ERDNASE

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Richard Kaufman
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 20th, 2011, 5:43 pm

There are some influential people in our field who think that the entire argument for Wilbur Sanders is "nonsense" and they don't accept the conclusion AT ALL. I expect we'll see and hear more about this in coming months.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Chris Aguilar » August 20th, 2011, 5:54 pm

Are these "influential people" folks who have publicly weighed in on the topic before?

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » August 20th, 2011, 6:19 pm

Wilbur Sanders, literary critic, via Bill Mullins: wrote: ...the following extracts have been exhumed from their obscure place of burial

Ah, perhaps this is the same place where one can also exhume some "antiquated moss-covered ruses" :-)

Wilbur Sanders, literary critic, via Bill Mullins: wrote: ...data culled in a measure from geologic reports and folios of the region

Undoubtably via the Erdnase System of Culling....

Wilbur Sanders, literary critic, via Bill Mullins: wrote: ...And how many reports presuming to describe mining properties are written that should never have been penned because of the wicked waste of ink resulting therefrom.

Presumably by the same "Self-styled 'ex-professionals'" (responsible for the aforementioned exhumations, btw) who have "regaled the public with astounding disclosures of their former wiles and wickedness"

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Rick Ruhl » August 20th, 2011, 6:28 pm

Carlo Morpurgo wrote:Just fooling around with the title page (and nothing more...)

http://tinyurl.com/3gc7bzq

Can you read W.E. Sanders?


David Alexander said in his article that that page is the only one needed to find the true name of the author.

And this is from TOP to BOTTOM. Its has to be intentional.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Rick Ruhl » August 20th, 2011, 7:14 pm

Also I was playing around with the name..

S W Erdnase

E S Andrews

Pop the W to the top and invert the RE

W E Sanders

Im thinking this relates to three magic tricks.


The first, of couse, is reversing the order of the deck.

The others are a double lift and a shift....

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Marty Demarest » August 20th, 2011, 7:16 pm

Carlo's work is very interesting, and quite in keeping with David Alexander's original research. Fascinating!

It points up one of S.W. Erdnase's unquestionable qualities: He disguised his name.

Along with being a writer and a self-publisher, we can be fairly certain that S.W. Erdnase disguised his real name. Any credible candidate for Erdnase must be a writer, a self-publisher and have reason to use a pseudonym.

Of course authors have many reasons for disguising their real names, ranging from personal to legal. But since S.W. Erdnase did not attempt to hide his illustrator's name, and since he never emerged to claim his work after laws and legal rulings began to change in the early part of the 20th Century, it seems likely that S.W. Erdnase had a personal reason to disguise his name.

I discuss W.E. Sanders' personal reasons for maintaining his anonymity in the September issue of Genii. I also provide examples of Wilbur's fondness for rearranging the letters of his name in different ways, including stacking them in columns.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Roger M. » August 20th, 2011, 7:21 pm

It's disappointing to read that some think Sanders candidacy is "nonsense".

Making broad or definitive statements in either direction doesn't help the search at all.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 20th, 2011, 7:24 pm

It helps THEIR search if they have a different candidate that they are supporting, for whatever reason.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Geno Munari » August 20th, 2011, 7:47 pm

I agree with Roger. There is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that is getting stronger. Carl's discovery is really amazing.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Chris Aguilar » August 20th, 2011, 8:01 pm

I'll be most interested in seeing any forthcoming evidence (for or against any viable candidate) that these "influential people" choose to share with us.

Once one makes a statement as strong as "Nonsense!" it's unequivocally "put up or shut up" time.

----- Grabbing my popcorn and settling in for some interesting times -------

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Brad Henderson » August 20th, 2011, 10:05 pm

Can someone point out what I am meant to see in carlos's picture? Reading on iPhone. Perhaps it isn't visible so readily there?

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » August 20th, 2011, 10:20 pm

A few days ago in this thread, David Ben said "Hopefully the next issue of Magicol will provide some clarity to this debate. I am in the process of assembling the issue for layout now."

David more recently in this thread asked Marty for documentation to support the new claim that the Edgertons (Sanders Mother's family) were related to Dalrymple.

So it sounds to me that at least some counterarguments will be presented there.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » August 20th, 2011, 10:27 pm

Brad Henderson wrote:Can someone point out what I am meant to see in carlos's picture? Reading on iPhone. Perhaps it isn't visible so readily there?


The nine lines of text that says "Embracing the whole calendar..." were all shifted left or right so that a vertical column of letters spells out "WESANDERS".

It starts with the W in "whole", the second E in "employed", the S in "Describing", the A in "tration", the N in "manoevre" etc.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Roger M. » August 20th, 2011, 10:28 pm

Brad, starting with the "W" in "Whole", read in a vertical line going straight down.

WESANDERS

Might be tough to see on an iPhone.

Edit: Bob beat me to it!
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 20th, 2011, 10:30 pm

It took me a few minutes to see it.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Eoin O'hare » August 20th, 2011, 11:44 pm

Here's Carlo's photo ( I hope you don't mind) with the name circled.



Image



Image
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby El Harvey Oswald » August 21st, 2011, 1:37 am

wow; that would be an extraordinary coincidence, and the weird margin justification suggests it was deliberate

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby El Harvey Oswald » August 21st, 2011, 1:41 am

i see now that's not in fact how it was arranged on the original title page; not so remarkable

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Larry Horowitz » August 21st, 2011, 2:06 am

I do not recall if this has been mentioned previously;

But can any significance, in light of latest findings, be attached to the credit for illustration going to M.D. Smith and not his full name.

Just as we have only S.W. we only get M.D. Why no full name for the artist? Why no Full false name for the author?

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby El Harvey Oswald » August 21st, 2011, 5:32 am

"Just as we have only S.W. we only get M.D. Why no full name for the artist? Why no Full false name for the author?"

initials for both: just parallelism.

initials for the author: arguably more concealment, as a full name might give clues, even unintentionally. also, it is gender neutral, though the probability of a female author is likely close to zero.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Marty Demarest » August 21st, 2011, 9:13 am

Happy 150th Birthday, W.E. Sanders!

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Leonard Hevia » August 21st, 2011, 12:23 pm

El Harvey Oswald wrote:i see now that's not in fact how it was arranged on the original title page; not so remarkable


If Erdnase had arranged it as Carlo did, wouldn't it have been too obvious to ascertain his real name? There was a deliberate reason for the pyramid shape of the title page. If Erdnase designed it that way for purely aesthetic reasons, then we have a hell of a coincidence. If not, we have W.E. Sanders.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Brad Henderson » August 21st, 2011, 12:38 pm

Thanks!

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 21st, 2011, 2:08 pm

It's yet another SWE "shift" that produces the name of the author.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Rick Ruhl » August 21st, 2011, 4:17 pm

I was working on this even more and needed to add what I think are moves in the book that relate to the name.

S W Erdnase

E S Andrews

Reversing the order of the cards as described in the Stock Shuffle.

E S Andrews

W E S Andres

Use the Slide to bring the W to the top. In his description of the slide, he says "It is a form of exchage that may be occasionaly employed".

I still havent figured out which move would reverse the r and e.

Rick

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Jonathan Townsend » August 21st, 2011, 6:39 pm

Who's gonna be first with "bible code" revelations from this text?
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Geno Munari » August 21st, 2011, 9:55 pm

I found this interesting post. It mentions a different name for Wilbur's son. Perhaps he had another son, other than James, as mentioned in the article. If I missed this, my apology.

http://genforum.genealogy.com/sanders/m ... 10354.html

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 21st, 2011, 10:22 pm

Wilbur Fisk had three sons if memory serves: Wilber Sanders had two brothers.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Rick Ruhl » August 22nd, 2011, 8:20 am

Wilbur's younger brother was named Louis, according to the sidebar in Marty's article.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby El Harvey Oswald » August 22nd, 2011, 9:37 am

"If Erdnase had arranged it as Carlo did, wouldn't it have been too obvious to ascertain his real name? There was a deliberate reason for the pyramid shape of the title page. If Erdnase designed it that way for purely aesthetic reasons, then we have a hell of a coincidence. If not, we have W.E. Sanders."

i suppose so; i'm kind of drifting back toward finding it pretty compelling

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Jonathan Townsend » August 22nd, 2011, 10:30 am

Can you slide the lines around to find other names of candidate magicians, writers or card sharps?
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » August 22nd, 2011, 11:34 am

El Harvey Oswald wrote:"If Erdnase had arranged it as Carlo did, wouldn't it have been too obvious to ascertain his real name? There was a deliberate reason for the pyramid shape of the title page. If Erdnase designed it that way for purely aesthetic reasons, then we have a hell of a coincidence. If not, we have W.E. Sanders."

i suppose so; i'm kind of drifting back toward finding it pretty compelling


I'm drifting around on this too. The letters in his name (E, S, A, ...) are almost all very common. So there's roughly a 1 in 10 chance that WESANDERS would appear either forward or backwards within a block of text of that size/shape (with each line of text containing the corresponding letter of his name). Plus there are other variants of picking letters or choices he could make for how he wrote his name. So it doesn't seem like that huge of a coincidence to find something.

Also, if Sanders wanted to conceal his name, wouldn't he have chosen a way that couldn't be chalked up as easily to chance? Eg, with the SW Erdnase anagram there are only a small handful of ways to unscramble that to an actual name. So that makes a much stronger (though well hidden) connection to his name.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Carlo Morpurgo » August 22nd, 2011, 1:29 pm

Glad to see that some more people found this "discovery" interesting...! I am personally entertained by it, but I would be cautious about claiming that it really means something... To entertain myself even more I came up quickly with a similar "pyramidal scheme" with my own name (not very creative, I admit), and when I was almost done I read Bob's message above and found out that I had already the first 6 letters in WESanders...I just tweaked it a little to have them all:

http://tinyurl.com/3hgqgfw

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Jonathan Townsend » August 22nd, 2011, 1:50 pm

Puzzle boxes in text form?
Is this a common practice?
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » August 22nd, 2011, 2:11 pm

I don't know much about this sort of thing, but what are the odds that the letters WESANDERS would appear in perfect order from top to bottom merely by shifting some of the lines from side to side? It would seem that the odds are very great AGAINST it happening, which makes it much more likely to have been done purposefully.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Carlo Morpurgo » August 22nd, 2011, 2:11 pm

this is the correct link: http://tinyurl.com/42b8mjr

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Geno Munari » August 22nd, 2011, 2:12 pm

Carlo,I find this so compelling.

I just am amazed,however it is similar to the problem with imperfect anagrams. For instance, In New Era Card Tricks, you can find Erdnase car trick. However I am afraid that anagrams are much like a Google search. You can put two different names together and find items in the search that are not relevant.

I still am pondering the theories pro/con, allowing the use of Marshall Smith's name to remain on the cover. Any thoughts on this?

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » August 22nd, 2011, 2:13 pm

Geno Munari wrote:I found this interesting post. It mentions a different name for Wilbur's son. Perhaps he had another son, other than James, as mentioned in the article. If I missed this, my apology.

Wilbur Fisk had five sons. WE, James Upson and Louis Peck lived to adulthood. Henry and Walter, both born in 1872, died in infancy.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Marty Demarest » August 22nd, 2011, 4:20 pm

Carlo's recent exploration of the "Erdnase Triange," along with some interesting blog posts by Tom Sawyer (http://rulebooklets.wordpress.com) have started me thinking about coincidences.

David Alexander pointed out that at some point, endless coincidences become irrational. And I agree with him.

I also agree with many posters on this forum that many congruities between W.E. Sanders and S.W. Erdnase could be coincidences.

But no person is a series of discrete qualities. Each person is a aggregate of those qualities.

Take a sample group of every man alive in America ca. 1901. Then have those who were writers stand up. (Then everyone sit down.) Then have those who had self-publishing skills stand up. (Sit down again.) Then have those whose names have a realationship to S.W. Erdnase stand up... Etc.

Each time a different group of men would stand. Coincidences.

But if you have all the writers stand. Then ask those who don't have self-publishing skills to sit. Those whose names don't have a relationship to S.W. Erdnase sit... Etc.

You'd be left with a single group. Very, very small. Coincidence?

A coincidence is rare enough. But as coincidences aggregate, the rarity exponentiates. More than becoming irrational, it becomes unique.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Carlo Morpurgo » August 22nd, 2011, 4:51 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:
I'm drifting around on this too. The letters in his name (E, S, A, ...) are almost all very common. So there's roughly a 1 in 10 chance that WESANDERS would appear either forward or backwards within a block of text of that size/shape (with each line of text containing the corresponding letter of his name). Plus there are other variants of picking letters or choices he could make for how he wrote his name. So it doesn't seem like that huge of a coincidence to find something.


Isn't the relative letter frequency already taking into account the fact that those letters are very common? I tried the calculation myself, without the additional constraint that the lines can't slide outside the margins, and I came up with 0.012 (assuming that lines have 38, 29, 33...9, words in them)

Note in passing that the last 4 letters of the name are already pretty much aligned in the original pyramid. But it could be chance as well.

Bob Coyne wrote:
Also, if Sanders wanted to conceal his name, wouldn't he have chosen a way that couldn't be chalked up as easily to chance? Eg, with the SW Erdnase anagram there are only a small handful of ways to unscramble that to an actual name. So that makes a much stronger (though well hidden) connection to his name.



I doubt that Erdnase went through all the anagrams (by hand) to find out that only a few are reasonable names. In all this, it seems reasonable to assume that if he concealed his real name then he must have also left some clues on how to find it, without the use of modern technology. Otherwise almost anything is possible, if it was "for his eyes only".

If the "S.W.E. shift" is such a clue then the anagram search is reduced considerably (either WES or ESW as first block). If one absolutely wants to push the pyramid scheme (and I am not), then ESW is out, DERS is in (assuming that the originally aligned "DERS" is a clue related to the last 4 letters). One is then left with only 2 possibilities, one of which is not reasonable, (WESNADERS - note however that "Snaders" today appears as a proper name in the white pages).

I find this argument a bit weak, but it's all I could come up with in order to justify the "lines in the pyramid" thing (no pun intended!), and putting it together with what's known...


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