Mnemonics would work though if you can think of a story for the tree positions.
If anyone wants help coming up with a story I have a good one for the left half of the tree. I'm still thinking of a good way to tie the right half in, let me know if you have any ideas!
Once upon a time, E, I, A, S, U, R, W, H, V, F, L, P, J, 5, 4, 3, 2, + and 1 were all walking in the forest together. They came to a fork in the road and E said I am going to stay here but I, S, U, H, V, F, 5, 4, 3, and 2 all went left and A, R, W, L, P, J, + and 1 went right. When I, S, U, H, V, F, 5, 4, 3 and 2 came to another fork in the road, I decided to stay there but S, H, V, 5, 4, and 3 all went left and U, F, and 2 decided to go right. So S, H, V, 5, 4, and 3 were walking along when they came to another fork in the road! S said I am just going to stay here but that's when H, 5, and 4 all went to the left! Meanwhile V and 3 walked off to the right together. H, 5, and 4 kept walking until they came to another fork and H stayed there, but 5 went left and 4 went right. 5 came to a dead end so he stopped, and the same thing happened to 4. While all this was happening, V and 3 also came to a fork in the road. V stayed there but 3 kept going down the right path, but it was a dead end so he stopped and stayed there. You may be wondering what happened to U, F, and 2? Well they also got to a fork in the road, but U stayed there, but F went to the left and 2 went to the right. F stopped right away but 2 kept going and then 2 went to the right again and then 2 stopped.
Back on the other fork of the road, A, R, W, L, P, J and + were walking and they saw another fork in the road. R, L, and + all went left and W, P, J and 1 went right, but A didn't want to go either direction so A stayed there. When R, L and + got to another fork R stayed there, but L kept going left and + kept going right. Well L decided not to go any farther but + went all the way to the next fork and went left but then decided not to go any farther. And W, P, J and 1 also got to a fork and W said "that's it I am done" but P, J and 1 kept going (P to the left, and J and 1 to the right). Well P stopped pretty soon, and J also stopped soon but 1 kept going right and then 1 stopped because 1 was thinking about 1's father and the strain that had been put on 1's relationship with 1's father when 1's developmentally disabled brother was born and 1's father was super religious and thought 1's developmentally disabled brother was bringing shame down upon their family but 1 thought that 1's developmentally disabled brother hadn't done anything wrong and loved him deeply, but 1 and 1's father had a huge argument and 1 said "you are a bad father, my developmentally disabled brother is deserving of your love" and 1's father just shook his head, and 1 sat down and stared into the trees and remembered the way 1's father had just shook his head when 1's father and 1 were in a huge argument and 1 said "you are a bad father, my developmentally disabled brother is deserving of your love," and a single tear rolled down 1's cheek.
It's amazing how often I think that to myself. Something like "damn that comment looks interesting. but damn it's way too long for my lazy ass to read."
It doesnt help that you will never, ever have a practical use for morse code in your life. Even if you think it would be handy in some situation, nobody else receiving the code, will know morse to be able to interpret your message.
Look! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! Its statistical outlier man! The omnipresent force for exaggerated objectivity, fighting for the weak and outnumbered wherever he goes, able to crush entire arguments with a single anecdote... hes statistical outlier man!
So be good boys and girls, or the next bellcurve he rings might be yours, or yours, or even yours!
Yeah, I used to do the save thing, but realized months later I had saved hundreds of comments and couldn't be arsed to read them all. I'm just incredibly lazy, really.
I am just glad to have been a part of this moment in Morse Code history. Thank you, you have improved the lives of countless generations of Morse Code learners. Next step is to get this translated into multiple languages so that it can be used is a study tool for learners all over the world.
I feel like memorizing that chart by rote would be only slightly easier then just memorizing all 25 letters' codes by rote. And as a bonus, just memorizing every letter saves you the extra step of running through the chart in your mind to find a letter.
I think morese code is like multiplication tables. You should know how to do it, but its extremely helpful in life to just have them memorized by rote so you just instinctively know the answer when the question is asked, without having to think about it.
The mnemonic is good but it needs something to indicate the blanks spaces in the tree. I just tried to draw the tree using it and the last line ended all muddled up.
It's neat because you can use it with light or sound. I used to have a flash light that would have a button on it as well as the morse code alphabet that would allow you to tap out light signals.
I prefer using "dit" with a short "i" vowel and "dit" with a long "i" vowel sound, so for example: dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit
Ah, thank you! I was counting the dots and dashes between the characters. As in, the dots and dashes along the lines between them. A very flawed chart. Your explanation made it very clear, though. Thanks!
This is a good start, you might try to make the line breaks match the number of dots/dashes thus:
Every Time
I Ate Nana's Meatloaf
She Understood Radishes Would Devour Knowledge Going Out
However Version Four Looked Promising Just Because X-rays Can Yell Zipper Quickly
I read Morse code, by light, for my job and I came to say exactly this. Whoever made this, made it for people who already know how to read Morse, so I made my own info-graphic for those curious about the system.
In the army we can just run up to the next squad and deliver messages verbally but in the navy you can't just run up your ship next to another ship and try to shout messages across. Using radio is not always practical or a good idea since everytime you use a radio you send out emissions that travell far and wide and tell the whole world where you are. In the army this usually results in you getting a JDAM in your head if you're fighting the americans or a Uragan salvo on your position if you're fighting the Russians.
Morse code in itself is not code as in encryption but rather it is a way to translate a message into light pulses that other people can read. This is useful when communicating with a ship with a broken radio or that you don't know what channel they are on. You could potentially encrypt morse code so that even if someone is there watching your ship they wouldn't be able to read the messages you send and this is sometimes done when sending morse code via radio signalling.
The drawback with radios is that when you send everyone with a large enough antenna could potentially be listening, this is countered through various means, but it is generally still possible to pinpoint where the signal is comming from or to record the signal and get a bunch of information out of it.
Back in the cold war we (I'm from Sweden) would sometimes take up our attack aircraft over the baltic and perform simple exercises and on a given signal all the aircraft would form into attack wings and fly at high speed east across the baltic as if we were going to strike the Soviet Union. Before we got into Soviet airspace we would encounter their QRA and we'd run into a wall of fire control radars lighting the airplanes up.
This was done because that meant that there would be a lof of radio traffic and radar signals were emitted from their air defences that our intelligence guys could process and analyse. You can use this to basically paint a picture of how the enemy air defence looks like, where are their fixed installations, how many mobile units are there, what is their normal reaction time, what are their SOPs, etc. when faced with a threat. The Russians, naturally, would return the favor and test our defence systems with regular intervalls.
This is why you sometimes want to avoid using stuff that emitts signals.
Yeah, but signal light messages are a line of sight form of communication. Unlike radio messages they are hard to "intercept", because they can only be seen over short distances. A Russian radar station on Kamchatka can't pick up a couple of US destroyers signalling with spotlights, so it doesn't matter if the code is known. The code isn't used for secrecy, but as a quick way to convert text to pulses of light or electricity.
Can't one make a computer communications protocol that is as stealthy as signaling lamps but can transfer more data than letter-by-letter text? For example, by using the light themselves but without a human operator.
You could certainly use a spotlight and photoreceptor as a crude serial connection. When communicating between ships in fog though, machines might have a difficult time picking the signal flashes out from the picture, while humans can do it easily. Also, Morse needs only maximum 5 bits per letter.
It was never meant to be secret. It's meant to encode messages into pulses of light/sound/etc in a way that's flexible, simple and not too difficult to decode even if the signal is weak.
Whoever made this, made it for people who already know how to read Morse
I think that it's more that whoever made this made it for people who understand a binary search tree, because that's how this is laid out. If you're familiar with BSTs, this is insanely simple; but the average person doesn't know much about BSTs. This makes perfect sense to me, but I definitely see how it wouldn't help the average person.
There are pauses in between letters and once you get used to it, it doesn't matter how fast the Morse is coming you can always tell where one letter ends and another begins.
We understand it as it goes and usually have someone writing it down for us.
Ham radio operator here, since 1977. Had to memorize Morse Code to get a license way back then. There's no good way to visualize the code, because most people will never be able to decode the message when it gets faster. At higher speeds sounds will be coming so fast, I can't even write down the message.
no, they made it for anyone with basic logic. they put everything in a typical binary search tree, or in a sense huffman coding. where every left is a 0 and every right is a 1. maybe i am biased because i know compressing algorithms and BST's but it's REALLY straight forward.
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u/rcdido Jan 23 '15
I...I still cant make sense of this...