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Gokul43201
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It's guessable: fifth => "V" (di-di-di-dah)cobalt124 said:Must be Beethovens Fifth Symphony, don't know what the letter is.
It's guessable: fifth => "V" (di-di-di-dah)cobalt124 said:Must be Beethovens Fifth Symphony, don't know what the letter is.
Gokul43201 said:Here's another trivia question that is somewhat more likely to be answered correctly by someone that knows their Morse Code well (you could also accidentally come up with an acceptable answer if you went by general knowledge):
What's the standard Morse Code distress signal?
Gokul43201 said:Of course, a knowledge of Morse Code is invaluable. It might, for instance, help one answer the following trivia question (without recourse to Google et al):
Because of a striking similarity between the Morse Code signal for a particular letter of the alphabet and the opening notes of a famous symphony, it is often conjectured that there might be a connection between them (though no evidence of such connection has been documented). Which letter? Which symphony?
Here's another trivia question that is somewhat more likely to be answered correctly by someone that knows their Morse Code well (you could also accidentally come up with an acceptable answer if you went by general knowledge):
What's the standard Morse Code distress signal?
If the answer said SOS, that would be incorrect, though [itex]\overline{sos}[/itex] would be correct. If the answer is three dots, three dashes, three dots, I might call that acceptable, even though it might be a case of accidental correctness.jarednjames said:Asked and answered above. No knowledge of morse code by the answerer outside of that particular 'phrase'.
This - the frequency of usage - is, in fact, believed to be the correct reason for assigning Morse Code symbols to different letters. Commonly occurring letters (like E and T) got the shortest symbols (dit and dah), and less frequently used letters (like J, Q and X) were assigned to the longer symbols (di-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-di-dah and dah-di-di-dah). Incidentally, Samuel Morse only came up with a code for numbers; letters and other special characters were added by a close collaborator, Alfred Vail.BobG said:Beethoven's Fifth, and the 5 could be represented by the Roman numeral 'V'. Obviously, Beethoven didn't consider this when he wrote his symphony, since he wrote it before Morse Code was invented. I guess it's theoretically possible Morse could have considered Beethoven's 5th, but it would make more sense to consider the frequency of letters in the English language (much the way the population of different areas of the country were considered when assigning area codes).
Gokul43201 said:di-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-di-dah and dah-di-di-dah
FeDeX_LaTeX said:Hello;
Thank you for the link, but I live in London, UK, not London, Ontario!
Gokul43201 said:SOS is actually just a convenient tool for helping remember the actual distress signal, which is di-di-di-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit (SOS is di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit, the gaps are important in Morse Code).
Gokul43201 said:If the answer said SOS, that would be incorrect, though [itex]\overline{sos}[/itex] would be correct. If the answer is three dots, three dashes, three dots, I might call that acceptable, even though it might be a case of accidental correctness.
SOS is actually just a convenient tool for helping remember the actual distress signal, which is di-di-di-dah-dah-dah-di-di-dit (SOS is di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit, the gaps are important in Morse Code). Over time, the mnemonic aid SOS has come to be used synonymously with it (perhaps also because it is easier to say in speech), even though the original distress signal is just a single long character rather than a string of 3 characters.
See, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS
cobalt124 said:Another use would be to identify the murderer in the TV series "Inspector Morse", where sometimes the incidental music incuded their identity in morse code.