abbot Richard Beere (who died 20th January 1524). He took a 
well-documented trip to Italy in 1504 (and I believe at least one more 
later on behalf of Henry VIII), and I think there's reasonable suspicion 
that Glastonbury Abbey's wealth (and its library's appetite for novelty) 
provided a means, motive and opportunity for setting the VMs in motion. 
Carefully examining the Abbey court rolls / compotus for the period around 
Beere's trips might well help support or refute this notion, which is 
arguably as far back as we can reasonably guess at the VMs' provenance.

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


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