The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse

[Dunsel]

When it comes to undeciphered writing systems, nitpicking is the key since details matter. One clarification: a typesetting error changes a digit. It doesn't transform a 1976 Prentice-Hall book into a 1971 journal article in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society with a fabricated volume, issue, and page range.

Timm,

You asked me for a free eprint of my first published paper. I gave you one.

Your response was not to test the analysis, challenge the numbers, rerun the code, examine the controls, or show that the cipher comparison fails. You explicitly said you were not addressing the methodology or conclusions. Instead, you produced a public bibliography prosecution and even managed to include your own uncited paper among the supposed omissions.

That tells me quite a lot.

You also wrote that all of this is “checkable in a few minutes by anyone with the volumes to hand.” Not everyone doing independent research has a university library in their backyard, institutional subscriptions, or immediate access to every historical volume you happen to have available. That is one of the reasons independent researchers rely on public archives, digitized sources, repositories, and whatever tools they can get their hands on.

Let me make this clear so there is no misunderstanding. I am a truck driver. I am not an academic. I am not even college educated. I do not have an institution behind me, a research library at my disposal, or a department full of colleagues to lean on.

And yet I still managed to do the work, make it reproducible, survive peer review, and get published.

I work with the tools I can scrounge.

So spare me the holier-than-thou implication that everyone can simply walk over to a shelf and verify every historical citation “in a few minutes.” Some of us actually have to build the ladder before we can climb it.

Bibliographic details can be corrected. That is what errata are for. That does not immediately demand a public crucifixion. What you have not shown is that a single reported entropy value is wrong, that the train/test procedure leaks, that the natural-language controls overturn the result, that the shuffle controls fail, or that the Naibbe comparison does not reproduce the measured Voynich profile.

The paper makes its contribution through reproducible experiments, not through ceremonial obeisance to every Voynich paper you think should have been cited. The code and data are available. If you believe the result is wrong, falsify it.

If your real complaint is that I did not cite you, say that plainly. But do not dress a bibliography audit up as though you have dismantled the work when you have deliberately avoided engaging the work itself. 

You, sir, are why I will no longer do research on the Voynich. You, sir, are why I will stop posting on this forum. You read my paper not to understand, but to respond. And you just provided the perfect example. You wrote an entire dissertation on the references rather than the work. And that is too often what passes for discussion on these pages.

You had the paper. You had the data. You had the code.

And you chose the fucking footnotes.