Math Teacher Solves Adobe Semaphore Puzzle (mercurynews.com)

linuxwrangler writes: For over 4 years, lights atop Adobe's office building in San Jose have flashed out a secret message. This week, the puzzle was solved by Tennessee math teacher Jimmy Waters. As part of the winnings, Adobe is donating software and 3D printers to Waters' school in his name. "The semaphore had been transmitting the audio broadcast of Neil Armstrong's historic moon landing in 1969," reports The Mercury News. "That's right, not the text but the actual audio." The report provides some backstory: "Waters discovered the project, San Jose Semaphore, last summer while he was looking up something about Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel, 'The Crying of Lot 49.' The text of that work was the code originally programmed by New York-based artist Ben Rubin in 2006. Seeing there was a new message, Waters began trying to decipher it while watching and writing down the sequences online from Tennessee. He discovered a pattern that led him to believe it could represent a space -- or a silence -- in an audio file, and when he graphed the results it looked like an audio wave. He dismissed that as being too difficult but came back to it and eventually ran his results into a program that would convert his numbers to audio. The first results came back sounding like chipmunks squeaking. So he tweaked things and found himself listening to the historic broadcast, which ends with Armstrong's famous line, 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'" You can listen to the semaphore message here.

Comments

Armstrong didn't say "one small step for man"

[Anonymous Coward]

He said "one small step for a man". The transmission was messy.

Re:Tennessee

[PPH]

Yes. As long as it doesn't involve counting back more than 6000 years.

Congratulations

[mykepredko]

Great job by Mr. Waters.

I'm sure the printers donated by Adobe are secondary to the satisfaction of figuring out the message.

Re: tl;dr

[Jfetjunky]

Not having a blatant indication there was a puzzle to be solved was part of the puzzle. They were hoping for someone like him to be observant and curious enough to solve it.

His students are probably lucky to have him.

Attempting to down play it just sounds like petty jealousy.

Re:Can we solve a real problem please?

[Dishevel]

We will just have everyone defer to you to make sure that we are all spending our time doing with it, what you deem appropriate.
Or ...

You could fuck right off and keep your stupidity and self centered opinions contained with in your perpetual virgin shell of humanity.