• − − • • • − • − • • • − − •

1

A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same backwards and forwards like the word racecar. Forwards it's spelled R-A-C-E-C-A-R. Backwards it is spelled R-A-C-E-C-A-R. A palindrome. The word pulp is not a palindrome or is it? No. But kind of. The title of this story might give you a little hint about where I'm going with this. Here's another one. When I watched Jake's new episode of CYSTM on vsauce3 I said *Morse Code* which means Wow in Morse code. Morse code began in the 19th century when Samuel FB Morse a painter was commissioned to paint a portrait of Marquis de Lafayette he began by painting a study just to kind of get some of the details right but he never finished it because while he was working on that study he received a letter from a messenger on horseback telling him that his wife was sick. He rushed to her side. She was quite far away but by the time he got there she was not only dead she had already been buried. Morse was so upset by how slow a message carried on a horse was that he worked on faster electronic communication. The Morse code he created transmits letters using patterns of two kinds of signals: those of short duration and those of long duration. Here is Morse code in its modern form. Pretty cool. As you can see a letter like V okay the letter V is three short duration signals followed by one long duration signal. Learning Morse code can be a challenge because the connection between the patterns of short and long duration signals, dots and dashes or dits and dahs, doesn't quite make intuitive sense with the order of the letters. That's because Morse designed this system such that the frequency at which a letter appears in the English language is inverse to approximately how long it takes to send that message using Morse code. Learning Morse code is best done in fact it's only truly done correctly by sending and receiving Morse code messages. There are links down in the description below where you can take lessons and learn how to really get a sense of what each letter looks or sounds like in Morse code but today I want to show you some mnemonics. Using these works really well. It won't make you fast in Morse code but it has helped me remember what each letter is in Morse code. Let's begin with this fantastic flowchart looking thing. Here's how the chart works. You start where it says start. A movement to the left represents a short duration signal, a dot. Any movement to the right represents a long duration signal, a dash. So as you can see we start with a short signal a dot we land on E and in fact that is exactly what E is in Morse code. One more dot that is one more movement to the left brings us to I so I is two dots and sure enough it is. Three dots is s, four dots is H and there you have it. If I go all the way out dot dot dot for an S and then put in a long signal well then I have to move from s to the right which takes me to V and sure enough V is dot dot dot - V dot dot dot - This way of organizing Morse code is very cool looking but I mean using this to learn Morse code just means a whole visual thing to have to remember. Similar is a visual mnemonic created by Robert baden-powell published in the Girl Guides handbook back in 1918. Here it is it's all the letters of the English alphabet A to Z with dots and dashes incorporated into the shapes of the letters. As you can see E just has one little dot on it. I don't find this that helpful. I applaud the effort that went into it. You sort of have to read these like you would read a book left to right and top to bottom except not all of them. There's something better. Verbal mnemonics. These are what really helped me so let's get right into those. I have here on this legal pad the 26 letters of the English alphabet as well as a period and a comma. The way this mnemonic works is it associates with each letter a word or phrase that gives you a clue as to the pattern of dots and dashes that represent that letter. Every word or phrase contains emphasized or stressed syllables and syllables that aren't. Stressed syllables are dashes. Unstressed syllables are dots. You might be able to come up with a system that works better for you but this one has served me extremely well. Let's begin. The letter A. The letter A is a dot followed by a dash: boop-boop. Okay so to remember that think of a word that starts with A, specifically the word apart. Oh no everything fell apart. Apart. Unstressed. Stressed. The opposite would be apart but we don't pronounce it apart. We pronounce it apart. So apart is A which is a-part: dot dash. B is how I remember B: boot to the head. Boot to the head. C is coca-cola coca-cola. D is dockworker. Dockworker. E is just eh! F is a little bit weird. This really works for me. I never seem to forget that F is associated with this phrase even though the letter F isn't even in it. The phrase is this: get a haircut get a haircut. G is good gravy. H is hippity hop. I is I I. J is let's jump jump jump. K is kangaroo. L is to L with it. M is mm-hmm. N is navy. O is one of us. P is a poopy smell. Q is God save the Queen. R is rotation. S is sí sí sí. T is tall. U is underwear? V looks like the roman numeral five so think Beethoven's fifth: duh duh duh duhhh. W is a white whale. X is x marks the spot. Y is a yellow yo-yo. And Z is a zinc zookeeper. As for the full stop the period and the comma piece of cake. Watch this. For a period you just think a stop a stop a stop and for the comma I love this one: comma it's a comma. Now these might seem a little bit silly or weird or possibly confusing to you. That's fine. Come up with your own. All I'm saying is that this system has stuck with me really well. I don't know why. Perhaps because it's just so strange but I love knowing Morse code even at this just kind of rudimentary level because Morse code is everywhere like in Hollywood on the Capitol Records building. The light at the top of the spire blinks a message in Morse code every night. :et's figure out what it is. Hippity hop. One of us. To L with it. To L with it. Yellow yo yo. A white whale. One of us. One of us. Dock Worker. Hollywood! Pretty, pretty cool. Alright now let's talk about pulp. Remember how I said that pulp was a palindrome. Well obviously pulp is not a palindrome when you're using the letters of the English alphabet. P-U-L-P. P-L-U-P? Plup? I don't think so. Alright well let's do Morse code. We know that P is dot dash dash dot. A poopy smell. Ok a poopy smell. U is under where? Under where L is 2 L with it. 2 L with it. And finally P is a poopy smell. A poopy smell. Look at this. Pulp may not look like a palindrome in English letters but my goodness look at it in Morse code. It is symmetric right down there through that Center dot Pulp in Morse code is the same backwards and forwards. In 2010 Colonel Jose espero hid a Morse code rescue message in a pop song that was made just for that purpose and then played on radios because the hostages he was working on rescuing had radios and he was pretty sure that they knew Morse code but the people holding them captive did not. The message hidden inside that song translated into English said this: 19 rescued. You're next. Don't lose hope. During World War two major Alexis Casdagli, a British prisoner of war was held captive in a series of Nazi prison camps and during his time in those camps he learned to sew. In December of 1941 he created this. Look at those dots and dashes. They are Morse code for two different messages. One is God save the king and the other well it's something I can't actually say here on the DONG channel because I refuse to have a potty mouth but there are links down below in the description where he can learn more about that story. The guards that kept him captive were unaware of the message he hid in that canvas so they allowed him to hang it up in all of the camps in which he was imprisoned. During the Vietnam War Jeremiah Andrew Denton jr. was a prisoner of war. He was forced to record a propaganda story but he sent a secret message to those watching who might be able to help him. He let them know that everything wasn't okay. While he spoke he blinked in Morse code the word torture. One last thing about Morse code. Because it communicates using seemingly two kinds of signals short duration and long it sounds like it's a binary code. In fact Wikipedia has it listed on a list of binary codes however is it binary? This is a really good question and I can't get into a full analysis in this episode but here's something very interesting I learned recently. Yes Morse code uses two kinds of signals but there are also spaces in between those signals. In Morse code the standard unit is the length of a dot. The amount of time that a *dit* a bit or a dot lasts. Let's say that on this sheet of paper each column is one of those lengths. The pieces of a letter are separated by the length of one *dit* one dot so just so that it fits on the piece of paper I am going to write "Hi U." I'm gonna use letter U for you just to make this message quicker. Here's how that would work. Pieces of a letter dots and dashes that make up a letter are separated by a length of time equal to the duration of one dot. Letters are separated by a length of time equal to the duration of three dots and words are separated by a length of time equal to seven dots so this is what "hi u" would look like. Keep in mind each one of these columns is the length of time it takes for one dot to happen so we begin with H which means four dots hippity-hop that's an H so here's the first dot and then we wait a unit of time equal to 1 dot second dot wait third dot wait fourth dot. That's the letter H we then wait a unit of time equal to three dots letting everyone know a new letter has begun and that letter is I so after waiting three we do I which is I I boop boop so we do one dot wait one dot and we're done or moved on to the next word so now we wait one two three four five six seven spaces and we begin U which is underwear. Underwear The where is a dash and it takes up three units. A dash is three times longer than a dot. This is "Hi U" with all of the correct timing. Again there are tools down below that allow you to learn Morse code in a much more professional way but looking at this we can now see that in a sense Morse code is actually a ternary system. You need three elements to convey everything that it can and the third one is silence. Interestingly these are the three elements you need. The only three that you need. For a dot think of it like this a 1 and then a 0. A 1 means the signal is on and it's only on for that one little piece of time right there but you follow it by a 0 and that represents the space between the next piece of a letter. A dash we can represent like this. We can make it three dots so three times longer than a dot and then follow it with a zero. This way the space between dots and dashes within a letter are built into our symbols for those letters. Finally we have the separation character. Now we actually only need this to be two zeros because if we are still working on the same letter we just use a dot and that already gives us the space for the next letter so another dot. In fact I can just write this like this a dot would be 1 0 and then 1 0 and then 1 0 and then 1 0. Then we use the separation character which is just two. Add it onto the 0 already at the end of that dot we get 3 we need between letters. Alight so now we've got another dot which is 1 0 another dot 1 0 and then we have 1 2 3 separation characters needed. There are 7 moments dot moments of silence in between words but since we already have 1 from the last character whether it's a dot or dash then we just need six total zeros and the separation character has two so there's one there's two and here's the third for a total of seven zeros between the words and then finally we've got a dot 10 a dot 10 and then we have the dash which is 1 1 1 and then a 0 signifying that we are done with that piece of the letter U. So there you go Morse code; a ternary system. How about that? Check out the links below to truly learn Morse code if you would like to. I think it is so totally worth it. It is also worth going over to Vsauce3 to check out Jake's episode of system it is just beautiful the dangerous lovely science of Mad Max mm-hmm okay that's enough from me and as always thanks for watching