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Re: VMs: Epibrating Cerebrating

jan wrote:

right you are, but we will have to face it sooner or later anyway. The hesitation to act is understandable: the talk about hoax was here since the very beginning; even Voynich was supected. Now we have an interesting addition: Rugg claims it is only a gibberish, with nonesensical content.

It was not probed any deeper because of two very good reasons:
1) many characteristics show that the VM has sensical content (it still can be some hoax, however) , and
2) to prove it is a gibberish is very difficult (maybe even impossible) . 

  How does one prove a negative?  Can anyone answer that?   That is
(maybe) the question with gibberish.

   If we could say that it would take a separate table and a few
distinct Cardan grilles to produce the exact text of the VMs, then
Occam's razor would eliminate Rugg's thesis.

   There is also Brumbaugh's version of the hoax hypothesis, that the
VMs contains a meaningless collection of valid words from a dictionary.
One could disprove this, perhaps, by frequency analysis and study of
syntax, as Gabriel and Mark Perakh have already done to some extent.
However, humans never produce truly random sequences.  Cryptanalysis
works from this fact, after all.   So even a hoax per Brumbaugh would
show some token order.

   Finally, a hoax might contain a text that is somehow meaningful and
valid but vacuous.  Remember the third book of Trithemius'
Steganographia, or the Necronomicon prop we recently saw on eBay.

Therefore let us leave the burden of proof on Ruggs shoulders :-), but stress the first point instead. 

   Is it worth our time to get into a controversy over Rugg's thesis?
I have been  considering writing a letter to Sci Am, but I wonder about
that.  We have quite enough to handle as it is.

To catch the killer is stilll out of question: we would have to solve the VM first. 


   We could conceivably find the author(s) first, but I think Bruce
really meant we need to find a valid solution for the VMs to really
disprove the hoax hypothesis itself.

Dennis


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