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Message Digest
Volume 29 : Issue 32 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
OT: NASA, Bell Labs, NSA, and the Voynich Manuscript
Re: OT: NASA, Bell Labs, NSA, and the Voynich Manuscript
Re: at&t vs. Verizon TV ad campaign?
Re: at&t vs. Verizon TV ad campaign?
====== 28 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:10:43 -0800
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: OT: NASA, Bell Labs, NSA, and the Voynich Manuscript
Message-ID: <4B656533.9050104@thadlabs.com>
Today (Jan. 31, 2010) is the 52nd anniversary of the USA's first
successful satellite launch, Explorer I, and I was curious as to
whether it'd be mentioned on NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day"
(APOD) since my Dad was involved with the Redstone missile project
whose modified version, the Jupiter, was the Explorer's launch
platform. Explorer I wasn't mentioned today and my inquiry revealed
historical items over 25 years old are only revisited every decade.
Today's APOD http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100131.html,
however, does feature "The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript" and seeing
the picture reminded me I had some data about it in my archives.
The incidental relevance to comp.dcom.telecom lies with the Bell
Labs paper by Jim Reed entitled "William F. Friedman's Transcription
of the Voynich Manuscript" which can be downloaded from here:
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/voynich/wff.pdf [23 pages, 63 KB]
If you want a copy of the entire Manuscript, it's 53.6MB, 209 pages and
only available from here: http://awesta.sibirjak.ru/files/Voynich.pdf.
Yes, that's Russia, but it's a very fast connection and the only site
I've found having the complete document in color as a high-res scan.
Two documents from the NSA about the Manuscript (first is 141 pages and
32MB, second is a bio of John Tiltman, 6 pages, 200KB) are here:
http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/misc/voynich_manuscript.pdf
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/johnhtiltman.pdf
Brigadier John Tiltman is the author of "The Voynich Manuscript, the Most
Mysterious Manuscript in the World," published in 1968. According to the
Brigadier, this is his only unclassified publication.
Some other interesting references for the curious:
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich.pdf
http://voynichmanuscript.net/voynichpaper.pdf
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/img/curr_main.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:07:02 -0600
From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: OT: NASA, Bell Labs, NSA, and the Voynich Manuscript
Message-ID: <6645152a1001311107v64ce4b9as4912457b0d2c1cf8@mail.gmail.com>
On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 5:10 AM, Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>
> Today's APOD http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100131.html,
> however, does feature "The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript" and seeing
> the picture reminded me I had some data about it in my archives.
Yes, but you missed the most important link where the truth behind the
Voynich Manuscript is revealed: http://xkcd.com/593/
Thad, I have also copied you personally on this email because I'm
about to stray from telecom for a moment and it might not be relevant
to the list. I've long been intrigued by personal archives. I turned
40 last year and have quite a collection of handwritten notes,
notebooks, and computer files and it's all quite a mess. How do you
organize yours?
My personal goal is to have everything digitized. But I'm also
concerned about future-proofing my data, so I stick to well-supported
open formats.
John
--
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jmayson
***** Moderator's Note *****
Organization: (n) The process by which dullards and Daddy's Boys
require person capable of original thought to reduce their synapse
rate to a level compatible with the aforsaid's mental capability. ;-)
OK, OK: I admit I'm no good at it. I don't know why. My basement is a
cross between the annex to Tutankhamen's Tomb and the Smithsonian
Exhibet on Rube Goldberg's forgotten failures: I have to pay young
children who don't know any better to wade through the coaxial cables
and 3C-509-Combo cards and Arcnet bridges and Token Ring MAU's and
80386-based computers in order to reach the hidden treasure trove of
six-foot-long neon bulbs that fit the fixtures I dug out of a dumpster
fifteen years ago. I know that I have a tape cartridge down there
that contains the Great American Novel, and I'll be the toast of the
talk-show circuit as soon as I can find it and re-install the drive
and the software on the 80386-based machine I kept in case I ever
found that tape.
Help! I'm drowning in te....
@@@Carrier Lost
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:32:24 -0500
From: "Bob Goudreau" <BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: at&t vs. Verizon TV ad campaign?
Message-ID: <61804D1E957B4C699151EC8290834C3C@estore.us.dg.com>
Jack Myers wrote:
> The discussion concerned the *lower-case* at&t post-divestiture.
I'm not following you here. The phrase "lower-case at&t" is generally taken
as a reference to AT&T Inc., which was formed only in 2005 when SBC
Communications Inc. purchased AT&T Corporation. That was a full 21 years
after AT&T Corp. divested itself of Western Electric and the RBOCs. There
simply wasn't any "lower-case at&t" for most of the post-divestiture era!
Bob Goudreau
Cary, NC
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:25:27 -0500
From: "Bob Goudreau" <BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: at&t vs. Verizon TV ad campaign?
Message-ID: <1F420AF2BBD844108C5007BBD5F29F7A@estore.us.dg.com>
Lisa Hancock wrote:
> Bob Goudreau wrote:
>> Such confusion may have been common decades ago, but I think the
>> number of such people is now small and diminishing. Remember that
>> "Ma Bell" ceased to exist over 26 years ago, when the Bell System
>> was broken up. The rump company was not even permitted to use the
>> name "Bell" except for its world-famous Bell Labs (which had
>> virtually no direct consumer visibility anyway). Starting on January
>> 1, 1984, the 20+ "Bell" local phone companies became part of the
>> seven original "Baby Bell" RBOCs, while the remaining AT&T
>> Corp. became one of several long-distance carriers competing for
>> consumers' business.
>
> Even though the breakup was 26 years ago, many people continue, to
> this day, to use the term "Ma Bell" when referring to AT&T in whatever
> form it happened to be at that moment.
I guess we'll have to disagree on this, as our anecdotal experiences
seem to be much different. Frankly, it's been years since I've heard
anyone utter the phrase "Ma Bell" in person. If pressed to rely on
something more objective than anecdotal experience, I will note that a
Google search of "AT&T" yields more than 39 million hits, while a
search of "Ma Bell" finds only about 220,000, (a bit more than one
half of one percent of the larger number). "Small and diminishing"
may actually have been too generous a description!
> Besides, when AT&T was bought out by the baby bell, why did [the
> purchaser] decide to take the at&t name for itself? [The answer is
> that] it was more well known.
I don’t think this proves your point though. Even by the 1990s, most
consumers' exposure to the AT&T brand was as a long-distance company,
not as the original Bell System. In the current decade, it also
became a mobile brand (AT&T Wireless), though that disappeared briefly
(late 2004 until early 2007, when Cingular rebranded as AT&T
Mobility). Both the long-distance and mobile businesses had
footprints all over the nation, as opposed to the more limited SBC
LEC, so it's no wonder that the combined company took the more
geographically expansive brand name.
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> As for the AT&T brand, if I had to guess at why Southwestern Bell
> adopted it, I'd say that they were positioning themselves to appeal to
> the ever-older group of customers who still rely on POTS for their
> phone connections, and who still remember the brand and associate it
> with reliable service.
Can't see how that would matter to the vast majority of those folks.
Great Aunt Tilly is probably going to stick with her ILEC, be it AT&T,
Verizon or some smaller rural telco. She's not the kind of customer
who is going to port her landline to VOIP or venture farther into the
wireless world than the "Jitterbug" class of devices.
Bob Goudreau
Cary, NC
***** Moderator's Note *****
"Great Aunt Tilly" is moving to the Sun Belt, and she's going to
have to choose a new ILEC real soon now. Ergo, Southwestern Bell
wanted a name she'll be predisposed to trust.
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End of The Telecom digest (4 messages)
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