Would You Like to Buy a Copy of the Voynich Manuscript?
© Norman Sperling, December 29, 2012
Part of a set on the Voynich Manuscript:
Great Stories from a Book You Can't Read: The Voynich Manuscript December 23, 2012
Voynich: Turkish? December 24, 2012
Voynich: 2 or More Handwritings? December 25, 2012
Voynich: Spiraling Into Folly December 26, 2012
Could 2 of Voynich's Oddities Cancel Each Other Out? December 27, 2012
Did Voynich Swindle Mondragone? December 28, 2012
There is said to be a published version, but unavailable, and cropped so much that people complain. There's an eBook version, a CD ROM version, and an online version. But how about a book you can hold in your hands?
I queried my audience and found 5 who said they'd consider buying a printed copy. I presumed using modern acid-free document paper instead of vellum, and a binding that opens flat. I surveyed their preferences:
For margins, they preferred either the original amounts, or 10-12 mm. (I expected them to want much wider margins, for making their own notes.)
Then I posited 2 potential versions:
* a Replica, reproducing the manuscript in its present form as faithfully as technology allows;
* and a Restoration, with the page-order rearranged as sensibly as possible, with blank pages left for the missing leaves, with script printed black-on-white for ease of reading, and with colors restored to original tones.
Along a continuum from Replica to Restoration, nobody wanted the ink contrast or illustration colors as faded as presently. Preferences ranged smoothly from "fully restored to our best guess of original", to halfway to the present fading.
Everybody wanted the paper color roughly halfway between white, and as-brown-as-present.
With electronic reproduction now making pages and printing so selectable, I wondered if people might want to custom-enhance unreality by inventing a new page order, and rendering lettering and illustrations in user-selected colors, including psychedelic. (About a mile from where I spoke, and about 4 blocks from where I teach, psychedelic tie-dye shirts are still sold by street-vendors on Telegraph Avenue.) But these 5 customers were way more sober than that, and wanted no such thing. They also wanted no enlargement, or just a little.
I suggested 3 kinds of binding. They strongly preferred "quality cloth-covered hardback" and "quality paperback". My imagined "custom vellum-covered hardback" found no favor.
Then I asked them to forecast "In the long run, per 100 copies sold, estimate the number picking:
* replica: 30%
* restoration: 42%
* psychedelic: 5%
* their own custom settings: 30%.
Yes, those don't add up to 100%, but that's what the folks wrote.
Averages of estimates for the proper prices:
* replica: $30
* restoration: $53
* psychedelic: $47
* custom settings: $70.
If you could tailor a copy to your preferences, what characteristics would you want? What would you pay? Compare that to Emperor Rudolph's 600 ducats, or the $160,000 that Voynich never got.
Did Voynich Swindle Mondragone?
© Norman Sperling, December 28, 2012
Part of a set on the Voynich Manuscript:
Great Stories from a Book You Can't Read: The Voynich Manuscript December 23, 2012
Voynich: Turkish? December 24, 2012
Voynich: 2 or More Handwritings? December 25, 2012
Voynich: Spiraling Into Folly December 26, 2012
Could 2 of Voynich's Oddities Cancel Each Other Out? December 27, 2012
Would You Like to Buy a Copy of the Voynich Manuscript? December 29, 2012
The book The Voynich Manuscript by Kennedy and Churchill (Orion, 2004), and some websites, repeatedly accuse Wilfrid Voynich of unethical dealing because the religious books he traded to the Catholics of Mondragone in return for 30 old manuscripts including this odd one, didn't cost a lot. Voynich, Kennedy, and Churchill all valued antiquarian things unusually highly. They didn't value those new books very much. The accusation makes several faulty assumptions.
From all we are told, nobody was forced into a deal. Nobody lied. They all had what they had, wanted what they wanted, and reached agreements. This is the principle of "a willing buyer and a willing seller": it just needs to make sense to the people involved in their own circumstances right then. How it would be regarded by others, elsewhen, with different circumstances, is not relevant.
I have experienced quite a number of things that I valued, selling for low prices, or not selling at all. In hurriedly clearing out our old house in preparing to sell it, we ended up giving away several thousand dollars worth of stuff. And I have experienced items fetching surprisingly high prices because they were worth a whole lot to someone else in their particular situation. Our house sold for a handsome profit that dwarfed the losses described 2 sentences ago.
Mondragone made no use of what they had, had no use for it, and had not even touched it for centuries. They did their religious duties, for which those 30 manuscripts were actually a drag. They also had no means to find out their specialty value (the antiquarian book dealers Voynich and Kraus didn't know, either: they speculated and lost). Mondragone had no experience in selling through specialists anyway, and no means to find and deal with dealers or collectors of antiquarian books, or they would already have done so.
Wilfrid Voynich acquired the knowledge to find Mondragone, exercised the energy and paid the cost to actually journey there, and took the risk to invest money with no surety of earning a profit. Voynich listened to them - what other merchant would? They wanted certain uncommon books they could actually use, but they didn't have money to get them, nor the knowhow to find and purchase them. We worldly people of 2012 could do that in a snap (well, a click), but buying their wants was beyond the abilities and resources of isolated members of a religious order in 1912, or they would already have done so.
Voynich took considerable trouble to fill Mondragone's shopping list and deliver to them what they really wanted - "concierge" service. Nobody else had, or would. Voynich performed several services that required his expertise and attitude, including the age-old commercial one of taking things from where they have low value to where they have high value.
A strongly parallel experience happened to me about 1990. A little, isolated college had an antique telescope. The occasional astronomy course was taught by a professor of something else. He saw an ad for a modern telescope, which would help him teach his course much better than the awkward old thing could. He was worldly enough to know how to buy the new one, but far from knowing how to sell the old one for enough money to pay for it. From a friend of a friend, he heard that I had studied antique telescopes. So he invited me to examine the old scope, appraise it, and sell it so he could buy the new one. Unfortunately, its lens was badly chipped, devastating its value. I never found a customer, no deal occurred, and I never heard from them again. I lost the value of that time and travel.
If I had succeeded in fulfilling that college's wants, Kennedy and Churchill would regard me as an unethical swindler for doing so. I regard Voynich as an enterprising, risk-taking expert bringing added value and new possibilities wherever he reached agreements.
Swatting Scammers
© Norman Sperling, September 5, 2012
The 4th-best apartment-for-rent ad that I answered was also a scam, just as the 3 better ones had been, and (judging from the responding eMail) it was from the same scammer as #2.
Craigslist claims it can't tell. More likely they don't care to bother.
Gmail's spam-spotters sure recognized them. But they just relegated their responses to the spam file, apparently based on the similarity of the wording to a lot of other mail they'd carried that had been flagged before.
I hear that law enforcement won't do much because they can't prove that the location of the offense is within their bounds. Mine all cited "West Africa" ... but why should that be truer than their offerings?
The scammers know that Craigslist hardly hinders them, Gmail merely redirects their mail to a different folder, and law enforcement leaves them alone. They get away with their scams because no one with evidence communicates with anyone else.
As long as Gmail and Craigslist operate in blissful independence, scammers will continue to exploit their hands-off attitude to scam money from the customers of both.
So here's a superb opening for Anonymous and White Hats. They want to right wrongs, don't they? They want to keep the internet open and effective, don't they? The using public should contribute thousands of exemplars, from which patterns could be recognized, from which the number and behavior of scammers can be determined. I suspect there are fewer than 1,000 originators of this misery, and I suspect that >90% can be identified this way.
Cooperate with selected targets (banks, merchants, Craigslist, eBay, ...) and media (eMail, ISPs, portals, ...), track down the crooks, document their takings, build overwhelming legal and moral evidence, and come down so hard on them that they'll not only cave in (and go to jail and pay restitution) but also deter anyone else from even trying. This may also expose government agencies and banks that cast blind eyes.
I sure would enjoy reading the stories of such rip-off artists, and their downfalls.
My forwarding address
I have rented a mail-drop. Everything postal (& UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc.) should go there.
Norman Sperling
2625 Alcatraz Avenue #235
Berkeley, CA 94705-2702
Items sent to 413 Poinsettia Avenue, San Mateo, CA 94403 after September 22, 2012, will be forwarded irregularly for a few months, but then returned to sender or destroyed.
Also expiring in September:
the landline telephone, 650-573-7125
and the eMail wonttell@astound.net .
I expect to check the maildrop 2 or 3 times every week until late December 2012. While I am on the road, things will be forwarded to me sporadically. Therefore, use eMail whenever that can serve well enough: normsperling@gmail.com. My cellphone remains 650-200-9211.
The Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, by Robert Neuwirth. Pantheon 2011.
review © Norman Sperling, February 7, 2012
This new book tells nothing new, and offers many examples of no value. Ostensibly celebrating the pirate economy, the author neither self-publishes nor finds street sellers. Instead, he contracts with a name-brand publisher, copyrights his tales of piracy, and repeatedly invalidates his own premises.
The underground and pirate economy is not rising, it's always been around. This "informal economy" is older and far more entrenched than the formal one. In several places the book admits that, but immediately reverts to the fantasy that working "off the books", on the street, on the margins, or not fully licensed, is new, or increasing.
What's newer, and growing far more vigorously, is the formal economy that earns confidence, enforces inspections, builds brands, and does things right. Several times, the narrative brushes up against the roughly-direct relationship between an enterprise's degree of formality (for which the author selects the odd proxies of being licensed, registered, and taxpaying) and its degree of trustworthiness. Trust and confidence are critical in transactions.
That's why customers graduate to more formal levels of the economy as soon as they can. They get better quality and therefore better value: the things they buy are closer to "real" and "working" and "sturdy" and "supported", and therefore worth the higher price. This generates valuable repeat-business, compared to street-hawkers who always need to drum up yet more new customers. Of this, the book gives only the slightest mention.
The author offers several sighs over capitalist misbehavior, while citing far more examples (without sighs) of pirate misbehavior. Almost all the misbehavior is just plain short-sighted: taking an immediate advantage and ignoring its (bigger) long-term consequences. Undermining value, as several chapters on piracy celebrate, undermines confidence. Folks who can't afford the most-trustworthy goods, and therefore take less-trustworthy, discounted street-goods, often live to regret it. Frequently-cheated customers are less eager to buy, which slows the 'speed of money', whose rate tracks the health of economies.
Save your time and money: skip this book. To improve the economy, earn as much confidence as you can (in reality, not just "licenses and registrations"), and do business with others who also earn confidence.
The Garages of Silicon Valley
© Norman Sperling, February 1, 2012
We're all familiar with giant computer-industry corporations. Here in Silicon Valley, we have hundreds of them. But they didn't start out giant, they started out basic and bare-bones. I drove around the Valley a couple weeks ago to look at some of their birthplaces. See pictures of these and many companies' first buildings at scaruffi.com. (HP and Google were founded in garages just around the corners of the houses shown.) You can also find them on satellite imagery.
1939: Hewlett Packard garage, 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto: quite rustic, with not-quite-even wooden planks. Narrow 1-car garage (no house had a 2-car garage in 1938!). Were it not for the bronze plaques in front of the house (a duplex, private residences), absolutely nothing would call attention to the garage. Unassuming. It's well-painted because the garage is now owned by Hewlett-Packard and maintained as their honored birthplace. A private tour inside, that I didn't see: by Brian Solis.
1956-57: 391 San Antonio Road, Mountain View: where Shockley Semiconductor got started. This pioneering transistor company was a terrible place to work. Experts fleeing Shockley founded Fairchild, Intel, Kleiner, and others. Now at the corner of a gigantic shopping center (redeveloped in 2012), a WalMart stands on the opposite corner. The building is hard to recognize! It's now an "International Market" selling halal meats. The historic, main part is extremely plain, basic, slab-sided, undistinguished. The newer front segment is much better looking. The Geek Atlas says there's a plaque but I didn't find any.
~1958: 844 E. Charleston Road, Palo Alto: Fairchild Semiconductor , 1957- . Invented integrated circuits. Moore's Law 1965. Begat the "Fairchildren" LSI, Advanced MicroDevices, and many more. Very plain light-industrial building, with only a few faint touches of styling. Modern for the 1950s. 2 bronze plaques out front tell how the commercial integrated circuit chip was invented there, but you'd never notice the building if it wasn't pointed out. 2 suites are for rent as of January 2012.
1975: Apple's garage, 2066 Crist Drive, Los Altos. The front actually looks rather like my house, though the spacing between houses is quite a bit wider. It has a double-width garage, where mine has a single. Extremely unassuming, less adorned than most of the houses on the street. No plaque. This front lawn has the smallest tree on the block (perhaps a big old tree had died). The garage is absolutely unassuming.
1998: Google's garage, 232 Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park. Somewhat newer, with a classy mailbox and tile address on the garage. No sign or plaque visible. Clean and trim but plain. Some neighbors haven't been maintained in decades, others are junior palaces.
Nobody would pick any of these as a place of future greatness. These ventures all started very small and plain and unadorned, all hope and work. Nothing big or rich till long after they outgrew these cradles. If the beginning work hadn't fostered sales and expansion, we'd never have heard of any of them. It doesn't matter how tiny your accommodations (I say, typing away in a corner of a closet), what counts is where you take it from there.
Remembering Norman Edmund
© Norman Sperling, January 25, 2012
Norman W. Edmund founded Edmund Scientific Company on a card table in his home in 1942. When he retired in the mid-1970s, it had over 200 employees. He died at the age of 95 last week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to which he had retired.
I vividly remember devouring every new issue of the Edmund catalog while I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. The catalog always had a lot of "tutorial" segments - several paragraphs each, usually with diagrams, so the users could understand the technicalities of the equipment. They weren't particularly slanted toward Edmund products, and they taught a great many people a lot about their hobby and its hardware. Only a few catalogs (like Orion) continue to do that, though it's absolutely the best policy and should be fostered. Tutorials are NOT waste-space, and they foster brand loyalty: I trust the company that makes the effort to tell me the straight information.
I met Norm several times in the 1970s, while I consulted for his son Robert. In those years Norm kept his desk in the main office, kept a bunch of neat science-thingies around, and had appropriate input. But I also sensed that he kept his distance from daily operations, carefully avoiding stepping on toes.
What always impressed me was how nice he was. Plain, no affectations, no flaunting. And he passed all that on to the rest of his family, several of whom I met. They're all nice. They treat people well. They treated me very well. It wasn't just a put-on performance, it was genuine.
To Norman and Robert, "treating people nicely" is business policy as well as personal. While it's true that being nice to people is good customer service and good business, I think they are nice to people simply because they think that is the right way to be. I learned a lot from that.
They didn't outsource service. Callers were transferred to people who knew the technicalities they needed. Customers could get replacements and refunds.
Robert once told me "Customers will always complain. They'll complain about price, or they'll complain about quality. As long as I'm president, they aren't going to complain about quality." Which is to say, the stuff he designed, produced, and marketed would actually work well. And it did. Sure, humans aren't perfect and hardware isn't perfect, but when problems cropped up, the company tried hard to fix them, and usually succeeded.
Norman Edmund was well-respected as a leader in science business, an advocate of science education, a business leader of Greater Philadelphia, an expert fisherman, and a gentleman who "lived long and prospered". I'm really glad I knew him.
Develop Your Own Product
© Norman Sperling, October 9, 2011
Develop and sell your own product or service. This little sideline can help in everything
* from venting frustration ("I'll show THEM!")
* to opening doors (I earned even more from contracts facilitated by being author of my first book, than I earned from selling the book itself)
* to actually producing decent income on its own.
Running your own business gets you a high, different, and useful status, and the potential to build something bigger.
Start with something you can do distinctively, even if it's a very small enterprise. Keep it affordable under your circumstances. The very exercise of taking something from idea all the way through the practicalities of production, sales, and distribution is a huge education and a huge accomplishment. The techniques it teaches you can help a wide array of your other activities. And the people it introduces you to can open more doors.
Then spread the word. Set up a website, and maybe a blog. Show your expertise and how distinctive your product or service is. Tell leaders in the field about your stuff. Encourage up-and-coming leaders to use it.
Career-long, full-time jobs scarcely exist any more. There are times when conventional employment may let you down: cutbacks, layoffs, firings, expirations, disqualifying circumstances, whatever. When that happens, you're still a "somebody" because you run your own business. You'll always have your current business card, not merely a card from where you used to work. The status of "business owner" is way better than the status of "unemployed". How little your business is, is no one else's business (except the tax authorities). If you have time on your hands, put some of it into developing your little business into something a little less little. That'll feel good, and earn a bit more money in tight times.
Once in a while, a little business can take off and turn quite profitable. When ideas occur, and/or pathways open to bigger things, you'll already be established. Scaling up is way easier than newly establishing everything. Be poised so that could happen to you.
Essential Reading on Your Own Business:
Bernard Kamoroff: Small Time Operator.
Claude Whitmyer & Salli Rasberry: Running a One Person Business. Ten Speed.
Recommended:
Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry: Marketing Without Advertising. Nolo Press.
Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry: The Seven Laws of Money.
Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry: Honest Business.
The Briarpatch Book.
Rafi Mohammed: The Art of Pricing. Crown 2005.
Loyal Old Customers
© Norman Sperling, June 21, 2011
I was talking business with another proprietor of a decades-old science business. We both have loyal customers. For both,
* most pay by check, instead of credit card or PayPal
* a few fill out their checks by typewriter (yes, in 2011)
* a few don't like the prices' .95 and round their checks up to .00
* none of their checks bounce.
The "typewriter" aspect no doubt marks people who have not fully adopted computers, because hardly anyone else keeps a typewriter handy. Customers who have been loyal for decades are, by definition, older, so this is no surprise.
The preference for checks is not just a failure to adopt newer technologies, since credit cards became very common by the 1960s. Some feel less secure about giving out their credit card numbers.
Their checks are always good. They want the product, and they'll want the next one too. They're quite content to transfer the money. They don't begrudge the price. It is tempting to read into this the high ethics of science, too.
Paying the rounded dollar instead of the .95 shows these customers' rationality overpowering their emotional reaction to the price. I've never heard of this happening outside of science businesses. Lots of business have thought of charging rounded prices, and many have tried it. Sales slump horribly. Customers only buy when prices end in .95 or .97 or .98 or .99. Only merchants that end their prices that way survive. I once raised the price of an item from $4.35 (which was determined by standard pricing formulae) to $4.95, and thereby markedly increased sales. That's the way customers want things ... except for this extreme intellectual fringe, who are so repulsed by that practice that they send $27.00 for a $26.95 product. They have no way of knowing what a pricing formula would actually call for - the formulaic price might actually end in .31 or .78 or anything else.
Ghostwriting Busters
© Norman Sperling, November 14, 2010
Medical ethicists are in an uproar over misleading medical research articles and presentations being "ghost-written". They're confusing 2 different activities, and blaming the wrong one.
One thing that's going on is ghost writing. That is often good.
The other thing that's going on is distorting results. That is bad.
Experts with talent and training in research can be wonderful at that, but often don't write well. And people who write well are rarely talented or trained in research. In your own experience, you know several people who are great at doing something but poor at expressing it, and several people who are great at expressing things but not so great at originating all of them.
So people who aren't so great at writing, who need to write something for publication, enlist help. They can ask friends, they can hire writers, or their sponsors can hire writers. As long as the output is correct, nobody is deceived about the scholarly content. While literary sleuths dispute "true" authorship of literary gems, that never happens with these reports.
I've done some of this. Here's an example from when I was an editor at Sky & Telescope magazine: An interesting article arrived with a turgid title something like "Thermoluminescence and Cathodoluminescence in Chondritic Meteorites". I changed the title to "Meteorites that Glow". I bet a lot more people read the article than would have with the stilted, stuffy title. That time I was paid by the publisher rather than the writer or the writer's sponsor, so that could be called "editing" instead of "ghost writing", but it's doing the same thing.
Turning ineffective writing into something people actually like to read takes talent and training that is rarely part of researchers' education. It's fair to have a ghostwriter as long as the meaning doesn't change, and the researcher approves everything the ghostwriter did before it's published. It doesn't matter who pays the ghostwriter, though it's cleanest if the money is laundered through the researcher.
Changing the meaning is entirely different. Someone thinks that by lying about reality, they can make quick money. The original author may have at least as much motivation as a hired writer. Warping can be done by ghostwriters, editors, publishers, and others. Of course reality must always win in the end. Concealed harm grows too blatant to hide. Legal settlements for causing harm can bankrupt corporations. Even the accusation can cripple a researcher's career.
The flap over ghostwriters is mis-aimed. Attack liars and cheaters for lying and cheating. Don't attack people who are good at expressing things for being good at expressing things.
