

The Downton Abbey Morse Code - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2011/11/downton-abbey-series-1-episode-1-morse.html

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atomical
My girlfriend and I are in love with this show. It surprised me to see a
reference to it on HN this morning.

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mattdeboard
Ha, ditto on all counts. I am man enough to admit I love me a well-made
British period drama.

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grandalf
As a kid I got my ham radio license. Recently the FCC removed the requirement
to learn morse code. Yet it's becoming more popular than ever.

It's an extremely efficient way to communicate (a watt or two is all that is
often necessary to communicate across the country or even the world).

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WalterBright
What I find amusing is all the modern schemes to try to communicate with one
button (such as you see on a cell phone), whereas morse code does the job very
well.

The neato things about morse:

1\. you can key in the message without needing to look at the phone display

2\. disabled people enter it efficiently if all they can do is tap (it just
kills me to see them, like in Breaking Bad, using a bell while an aide moves a
finger along an alphabet board)

3\. one doesn't need to read morse code, a computer can ably decode it

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willhopkins
It hadn't occurred to me to check that. It's nice when shows take the time to
get it right, or mostly so.

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jgrahamc
It's also nice that the radio amateur who did this, G3YXZ, used period
equipment as well. He was using a circa 1900 British Post Office Morse key.

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grandalf
Don't underestimate the more modern equipment... I just ordered one of these:
<http://www.i2rtf.com/html/pearl.html>

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jdietrich
Along similar lines, the theme tune to Inspector Morse includes the repeated
word "TTORSE"[1] - the initial M (--) is inadvertently split into two Ts (-),
possibly because the different rhythm sounded better to the composer.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tuRIciN8B0>

