Re: Re: VMs: Re: Re: Inks and retouching

["Jan" <hurychj@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,  

it is amazing  by what means can Big Brother Nick defend his uncompromising stand. I would not call 
it censorship - censors do have some rules,  after all - they do not shoot down anything they personally do not like :-).  Still, I would not enter this discussion about "censorship" if he didn't not use my 
name in other, denigratory remark on myself, just in this very letter.

Since he did  not bother to explain what it was all about, let me clarify it: we had private (!) mail 
discussion about my research  that numbering of the VM looks like it was done by author himself 
(based on some numbers having distinctive character of authors handwriting). Nicks objection was that 
the pages are certainly misnumbered, something the sane author definitely would not do.   

Since he also insisted the numbering (or misnumbering, for that matter) was done by John Dee, I asked 
him why would he consider the author doing it rather feebleminded, but not Dee himself - while even he, Nick, could see  it was misnumbered :-).  To that, I got no answer, but apparently  he still remembers the sting :-).

It is rather misfortunate  if this list, originally devoted to free exchange of opinions  is being hijacked by
somebody, just  because he claims he is  a "senior" (for all what it is worth),

Jan  

======= At 2004-08-11, 13:19:00 you wrote: =======

>Hi GC,
>
>At 02:51 10/08/2004 -0600, GC wrote:
>>I've often felt that Nick or someone else shot down an idea before it
>>blossomed, and I'm certain they've felt that way about my responses as well.
>>There are a few of us very head-strong and unrelenting in our opinions, and
>>when we trash ideas on their initial post, we are essentially performing an
>>act of censorship.  This is in essence exerting a method of 'control'.  Our
>>personal visions of our actions are different, but we do indeed 'dominate'
>>conversations, and censor list input on one level or another.  My
>>single-minded approach is good example, that I rarely leave room for
>>alternate interpretation.  I'm a hard-case for sure, but each of us has to
>>examine the extent to which we want our opinion to prevail over others, and
>>our reasoning in that regard.
>
>The problems for newcomers (say, anyone joining in the last 10 years :-) ) are:
>(1) that the available commentary is unstructured, difficult to navigate, 
>hard to master
>(2) that the VMs is an easy screen onto which one can project one's ideas
>(3) that it's easy to find corroborating evidence to support those ideas
>(4) that it's easy to dismiss falsifying evidence as being unclear or uncertain
>
>But we do actually have many things we are now quite certain of, and about 
>which we gain in confidence with our accumulated observations. For example, 
>I think that the evidence of Quires 9 and 13 is unequivocal: that the VMs 
>was rebound incorrectly (by someone who presumably did not understand its 
>contents), and that the foliation marks post-date that rebinding. Most of 
>us (Jan aside?) have long seen the foliation as being written by quite a 
>different hand from the text itself, so this is not a radically new idea, 
>merely a more substantive expression of an old idea.
>
>If observations like this happen to be antithetical to someone's pet 
>theory, so be it - let them form the synthesis necessary to move themselves 
>(and us) along. But is that censorship? No, not really.
>
>>Let's just look at the Strong material.  You've all passed judgment and
>>moved on, but not one of you has examined the material and refuted its
>>validity point by point.  How long has it been available, six years maybe?
>>And why not, by doing so you could have gotten rid of me a long time ago.
>>Without such a study your collective judgment is without validity, and if
>>your judgment has failed here, where else does it suffer a lapse?
>
>I'll be honest - Strong's magic key seems arbitrary (where did it come 
>from?), his character count is inconsistent in places, his tables seem 
>wishful thinking, and his decoding seems ambiguous at best. His solution 
>provides no explanation at all for why common pairs - like "qo" "or" "ol" 
>"dy" etc - should occur, nor any explanation for the stroke structure, nor 
>why Neal keys should exist, etc, etc.
>
>This all hides a deeper problem: that the plaintext Strong extracted from 
>the ciphertext seems more complex than the ciphertext itself (which has a 
>great deal of, for example, letter adjacency structure). Is that not some 
>kind of indication that there is a gap between the two which was filled by 
>his imagination?
>
>If there *is* some kind of cyclical polyalpha going on here, it's not at 
>the apparent glyph level as Strong believed. Cryptologically, the signature 
>of cyclic polyalpha is that plaintext structure gets destroyed (except in 
>key-length separated substrings), and - unless you have any specific 
>evidence that supports Strong's key-length assertion, never mind his actual 
>key contents - that is not the case here.
>
>>As I've said, I'm not innocent in this matter.  We 'seniors' have developed
>>a tone that is not entirely receptive of new opinion, and we should be more
>>careful in our approach in the future.
>
>Where someone floats an idea without any apparent awareness of the relevant 
>evidence that might falsify that idea, I think it's in everyone's interest 
>for that person to be made aware of it - surely testing nice ideas against 
>awkward evidence is the basis of science? FWIW, I believe in "laissez 
>faire", not "laissez err". :-o
>
>Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 
>
>
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= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
			

Best regards.				 
Jan
 Our mail is always sent without attachments.
 http://hurontaria.baf.cz/enigma/ Enigma, nas novy casopis zahad


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