A BT can blow and leave behind a ridge of energy. There are BTs in the energy ridge left hidden by another BT.In a stunning display of technical ingenuity, the contents of NOTs 23 have now been partially revealed. Lawyers for Religious Technology Center gave H. Keith Henson masked copies of the NOTs as part of the discovery processs in their ongoing lawsuit against him (and his countersuit against them.) They gave him these copies to prove that they had copyrighted the NOTs documents. Because of the masking process, they believed the documents to be unreadable.
Henson theorized that because Hubbard drew on a limited vocabulary in writing NOTs, and the portions of the documents that were not masked provided a strong source of constraint on the text, he could heuristically reconstruct virtually the entire contents from the masked version. (The NOTs documents were produced on a typewriter, not a word processor, so they appear in a fixed-pitch font.) Using a vocabularly list supplied by an un-named netizen, Henson wrote Perl scripts to assist in the search.
I cannot reproduce all of NOTs 23 here because it remains a copyrighted work. However, under the "fair use" provisions of the US copyright code, here are the first two lines of the masked document:
And here is Henson's reconstruction of those lines. The digits indicate column numbers. The first text line shows the characters visible in the masked version; the line below is Henson's reconstruction. Blank spaces that can be seen through the mask are shown as underscores; these supply important information about word boundaries.
1 2 3 4 5 6
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
_A ca w_an ave ind ge_ nerg Ther
A BT can blow and leave behind a ridge of energy. There
1 2 3 4 5 6
123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
re_ in_ ner dg ft_h _by_ ther
are BTs in the energy ridge left hidden by another BT.
NOTs 23 is only one page in length, and Henson estimates he's
recovered about 70% of it so far. Work on the reconstruction is
continuing.
This raises an interesting question about the trade secret status of
NOTs. Since the masked versions are supposedly on file in the Library
of Congress and open to public inspection, RTC may find it has
inadvertently published NOTs. In any case, Henson's revealing the
contents of NOTs 23 cannot be a trade secret violation because CoS
voluntarily disclosed the information to him, and had no reasonable
expectation of confidentiality. (They are, after all, already suing
him for publishing NOTs 34.)
Those of you interested in learning more about remnant ridges
should examine NOTs 27, the "NED for OTs" Checklist.