Re: VMs: Initial gallows

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Steve,

At 00:19 28/03/2004 -1000, Steve Ekwall wrote:
> i guess i'm still ~stupid spooked steve~ (sigh).. i've tried every
> which way from sunday to explain how the gallows ARE a _change.key_
> function..

Personally, I *do* get it - but let me explain a little more...

You describe a cipher system which is pretty much exactly like a VMs cipher 
system would need to be to reconcile (a) the dating evidence, (b) the 
structural evidence, and (c) the statistical evidence. This alone is pretty 
exciting, were it not for one awkward fact - having looked at the text 
produced by the exact gallows fold/shift mechanism you describe, it still 
does *not* look much like any language I've seen (and I've looked at a fair 
few). Your ES told you that you couldn't read it, right? So why are you so 
sure that we can?

In fact, there seems to be a number of good reasons to suspect that there's 
some kind of abbreviation / shorthand process going on as well - but 
(AFAIK) nobody's tried to decipher a shorthand text written in a complex 
cipher-system before. Hence we're probably several (jigsaw) pieces short of 
Convergence. :-o

So, the way it looks to me is this: that you're probably right in most of 
the important ways, but the gallows shifting stuff is only part of the 
story (in fact, possibly only 1/12th?) Have faith in the rest of us to work 
out the remainder, and - with a bit of luck - we should all get there in 
the end! :-)

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


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