Speaking of low bitrates
"So Geoff and Alex were talking to each other in finger-binary..."
Random tidbit of conversation in the HKN office today. Finger-binary is, yep you guessed it, holding up fingers in binary for each letter's ascii code. I can't believe I know these people.
"... about the other people on the bus near them who were reading their bibles and discussing them together." To paraphrase.
It's been a long week. A very long week. I'd write more, but I think I'll just nap.
Comments
What encoding? US-Ascii, ISO-8859-1, UTF8, or something else? Was it parallel (8 fingers at a time) or serial (one finger at a time) communication?
If you know your ASCII, I guess parallel finger binary could actually be quite fast, relatively speaking.
Assuming you use thumbs to hold fingers down, and encode characters as eight bits starting with the least significant bit on the left of the left hand, with each nibble (4 bits) encoded big endian, so the most significant bit is at the right of the right hand, U+0042 (latin capital letter B) becomes quite a rude character, so this form of communication could raise some offended eyebrows...
Posted by: Ian Hickson | October 5, 2002 09:18 AM
As far as I understood, the encoding was assumed to be us-ascii. I doubt any characters were used that would distinguish any other encodings, but I haven't asked. And yes, it was parallel, and yes, we did spend some time at the office figuring out orientation and the difficulty of raising a single ring finger. I think I assumed back of the hands facing the reader, thumbs not in use, and little-endian (from the direction of the sender) because that's just easier.
And... quite fast relative to what? Speaking? Typing? ASL? Semaphore?
Posted by: Nadia | October 6, 2002 08:51 PM
Relative to morse code.
As I see it the only big obstacle is that you have to know your ASCII. My memory sucks. :-(
Posted by: Ian Hickson | October 7, 2002 06:39 AM
Well, if you did parallel finger morse code, or tried ascii in serial, morse code would win.
And then there's the existing population of people who are already fast at morse code.
Posted by: Nadia | October 7, 2002 09:26 AM
Ah, but you can't do morse code using fingers, at least not trivially, since morse code is a base 3 system (dot, dash, and terminator, usually represented as a space).
Plus, morse code isn't defined for all 16000+ different characters that UTF8 can do. :-)
Posted by: Ian Hickson | October 8, 2002 08:33 AM
If you do morse code in parallel (ie each letter displayed at once on your fingers) then a terminator could just be you moving your hands, or even a pause in time.
Do *you* use 16000+ characters in normal conversation? :)
Posted by: Nadia | October 8, 2002 12:08 PM
In recent conversations, yes. :-/
But I guess I wan't be talking about the CSS3 lists module all my life...
Posted by: Ian Hickson | October 9, 2002 07:18 AM
another way of doing it is to omit the higher bits which one can assume will mostly be set to the same thing all the time, either 64 or 96 (the alphabet). this way you only need one hand (5 bits, 32 characters) to show the whole alphabet, and can communicate two letters at once.
if you need to shift to another part of the ascii or unicode table, you could maybe indicate this with a shift symbol on one hand.
Posted by: david | April 30, 2005 08:44 PM