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Morse Coders Beat SMSers
dgnicholson writes "Jay Leno did a text off between two text messengers and two Morse coders. The Morse coders handily beat the young whippersnappers with time to spare. It might be a fun phone app to make a Morse code messenger, if you kept your headset in and had an external sender, could be interesting. Perhaps a Morse code Skype device."
Someone already wrote an application for Nokia phones that lets you write your SMS by using Morse code.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Granted, but let's see them repeat the experiment with a device that has a full keyboard on it. I've known people who can type on QWERTY at 120 WPM sustained, let's see any morse guy keep up. Or get one of those closed caption keyers to compete as well -- they apparently go up to 250 WPM.
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French is a Hindi. It just happens to use different words for most things.
An electric oven is a gas oven. It just happens to use electricity instead of gas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually, the morse guys were amateurs as well. Neither of them has ever had a job in which use of morse code was part of the job.
The earlier contest, on which this one was based, was held in Australia, and was much more lopsided. The SMSer was a high school girl who did NOT have the world record, and the morse code guys were 90-year-old retired telegraphers. It's been a very long time since anybody got paid to send morse code.
Chip and Ken are amateur radio operators, K7JA and K6CTW. The tonight show staff just dressed them up like old-time telegraphers.
VILLAGER #1: Well, we did do the nose.
BEDEVERE: The nose?
VILLAGER #1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
The big advantage they had is not the quality of their paddles nor the lack of time shifting (the twirp wasn't anywhere near done sending when they finished). They could send every letter with their fingers on the same buttons. Sending text from a cell phone is like hunt-and-peck typing. Sending morse code is more like touch-typing. I personally could have beaten Chip and Ken 2:1 or better if I'd been there with a decent keyboard to enter the text, and I'm not a particularly good typist:
[hiram@flatus hiram]$ time read line
I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance.
real 0m6.993s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[hiram@flatus hiram]$
Another advantage morse has is that more-common characters have shorter symbols. At the extreme, an E is 1/19 as long as a 0(but only 1/9 as long as a 5 - an artifact of the system for numerics).
Few of these thoughts are my own. This was discussed to death on ham radio mailing lists, on the air, and in coffee shops nation-wide, 3 weeks ago.