Re: VMs: Faces at the roots

[Wayne Durden <wdurden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you Nick!

The time you took to write this was considerable and appreciated.  I 
misunderstood clearly, and I feel much different as a consequence of 
your post.  Thank you.

> ... I always say that email is a generally unfriendly medium, used by 
> generally friendly people. :-o

Great quote.


> though I would generally suggest posting spreadsheet-like things as 
> CSV, as this seems to be near-universally manipulable.

Can you send a CSV attachment to the list or did you mean inline with 
commas as field delimiter?  I agree CSV is better in general, but the 
problem as in this particular case is that the body text had commas 
within the descriptor fields.  Ordinarily I would use the pipe 
character, but I was afraid that made it difficult to read for folks 
who might merely want to scan it quickly by eye.  Will be happy to 
oblige in whatever is desired here...

> This makes trying to reason via nulls a hazardous path to tread

I get your point and agree whole heartedly.  Using a binary code 
sparsely enciphered into remainder nulls from label digraphs it appears 
relatively easy to create voychinese with plain english words 
enciphered about 2  or so to a hebal page which appears more convincing 
than the Rugg examples.  I also agree that nulls introduce the 
interpretative room danger of finding anything in text.  However, if 
the encoding glyphs are ONLY used for meaning and not in any other 
capacity where sometimes they would be also be nulls by way of 
ligature, etc., then they 1) might be identifiable, and 2) preclude 
much wiggleroom on interpretation ( a necessary characteristic for a 
good communication code).  The problem I face is that I now know that 
there were precisely these kinds of codes in the early 1600's at least; 
forms of binary encoding intermixed with nulls at a ration of 5 or so.  
A sparse enough one seems arbitrarily difficult to distinguish from 
pure hoax all nulls if any effort is also made to reuse the encoding 
glyph(s) via subtle stroke distinction.  Unfortunately there are also 
very early examples of doing just that.

>  - one where you need solid evidence to make even a small step.

Agreed.

As a final aside, and this relates to the issue of how hard it might be 
to use the labels to encode or decode in a book  form if they were null 
digraph tables, a colleague of mine pointed out that if in fact an 
external table of the null digraphs was used somewhat along the lines 
of the prefix, midfix, suffix valid word construction lines, you could 
have an external table used for encoding and decoding and the labels 
would still be a subset to the complete set of this dictionary as a 
result.  That probably isn't very clear, but here was his example.  a) 
The writer puts his meaning on prepared drawing pages in the white 
space.  He then uses the table to stick the null digraphs all around 
the code characters.  He then puts labels to the artwork using null 
digraphs to add a look of authenticity as a herbal, etc.  But all the 
meaning was already in the document and none is in the labels.  In this 
manner, the labels would represent a subset of the separate table 
without the small hassle of consulting the label folios themselves as a 
table...   Probably still not clear, but I have already again written 
far too much.  Of course that also throws up a new avenue to chase, 
whether there might be evidence that labels were added last, first, etc.

Thanks again, Nick!  I wish you a great remainder of the week.

 I'll not write in again for a while.  I respect that there isn't time 
enough in the day for folks to wade through this much.  Unfortunately 
for you guys, I am in an energized state about the VMS currently.

Wayne

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