Lani
06-03-2005, 10:26 AM
Jay Leno had two "fastest text messagers" compete against two morse code geeks on his show. The morse coders won hands down.
You can see a video of it here (http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/05/video_morse_cod.html). Hee hee!
This reminds me of the contests they've had between someone using a calculator or ten-key, against someone using an abacus.
The biggest difference is that with both morse code and abacus, the message/calculations are visible at each step -- that is, you don't have to press "=" or "send" to see the final output. No wonder a good abacus user can beat the pants off an accountant using a calculator. My parents' accountant back in Japan used to do all his complicated books with just an abacus, and he only used the abacus to back up all the math going on in his head (because he was so proficient with it that he could visualize the beads in his mind). Oh well, that's for another story.
Morse code rules! Yay! Cheer on, ham radio operators! :)
You can see a video of it here (http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/05/video_morse_cod.html). Hee hee!
This reminds me of the contests they've had between someone using a calculator or ten-key, against someone using an abacus.
The biggest difference is that with both morse code and abacus, the message/calculations are visible at each step -- that is, you don't have to press "=" or "send" to see the final output. No wonder a good abacus user can beat the pants off an accountant using a calculator. My parents' accountant back in Japan used to do all his complicated books with just an abacus, and he only used the abacus to back up all the math going on in his head (because he was so proficient with it that he could visualize the beads in his mind). Oh well, that's for another story.
Morse code rules! Yay! Cheer on, ham radio operators! :)