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Another Reason to Learn Morse Code: Kidnapping
- yason 9y agoThe article doesn't seem to be exactly about using Morse code when kidnapped, unlike the title, but about instances of Morse and other code used in various circumstances today and in the past. Having said that, to reflect the title itself I don't think Morse code has a very good bang-for-buck ratio for kidnapping. Absolutely most people never get kidnapped, it's a very rare occasion statistically. Learning Morse code is not enough: you will have to use it repeatedly to keep remembering it, and I don't think you need Morse code very much in general life so you'll need to exercise your skills intentionally just in case a very unlikely event would happen. Further, to benefit from Morse code while being kept hostage you will need some medium through which to transfer knocks or beeps and you need another party who is both listening and can read Morse code. It might make sense if your lifestyle calls for higher risks to be kidnapped, but even then I think there are wiser ways to spend your minutes trying to avoid being kidnapped in the first place.
- w-m 9y agoI think learning just the SOS distress signal (...---...) has a decent bang-for-buck ratio. And because of its frequent use in films there's usually not even much learning involved.
- trothamel 9y agoIf you want, just remember that groups of three of anything are a distress signal. It's why smoke detectors beep in groups of threes for example. Groups of three whistles indicate distress. Three flashes of light. Etc. Although I don't know how true this is, I've tried to keep to this in other interfaces, avoiding three-blink patters on lights when someone is not in trouble.
- jfries 9y agoJust don't panic when the cruise ship you're on signals that it is operating in reverse by sounding the horn three times.
- lb1lf 9y agoThere is cause for concern when hearing seven short and one long blast, though. (General alarm; something has happened. Better head for the muster station to find out what...)
- nasredin 9y agoFrom the recent El Faro sinking post here on HN: There's a General Alarm signal (above), but no Abandon Ship signal. The captain gives those manually. (I may be blatantly wrong!)
- lb1lf 9y agoTo the best of my knowledge (not a sailor, but my work has netted me several hundred days on vessels offshore), 'Abandon Ship' is always an explicit, verbal order from the captain (or whoever follows him in authority if he is incapacitated) The General Alarm typically calls for the crew to proceed (at haste!) to the muster station to be informed of the nature of the emergency and be put to work handling the situation. Luckily, I've only ever had to abandon ship during a couple of drills.
- automatoney 9y agoIn lifeguard training I've gotten, 3 whistles is what you do to start emergency procedures.
- emmelaich 9y agoAnd the emergency button in your car is a triangle. And the sign on the inside of your trunk / boot is a triangle.
- mondoshawan 9y ago
- jasonkostempski 9y agoEveryone my age learned SOS from a commercial jingle and/or playing Atari.
- tinus_hn 9y agoOlder people learned SMS from the Nokia sms tone :)
- digi_owl 9y agoAnd now i am old...
- codetrotter 9y agohttps://youtu.be/9QWez2Siw4g https://youtu.be/9QWez2Siw4g Woah I had no idea!
- jamesrcole 9y agoWhat jingle and what Atari game?
- anw 9y agoI believe he's talking about the SOS cleaning scrub commercial from 1994. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVooUKtV3nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVooUKtV3nQ For those that don't want to click, it's a commercial for a brand of dish cleaner named S.O.S. There are dirty pots and pans that clang out the S O S message in Morse code, with subtitles spelling out the letters as they come out. A screen appears at the end asking "are your dirty pots trying to tell you something?"
- hypofyse 9y agoNot Atari, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVFVQ85uB-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVFVQ85uB-E
- dfox 9y agoIt should be noted, that the popular distress signal is "...---..." and not SOS as it is sent as single symbol. Also it is not the only one special morse symbol used for distress (eg. ten dots is also an distress signal with slightly different meaning)
- ourmandave 9y agoI think its more about wardrobe choices. Wearing close that easily shred so you can hang small pieces of your shirt on nearby bushes as a trail. Or unique pieces of jewelry you can drop along the way for the Ranger to find. It also doesn't hurt to have at least 2 days of laundry in the basket so the blood hounds have something to scent from.
- hiccuphippo 9y agoIs there a shop that specializes in clothes for people propense to getting kidnapped?
- hackerman12345 9y agoThe gun and knife store. :P
- tigershark 9y agoLearning Morse is quite easy, it’s nothing compared to learning a new programming language or a new human language, so I don’t really see the waste of time in this case.
- w-m 9y agoAfter listening to a Camille album from time to time, I subconsciously internalized the backing vocals of the song "Show Me The Waves". https://youtu.be/S0PMZg8lZ-M https://youtu.be/S0PMZg8lZ-M Knowing that it's Morse code for the title of the song, I can reconstruct the individual codes for the letters AEHMOSTVW. If someone were to write a hit song containing the whole Morse alphabet in a way that gets stuck in your head easily like in this Camille song, we might all learn it without trying.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoIf you're familiar with "YYZ" by Rush you know two more letters!
- lb1lf 9y agoAnd Kraftwerk’s «Radioaktivität / Radio-activity» - the title is tapped out in (not very good!) morse code.
- saghm 9y agoI've listened to this song probably hundreds of times over the years, and I never realized that was why it's called YYZ. I'm definitely not forgetting those letters now!
- mondoshawan 9y agoIt's widely claimed, but most folks can't hear it because the rhythm is totally wrong. Listen to high low freq shifts instead.
- lscharen 9y agoTotally dating myself here. In the Hardy Boys book “Hostages of Hate”, Frank Hardy’s girlfriend, Callie Shaw, is kidnapped and is able to send a secret message to Frank by blinking her eyes on a video recording. Funny what sticks in your mind from a young age.
- celticninja 9y agoBased on an actual event from the Vietnam war iirc.
- noefingway 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThere is a Hardy Boys book in which one of the boys makes a phone call to family with some nefarious person present. He holds an innocent conversation while sending a message in Morse code by tapping the phone with a pencil.
- nasredin 9y agoIn the 21st century this would be: kidnapped by terrorists and forced to read a statement. IIRC this was used in Homeland, the TV show.
- aaronharnly 9y agoThe most moving Morse code story I’ve heard is this one from Somalia: A man writes a letter complaining about conditions in a hospital, and the government imprisons him in solitary confinement, with no one to talk with and nothing to read. After eight months, his next door neighbor whispers across: “Learn ABC through the walls....” and he learns an ad-hoc Morse Code through knocks and taps. Then, after two years, the neighbor begins “reading” to him, via the code, the 800 page novel Anna Karenina. https://www.npr.org/2017/09/11/550058353/rough-translation-how-anna-karenina-saved-a-somali-inmates-life https://www.npr.org/2017/09/11/550058353/rough-translation-h...
- nih 9y agoTheres also a radiolab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-rough-translation/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-rough-transl...
- mannykannot 9y agoI think morse code could be helpful for someone with locked-in syndrome, like Jean Bauby. In 'dictating' his memoir 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly', it took him an average of two minutes to write each word by blinking at the time when the next letter he wanted was presented to him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...
- matte_black 9y agoMeh, with an eventual VR/AR headset with eye tracking these patients will be able to look at letters they want to type and then blink to type them out that way.
- mannykannot 9y agoBefore you casually dismiss it as a worthless idea, consider that some victims have fewer capabilities than Bauby was left with.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoI'd genuinely want to be euthanised in this situation. But that's a whole other debate.
- inteleng 9y agoNobody asked for that opinion here, and it's not relevant to the conversation.
- matte_black 9y agoIf a person has lost all capability such that they cannot even blink or move their eyes, I’m not sure what else they could do to communicate. Breathing? I don’t think the idea is worthless, just not worth as much as what others may think.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
- lisper 9y agoIf you want to learn Morse it is a lot easier if you don't try to learn it in alphabetical order. Instead you should learn it in order of the lengths of the signals, which corresponds roughly to the frequency order of the letters in English, i.e. learn the one-beep-long letters first (E, T), then the two-beep-long letters (A, N, I. M), then the three-beep-long letters, etc. E . T - I .. A .- N -. M -- S ... U ..- R .-. D -.. H .... B -... L .-.. F ..-. V ...- W .-- K -.- G --. O --- Z --.. C -.-. X -..- P .--. J .--- Y -.-- Q --.-
- knowsmorsecode 9y agoThis method disconnects it from your normal language processing. Start by learning simple words so you associate it with your language. You'll be at 20wpm no time.
- kqr 9y agoSo much this. Morse code is not a language of symbolic translation. You need to hear entire words.
- dmoy 9y agoI was taught that you should learn at speed (~20wpm) with 2 characters and build from there. Looking in to it, I see there's two ways - Farnsworth & Koch. The downside of the former is that you get stuck with slow speed and have a harder time to get faster. The downside of the latter is that the initial learning process seems more pointless because there's no actual words.
- thisisit 9y agoA newbie question - What is the reason E and T have one beep only?
- ge0rg 9y agoEfficiency of transmission. Having shorter codes for more frequent letters reduces the average length of the encoding.
- jlgaddis 9y agoU.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton, Jr., was a POW for ~8 years during Vietnam. He did something similar. > Denton was forced by his captors to participate in a 1966 televised propaganda interview which was broadcast in the United States. While answering questions and feigning trouble with the blinding television lights, Denton blinked his eyes in Morse code, spelling the word "TORTURE"—and confirming for the first time to U.S. Naval Intelligence that American POWs were in fact being tortured. [0] You can see the video [1] on Youtube. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Denton [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg
- hartator 9y agoHad a question about this for while: Are movies where people communicate using knocks really accurate? I would assume to effectively use Morse code, you’ll need a way to convey short silence, long silence, short beep, and long beep. Knocking misses the long beep.
- kqr 9y agoThis has been a major annoyance for me my entire life. Of course, you cannot possibly produce a long knock, any more than shooting someone slowly is a vengeful way of killing. What I guess you can do is vary the acoustics of your knocks (think knuckles vs palm) but this will require the recieving party to do much more processing when decoding.
- whatshisface 9y agoKnock whenever switching from beep-off to beep-on. The end of letters will be difficult to disambiguate but essentially unambiguous, because short pause + long pause (dot at end of letter) is distinct from medium pause + long pause (dash at end of letter), and they're both distinct from short pause (dot inside letter) and medium pause (dash inside letter).
- bigKnockrs 9y agoI think that's a little bit pedantic. Complaining loudly about how the knocks technically aren't, themselves, longer or shorter is a digression from the reality that any sane human can detect and recognize consistent patterns in a series of knocks on a door, or beats on a drum. shave and-a hair cut... two! bits! [0] match in-the gas tank... boom! boom! [1] –··–· ·· Everybody recognizes that knock pattern, whether they know the trivia behind its origins or not. The singular instrument leaves the interpretation to the pattern of the beats alone. Meanwhile, a rimshot, involving two drum hits and a cymbal crash offers two channels of interpretation. ba-dum tiss! [2] The rhythm and the sound could each carry separate messages, which means the carrier signal would have to be agreed upon, before sending the message. Is the cymbal crash the best carrier for the dashes, or is the rest note in between the drum hits and the cymbal crash actually the pause that signals the dash? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5KBVCoKYt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5KBVCoKYt0 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rimshot
- userbinator 9y agoI learned Morse many decades ago and still remember much of it, but if I was in that situation now I'd probably think of FM-encoded ASCII first... and while it might not be as "efficent" as Morse, I think ASCII is much easier to remember and only requires two states to transmit.
- southpawflo 9y agoI've tried several morse keyboards for android, but all of them seem to be more fun than useful. if only I could get a cross between the hackers keyboard and morse, I could stop finger fucking these tiny screens and actually type what I want
- pavel_lishin 9y agoCan you actually input morse faster than a keyboard?
- curiousfab 9y agoNo. The world record in sending letters (random 5 letter groups) is 283 for one minute: http://www.hst2017.org/en/records http://www.hst2017.org/en/records This is with a special key that's made for high speed telegraphy. Anything on a mobile device would most likely be a lot slower. There are some sample sounds of similar speeds, which you may find interesting.
- southpawflo 9y agoI don't know. I feel that speed is not important to me, it's the accuracy (gained with practise, of course) that I want. I make a lot of typos, it takes me much longer to edit something on a touch interface as my thumbs just don't seem to be very accurate. I guess you could say I'd rather slowly input the right thing the first time than to edit it quickly the second time
- gbacon 9y agoInstrument pilots use Morse code to identify ground-based navigation aids such as Instrument Landing System (ILS) or VHF Omnidirectional Range (VOR)[0]. The VOR does not account for the aircraft heading. It only relays the aircraft direction from the station and has the same indications regardless of which way the nose is pointing. Tune the VOR receiver to the appropriate frequency of the selected VOR ground station, turn up the audio volume, and identify the station’s signal audibly. Then, rotate the OBS to center the CDI needle and read the course under or over the index. Say a pilot is flying by reference to Avenal VORTAC[1]. She would tune a nav radio to 117.1 and listen for Morse code tones AVE, the station’s identifier and helpfully printed on the chart for quick reference. Nice avionics units will perform this translation for the pilot. [0]: FAA Instrument Flying Handbook, https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/media/FAA-H-8083-15B.pdf https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a... [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/VOR_on_sectional.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/VOR_on_s...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- olfactory 9y agoFWIW I find that copying morse code toward the limit of my ability (50+ wpm) results in a very peaceful mental state. Really anything over 35 wpm causes it. Interestingly, copying fast morse also pushes the limit of the human perceptual system just as hitting a 100 mph fastball does. It's fun to play at the edges and watch the skill strengthen over time.
- skookumchuck 9y agoThe "long knock" problem can be resolved in multiple ways. A dot can be a single knock, and a dash can be two knocks very close together, for example.
- Tomte 9y agoI learned Morse code (only listening and transcribing, not producing) at the German Army. It was an interesting, but also stressful experience, since we weren‘t practicing on natural language, but meaningless gibberish. Alas, I have lost the ability. Everything is gone.
- iKenshu 9y agoAny idea where to learn it? Just in case.
- rmason 9y agoHere are some resources from the ham organization ARRL on learning Morse code: http://www.arrl.org/learning-morse-code http://www.arrl.org/learning-morse-code
- coatmatter 9y agoThere are so many things to learn these days but learning morse code to fight against kidnapping sounds about as esoteric/specific/paranoid as learning shorthand so as to be able to transcribe important conversations quickly without having to rely on audio equipment. Survivalists probably have more practical tips at hand before needing to learn ham radio and morse. Heck, learning to run fast and long is probably more useful for most people.