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I spent nine years as a naval communicator and am fluent in morse. It's been a few years so I would definitely need a bit of practice to get back up to 12 words

by toddrew 13y ago

I spent nine years as a naval communicator and am fluent in morse. It's been a few years so I would definitely need a bit of practice to get back up to 12 words a minute on a flashing light. I can speak three languages and morse was similar to learn. From the first day of training they gave us sheet of paper with the alphabet and the morse translation and told us to memorize a couple of letters. Then they sent us outside to spend hours staring at a flashing lightbulb. When you recognize a letter your writer (someone with a clipboard standing facing you and away from the light) would write it down, and when you didn't recognize the letter you said "MISS". The first day was spent saying "MISS... MISS... MISS..." It was extremely frustrating, the same way being immersed in a new language can be. It felt useless... as if I would never get it. Every day we'd spend the morning staring at the light, and little by little we started to get more letters. Once we mastered it (100%) they would turn up the speed and we'd be back to where we started... "MISS... MISS... ECHO... MIKE... MISS... MISSS..." until we perfected that speed and were moved up again. It took about three months of daily practice to get up to the military's standard. I catch myself years later spelling out words in morse in my head.

bkanber 13y ago
I love anecdotes like this. Were you taught Morse purely visually, with the flashing bulb? Do you find it easier to watch a bulb or to listen to a tone?
- toddrew 13y ago
  It was always visual. It seemed useless at the time, spending hours out in the pouring rain on a ship, sending a message with a flashing light to another ship, but they always reminded us that even with all our technology and cryptography, flashing light is still the most secure method of close ship-to-ship communications because it's directional when using focused light.
  - bkanber 13y ago
    That's actually pretty great. I always loved "going back to basics", and flashing a light to talk to another naval ship is as basic as you can get. It works, it's robust in all but the worst conditions, and it's easy. Love it!
  - bigiain 13y ago
    Ahhh, the days before a $250 quadcopter existed to provide a plausible attack vector. I wonder if Navy personnel are flashing base64 (base36?) encoded GPG encrypted Morse code messages to each other?
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Ship to ship laser communication fixes that :) Good luck finding the beam.
      - bigiain 13y ago
        Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…
        toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Or do it with infrared.
        bigiain 13y ago
        Doesn't help - the quadcopter's cameras don't _need_ to be only sensitive to the human-visible spectrum. (having said that, Rayleigh scattering is frequency dependant, if I recall my high school physics correctly, IR will scatter lees than visible light – I doubt thst matter though, in ship-to-ship communication there'd be more than enough mist/water in the air to scatter enough IR for a suitable camera to see the beam)
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - shitgoose 13y ago
    - Is he the only one looking? - Probably. - We'll have to chance that. :) still my favorite movie
    - jloughry 13y ago
      It was The Hunt for Red October, with Sean Connery.
opminion 13y ago
More than a language, Morse is a script (or whatever is the generalisation of "script" to other transport layers than the written page), isn't it? The fact that you experienced learning Morse similar to learning a new language is rather surprising. For example, I would expect that you can transliterate random Morse into ASCII, perhaps at a lower bitrate, and, if so, the role of understanding the meaning of the content would be far less important than when learning a new language.
- toddrew 13y ago
  Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light. When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.
  - e12e 13y ago
    I think* that for those of us that don't have any language learning disability, or "glyph" learning disability -- all symbolic communication is best understood as flow of words/phrases, not symbols -- at least when you're talking about fluency/proficiency/literacy. I believe that's simply how our brains work. Yes, spoken language is technically built out of phonemes (sounds that we can distinguish, and which carry meaning) -- but there aren't "universal" phonemes (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages). But the "stops" that allows us to "hear" the phonemes, and even the "stops" between words -- are in fact almost non-existent. This is one reason why we often feel native speakers of a language we've yet to master, speak "too quickly". Our brains are unable to recognize the patterns (words and phrases) from the stream of sounds. I thnik there's a storng parallel there to how we raed word-picurtes, and not wrods. (Read that line again, slowly). It makes sense to me that to be "literate" in morse, you'd have to stop looking at the letters, and start looking for the words. Sounds like a great way to learn morse code (and there might be a lesson there about flashcards for foreign languages as well...).
INTPenis 13y ago
That gives me a great idea, to write a program that flashes the terminal bell in order to give a similiar educational experience in learning morse.

by toddrew 13y ago

bkanber 13y ago

I love anecdotes like this. Were you taught Morse purely visually, with the flashing bulb? Do you find it easier to watch a bulb or to listen to a tone?

toddrew 13y ago
It was always visual. It seemed useless at the time, spending hours out in the pouring rain on a ship, sending a message with a flashing light to another ship, but they always reminded us that even with all our technology and cryptography, flashing light is still the most secure method of close ship-to-ship communications because it's directional when using focused light.
- bkanber 13y ago
  That's actually pretty great. I always loved "going back to basics", and flashing a light to talk to another naval ship is as basic as you can get. It works, it's robust in all but the worst conditions, and it's easy. Love it!
- bigiain 13y ago
  Ahhh, the days before a $250 quadcopter existed to provide a plausible attack vector. I wonder if Navy personnel are flashing base64 (base36?) encoded GPG encrypted Morse code messages to each other?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    Ship to ship laser communication fixes that :) Good luck finding the beam.
    - bigiain 13y ago
      Dust, mist, and/or Rayleigh scattering means I wouldn't need to be in the beampath to "see" it, but I guess if you've solved the problem of aiming a collimated laser beam from a moving ship to another moving ship, and reliably hitting the "receiver" at the far end, you can probably do it at low enough power levels to make that very hard…
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Or do it with infrared.
        bigiain 13y ago
        Doesn't help - the quadcopter's cameras don't _need_ to be only sensitive to the human-visible spectrum. (having said that, Rayleigh scattering is frequency dependant, if I recall my high school physics correctly, IR will scatter lees than visible light – I doubt thst matter though, in ship-to-ship communication there'd be more than enough mist/water in the air to scatter enough IR for a suitable camera to see the beam)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- shitgoose 13y ago
  - Is he the only one looking? - Probably. - We'll have to chance that. :) still my favorite movie
  - jloughry 13y ago
    It was The Hunt for Red October, with Sean Connery.

opminion 13y ago

More than a language, Morse is a script (or whatever is the generalisation of "script" to other transport layers than the written page), isn't it? The fact that you experienced learning Morse similar to learning a new language is rather surprising. For example, I would expect that you can transliterate random Morse into ASCII, perhaps at a lower bitrate, and, if so, the role of understanding the meaning of the content would be far less important than when learning a new language.

toddrew 13y ago
Why I compare it to learning a new language is because after a certain speed it becomes almost impossible to read it out letter by letter. When you get good enough you start to see complete words in the light. When you learn a new language you go through a stage where you're going back word for word to your own language in your head. Eventually you become good enough to start thinking in the new language.
- e12e 13y ago
  I think* that for those of us that don't have any language learning disability, or "glyph" learning disability -- all symbolic communication is best understood as flow of words/phrases, not symbols -- at least when you're talking about fluency/proficiency/literacy. I believe that's simply how our brains work. Yes, spoken language is technically built out of phonemes (sounds that we can distinguish, and which carry meaning) -- but there aren't "universal" phonemes (hence most Japanese's problems distinguishing between r/l -- two sounds that are almost identical, and do not carry distinct meaning in Japanese, but do in most(?) European languages). But the "stops" that allows us to "hear" the phonemes, and even the "stops" between words -- are in fact almost non-existent. This is one reason why we often feel native speakers of a language we've yet to master, speak "too quickly". Our brains are unable to recognize the patterns (words and phrases) from the stream of sounds. I thnik there's a storng parallel there to how we raed word-picurtes, and not wrods. (Read that line again, slowly). It makes sense to me that to be "literate" in morse, you'd have to stop looking at the letters, and start looking for the words. Sounds like a great way to learn morse code (and there might be a lesson there about flashcards for foreign languages as well...).

INTPenis 13y ago

That gives me a great idea, to write a program that flashes the terminal bell in order to give a similiar educational experience in learning morse.