VMs: Re: Spending lots of money...

["Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Nick Pelling" <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 30 January 2004 12:04


> 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. :-(
>

You are not looking at it in the right way Nick. There is plenty of
structure if you
simply drop the modern tools and get your hands dirty. It takes hours and
hours
of effort, but it's worth it.

> 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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