GIGO: words unreadable aloud

Broken record

Whee! This posting today breaks my personal record of number of days in a row making reasonably interesting weblog postings. (Was 32, today's is #33.)

So for today's meat: here's the explanation of the Morse code thing of a couple of days ago: put the codes in "number of symbols order", so E and T (. and -) are first, IANM are next (.. .- -. and --), and so on. And note my ordering: consider the dots to be zeros and the dashes to be ones, and put the letters in binary order. Now to make a mnemonic out of that, just make up sentences in such a way that the next letter in the sentence that isn't already assigned a meaning gets the next available meaning. One complication is that four of the four-symbol patterns are not used. That's what the exclamation marks mean in the "Have Fun! I will!" part. Those mark two of those omissions. (The other two, ---. and ----, follow Z and can thus be ignored.)

So why does this add up? If we have enough bits to count up to 31, the four missing patterns should leave 27, but we come out even with 26 letters! Where's the missing missing pattern?

Answer: The question is kind of like the missing dollar in the old hotel-room change puzzle. The question is misleading, and the answer has everything to do with leading zeros. In fact, four bits should get you sixteen choices, not 31 nor 32. But we *hear* the leading zeros, so we count from zero again at each length, giving us

     2 (e and t) +
     4 (i a n and m) +
     8 (three-signal ones) +
     16
     --
  == 30.  Minus the four skipped patterns is 26.    
       --.-  .  -..  :-)

11:45:11 AM comment/