Re: VMs: Re: Re: Inks and retouching

["GC" <gc-@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick my friend, here we go again!  Didn't we just have a discussion on a
"kinder and gentler" list?  :-)  You're absolutely right - it just wouldn't
be any fun if it weren't a rough-house, that's part of the attraction!

> Shame on me, but I haven't read Feely's (1943) "Roger Bacon's Cipher: The
> Right Key Found": all I've seen of his labels are the five on (snip).....

> Face it, these are rubbish. :-(

Of course these are rubbish.  I didn't say Strong based his decipherment on
Feely's decipherment, only that he took 'cribs' from the publications of
Feely and O'Neill.  I don't need to repeat what they were, they're published
in Strong's letters, even the discussion of Feely's decipherment and
Strong's opinion on the matter.  I think Strong's meeting with O'Neill had a
much larger influence than Feely's 'ouari', but not all the records are
here.  I do see a change in approach after the meeting, but that's of course
a speculation on my part.  it's only of historical interest anyway.

(snip)....
> section") than a label (ie "a crib referring to an adjacent picture").
> [FWIW, I think it would be interesting to analyse all occurrences of "dl"
> throughout the VMs, but that's a job for another day...]  [BTW, it's
> possible that the right-justified "titles" we see throughout the VMs may
> also be another form of Neal keys].
>

Nick, this obsession you have with pairs is something else.  There are so
many cryptographic reasons for these pairs you can't just choose one without
doing some very difficult analysis.  Pairs are a feature of the Voynich, and
until you can explain it, they're nothing more than that.  Don't take me
wrong here.  The pairs are important to understand, but you haven't even
begun to dissect the Voynich in a way that could shed light on this.
Separate bifolios and Currier sections, then get down to the paragraph level
first, then the line level.  Are there paragraphs that don't even have {89}
pairs?  How about {oe}, {am} etc.?  If these disappear, when do they
reappear?  Don't just stick to pairs.  Are there glyphs that disappear and
reappear, and if so, when do they do this?  Is there a pattern, and do they
do so in conjunction with other glyphs?  A good exercise is to list a folio
in columns of two, then three, then four, etc.  Observe what's going on, and
write it down on a napkin so you can lose it later and have to redo it on
computer.  That's my time-honored approach.

> If these are typical of Feely's "clews", and are furthermore typical of
> that upon which you have constructed your own theory, then I truly wonder
> if you have been building on sand here.
>
> Having said that, I've also read that Strong derived his ideas more from
> O'Neill's suggested labels (rather than from Feely's), and so wonder
> whether anything remains of Feely in his or your work?

I think what John Grove was trying to point out in my chastisement is that
what remains in anybody's work is the cumulative result of studying past
commentaries and attempted solutions.  A lot of times the influence is not
in the work itself, but in the commentary, which has the ability to shape
ideas, and he is of the opinion that my approach has not been influenced,
but my thinking has.  I'd give him some reluctant ground if he were to word
it in this fashion.  Since I would hesitate to say you're deliberately
trying to provoke, I'll also forgive you your misinterpretation, considering
the language barrier and all.... :-)

> Thirdly, precisely the point I was trying to make was that this kind of
> simple substitution (even over an abbreviated Latin plaintext) fails to
> please when you look at all the common pairs. Never mind his reading "Ch"
> as "ee" (I can forgive him that), but seeing all the occurrences of "ar",
> "al", "or", "dy" as pairs of single characters within these strings just
> isn't getting what Voynichese is all about - IMO, it's missing the point
> about how Voynichese is structured, how it works.

SIMPLE SUBSTITUTION?  (Yes, I was yelling).  Maybe I've misunderstood your
shift from Feely to Strong and back again.  Perhaps you're referring to
Feely here, and not Strong.  This must be the case because what you've
written above has absolutely no relation to Strong's transcription.

> As a decoder/interpreter, note that also gives you the ability to "see"
> half-spaces when it looks like a word isn't "fitting" the apparent
pattern,
> and to "overlook" them when it is.

I can't comment on the EVA interlinear since I almost never open the file,
but the old interlinear showed the 'half-space' problem quite demonstrably
from one transcriber to another. Each tried to determine whether a minimal
space was a real space or a continuation of the word, and passed judgment on
this.  I prefer to do this with a symbol "-" that demonstrates an element of
doubt.  It seriously doesn't matter to ME whether this space is there or
not, or in fact if there are ANY spaces in the text, as the space has a
function, but not one so critical that it hides the underlying system.
Strong transcribed a space but determined the word to be "crawknot", and
again transcribed a space but determined the word to be "folkkin".  These
are two of several examples where he initially saw a space and later
determined that the space was "false".  My transcription doesn't have the
same spacing his does, but the spaces don't change the meaning of the
underlying word.  I posted about this before, where I referenced a page that
had "Sixteen Nouembre" written as "Sixteen Nou embre", and warned that these
'half-spaces' should be taken into account when running statistics because
they are systemic, and a feature original to the Voynich, just as your
fixating 'pairs'.

I don't "see" something you don't see here.  I mark a space as a space, a
half-space as a half-space, and then see where it leads.  I'm telling you
they have a systemic function, but the function is really no different than
the space at the end of a word, and if you don't accept that, no 'Nick' in
my armor, so to speak. :-)  (Purely cold blooded shot on my part, I know...)

>          http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2004/05/msg00227.html
> ...but I don't recall you ever connecting such numbers with the coding
> system before, FWIW?

Damn, I said something sane for a change?  I must have been doing some
really good drugs that day, eh? :-)  Too bad no one follows up on my lapses
into sanity.  But you cheated.  You only did a search on 'numbers of things'
without going back into the archives, where you would have found I discussed
this at length on more than one occasion.

> I think that the "heavy painter" colour is almost certainly junk (ie zero
> semantic content), but there are still coloured parts which seem to be
> original which we should handle with care.

So far you haven't established that there ever was such an individual as the
"heavy painter", at least not to the standards you would hold my opinion.
But yes, zero semantic content.  The coloured parts that are original we
both see, and they are one of those 'a priori' things I'd list, but so far I
haven't seen how they are in any way connected to the cipher.  If I do find
a connection, I'd certainly be the first to say so, and you'll certainly be
the first to ignore the reference.

> >Strong didn't believe your representation, and that's why he called it a
> >'peculiar' use of a polyalphabetic.
>
> Are you referring here to my conviction that many common pairs (like "qo",
> "dy", "ol" "or", etc) actually verbosely code for single letters in the
> plaintext (or in the preceding cipher stage)?

No, I was referring to this quote, located directly above my comment:

> 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.

Here you are wrong on all counts, both in assumption and assertion based on
that assumption.  Strong didn't believe the cycle to be at glyph level,
rather at word level, ala Trithemius, for instance, who was the first I
believe to bring up such variations?  Strong attempted to reassign to the pt
alphabet based on the word, but my efforts demonstrate a shorter key-length,
one based on groups of two or three, and therefore a smaller alphabet set in
use at any given time than Strong was following.  He was unaware of script
related mechanisms - I've investigated and defined them, and even announced
those discoveries on the list.

> I think that Strong was a clever guy, and that you've proved yourself (by
> rationalising and tidying up his approach) to be even cleverer. But if you
> need interpretable half-spaces & key lengths of 2 or 3 to make it all
> work, then I suspect that you've ended up with a system that has more than
> enough capacity to see just what you want to see (just as Strong saw
> "paprika")

Nick, have you done enough work in this area to really know what you're
saying?  I'm not poking fun anymore, I'm dead serious.  This is obviously
not a direct quote, but let me take something from Trithemius - "For more
security change the alphabet after every word, or after every letter or two,
or randomly".  Now let's just say you took everything here to heart except
the "random", which I've said in earlier posts is a scary proposition and an
indication that Trithemius didn't fully understand the ramifications of his
own efforts.  This is the setup, something straight out of Trithemius.
You're simply in the wrong ballpark, looking for something the Voynich
*could* be instead of what it *should* be.  No magic 'strings', no
*ingenious* decipherments necessary, simply a review of available systems
and a determination of which of these was used, and to what extent.

It's all right there, and you don't need to go any further than to ponder
this.  It's really that mundane.  Friedman's work was excellent on the
subject of polyalphabetics, but his work was geared toward more advanced
thinking, and didn't cover basic human intervention as suggested by
Trithemius.  The principles applied to systematic and mathematically
generated cipher don't fully apply to human generated cipher, especially
those based on archaic and esoteric numbering systems - look at the 'golden
numbers' as an example.  Here you have to do hard work, you have to line
things up in various columns, work through apparent incongruities, break
things down and identify the elements.  In the back of your mind you always
have to remember that a human did this, not a machine, and the only way of
getting into it is to duplicate the human pattern.  Machines and machine
theory are fascinating, but one little man so long ago did something no
machine could duplicate.

Take the core of Trithemian thought and add about 20-25 years of idle
scholastic manipulation, especially in a time when one thing was thought to
be inseparably connected to another.  You don't think the string
135797531474 is not grounded in astronomical observation?  You'd be wrong.
And what about your pairs?  Have you tried to duplicate this phenomenon by
other means than simply suggesting a 'code' instead of a working mechanism?

> What I'm trying to get you to see is that there is indeed a brilliant
> cryptographic heart beating inside the VMs, but that the brilliant Doctor
> Strong had his finger on his *own* pulse - and that you're now doing the
> same. There are places where we can catch a fleeting glimpse (as did Feely
> and O'Neill) of something resembling simple cipher, but these are simply
> hallucinations.

Now what were we talking about earlier?  Oh yes, how list members
intentionally try to shut down ideas without review, and that's exactly what
you're doing here, Nick.  I'm not pleased.  I'M NOT PLEASED AT ALL.  But you
are making my own point quite clearly.  Let me ask you something, Mr.
Pelling - you say the 'brilliant Doctor Strong had his finger on his own
pulse'.  What do you base that on?  Have you reviewed the files in any
detail?  No, you haven't.  Your own post demonstrates that you don't have a
working knowledge of the information.  Have you performed the analysis I
suggested some two years ago?  No, you haven't.  Has anyone done such an
analysis that you can quote from, or from which you can reasonably draw your
conclusions?  NO, they haven't.  You have no useable specific information at
your fingertips, so where do you draw these conclusions, that both Strong
and myself are measuring our own 'pulses'?  No matter how you might counter
in the strategy of defense/offense, you have nothing but quick-sand beneath
your feet.  What was all that crap about 'unfounded' posts, and other such
nonsense where you felt it justified to respond 'accordingly'?

You talk about a "brilliant cryptographic heart beating inside the VMs".
Great.  On that we can agree.  Sounds great, written great, I love it.  The
'fleeting glimpses' part sounds like someone who hasn't got a 'clew', sorry
about that.  I'm going to let go that comment on 'simple cipher' because you
haven't been studying, but to lump Dr. Strong or myself into any description
that involves the word 'hallucinations' I simply cannot let slip.  If there
was ever a blatant attempt at shutting down an idea without proper thought
or investigation, calling my work an 'hallucination' is right up there.
What do you actually know of my work?  I offered, you didn't accept.  I
wasn't keeping things secret at all, you refused to be let in on the process
and that was the end of the discussion.  Did you determine back then that I
was 'hallucinating', or is this an opinion you've reached after much
research?  It's actually neither, Nick.  You have your own approach, and you
push it to the exclusion of others.

> AFA analysing Strong's (and your) results, I honestly don't know what kind
> of counter-critique you would find persuasive. My counter-argument simply
> amounts to pointing out that Voynichese doesn't work that way, and that if
> Strong's magic key was based on Feely and O'Neill's cribs, then it was
> built on sand. If you require jumping between lots of tables to remap a
> highly structured ciphertext onto a differently structured plaintext,
> perhaps (like Gordon Rugg) you're implicitly embedding your desire to
> comprehend the text into those tables - and so are reading yourself
> instead.

How many more outrageous conclusions are within your reach?  You seem to be
the master of the high-jump here, I just want to know how high you can
actually jump.  What kind of counter-critique would I find persuasive?  The
kind you should logically have done when I offered both Strong's material
and mine.  Your counter-argument is that 'Voynichese simply doesn't work
that way' - what way, Nick?  How exactly does Voynichese work, since I'm
obviously hallucinating?  Lay it out for me, dude, and don't spare any
punches, I can handle the truth for a change. Anything would be better than
the gibberish I've read in this post, that's for certain.

I'm not really angry with you, don't gather that at all.  My mental image of
your thrashing about on e-paper is akin to that of a flounder who has thrown
himself on the bank for no good reason - a sight that is both sad and
humorous at the same time - something that makes your heart just want to
reach out and fry the little bastard in a pan. :-)

You've made my point, that you and others resist the discussion of alternate
ideas and principles and deliberately try to shut them down.  The general
response was of course that this NEVER happens.  We all live and learn.
John Grove doesn't recognize that this happens, and also says the group has
influenced my thinking, so if my reflexive negativity is any indication,
John has a very strong point.  I would rather think that my thoughts were
most heavily influenced by D'Imperio's empirical writings than the
meanderings of the list, and that I'm more 'old school' than the rest of
you.  At the very least, I've never lost focus, so this has been one hell of
a consistent hallucination.

GC

BTW I'm going off-list.  Not because of this, it was a scheduled outage.

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