5 responses to “Lines2”
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A visual representation of binary?
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This is a square-wave pattern, which represents a binary transmission (such as the voltage in a network cable, where the top line might be 2.5 volts and the bottom line 0 volts, and the x-axis represents time). What it actually *means* is not apparent to me. The top line, for reference, is: 00010110110101111110110100111101010111100101010010010000 Some background: It's possible that you're just supposed to read it straight across left to right, but it's also possible that (as in real life) there's some kind of frame around it. The fact that all the lines begin and end with a sequence of 0s makes me think frames are involved. It's worth noting explicitly that this *isn't* Ethernet framing as used on networks. In any case, the letters are going to have to be encoded somehow. The most likely encoding is ASCII, but I've decoded the top line in several ways and none of them produce readable text: 8-bit, 7-bit, 7-bit with parity before or after, and all of these with different starting points among the first seven bits, to work around framing. It's faintly possible that this is the antiquated EBCDIC encoding, and I haven't checked, but I'd be very surprised if anyone's using that for anything new these days.
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I love how you have worked through these options!
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There's another similar secret posted in this gallery where the binary translates easily. Figured this was the same. And seeing that this broke down into 8 character segments with nothing left over, I thought that would be give an translation. Alas, 00010110 11010111 11101101 00111101 01011110 01010100 10010000 seems to translate to ×í=^T which doesn't seem to be anything.
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My theory is "I Came 500mi 2 walk/wa_k where she was a year ago." The other comments are right about the binary encoding and the framing, but the picture is upside down, so we need to rotate it first so that it starts with a one: (for details see Wikipedia "Asynchronous serial communication") If we write down the numbers, we can group them as follows: [ 11110 – 0101110 – 010 – 1101111 – 010 – 1100111 – 010 – 1100001 – 010 – 0100000 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 1110010 – 010 – 1100001 – 010 – 1100101 – 010 – 1111001 – 010 – 0100000 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 1100001 – 010 – 0100000 – 010 – 1110011 – 010 – 1100001 – 010 – 1110111 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 0100000 – 010 – 1100101 – 010 – 1101000 – 010 – 1110011 – 010 – 0100000 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 1100101 – 010 – 1110010 – 010 – 1100101 – 010 – 1101000 – 010 – 1110111 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 0100000 – 010 – 1101011 – 010 – 11011?0 – 010 – 1100001 – 010 – 1110111 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 0100000 – 010 – 0110010 – 010 – 0100000 – 010 – 1101001 – 010 – 1101101 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 0110000 – 010 – 0110000 – 010 – 0110101 – 010 – 0100000 – 010 – 1100101 – 0111 ], [ 11110 – 1101101 – 010 – 1100001 – 010 – 1000011 – 010 – 0100000 – 010 – 1001001 – 0111 ] The 7 digit numbers are ASCII codes represented in binary: (for the table see Wikipedia "ASCII / Printable characters") Omitting the other numbers and rewriting them as letters: [ .oga ], [ raey ], [ a saw ], [ ehs ], [ erehw ], [ k?aw ], [ 2 im ], [ 005 e ], [ maC I ] We get the sentence by reading from the end: ".oga raey a saw ehs erehw k?aw 2 im005 emaC I" – "I Came 500mi 2 wa?k where she was a year ago." Notice that in line 6, a sign is deliberately missing from the group "11011?0": - 11011[0]0 is the letter "l" in "walk" - 11011[1]0 is the letter "n" in "wa_k" (And I may be wrong, but I think I've seen this postcard with handwritten text before.)
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