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code15

Uploaded by

Maya Koopla
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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4 Chapter One

computers to speak is hard, and persuading them to understand speech is


even harder.
But much progress has been made. Computers have now been enabled to
capture, store, manipulate, and render many types of information used in
human communication, including the visual (text and pictures), the aural
(spoken words, sounds, and music), or a combination of both (animations
and movies). All of these types of information require their own codes.
Even the table of Morse code you just saw is itself a code of sorts. The
table shows that each letter is represented by a series of dots and dashes. Yet
we can’t actually send dots and dashes. When sending Morse code with a
flashlight, the dots and dashes correspond to blinks.
Sending Morse code with a flashlight requires turning the flashlight
switch on and off quickly for a dot, and somewhat longer for a dash. To
send an A, for example, you turn the flashlight on and off quickly and then
on and off not quite as quickly, followed by a pause before the next char-
acter. By convention, the length of a dash should be about three times that
of a dot. The person on the receiving end sees the short blink and the long
blink and knows that it’s an A.
Pauses between the dots and dashes of Morse code are crucial. When
you send an A, for example, the flashlight should be off between the dot
and the dash for a period of time equal to about one dot. Letters in the
same word are separated by longer pauses equal to about the length of
one dash. For example, here’s the Morse code for “hello,” illustrating the
pauses between the letters:

Words are separated by an off period of about two dashes. Here’s the
code for “hi there”:

The lengths of time that the flashlight remains on and off aren’t fixed.
They’re all relative to the length of a dot, which depends on how fast the
flashlight switch can be triggered and also how quickly a Morse code sender
can remember the code for a particular letter. A fast sender’s dash might
be the same length as a slow sender’s dot. This little problem could make
reading a Morse code message tough, but after a letter or two, the person
on the receiving end can usually figure out what’s a dot and what’s a dash.
At first, the definition of Morse code—and by definition I mean the
correspondence of various sequences of dots and dashes to the letters of the
alphabet—appears as random as the layout of a computer keyboard. On
closer inspection, however, this is not entirely so. The simpler and shorter
codes are assigned to the more frequently used letters of the alphabet,
such as E and T. Scrabble players and Wheel of Fortune fans might notice
this right away. The less common letters, such as Q and Z (which get you

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