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[gfish]

Minor rant: You can't send morse code by tapping random objects, dammit.

Morse uses beeps of different lengths. If you can't send a dit that is distinct from a dah, it just isn't going to work. For example, R is di-dah-di. It might be tempting to think you could fudge that as tap-tap-(pause)-tap, but that doesn't work. You just sent 'ie' (di-di di) instead. Spacing is used to denote letter, word and sentence boundaries only. You might as well try to speak English without any consonants.

I know it's a very convenient plot tool to have people communicating between locked rooms by hitting a pipe with a wrench. But the only message they can send is "I'm hitting a pipe with a wrench!" Please, find a better solution.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I confess my non-critical mind has always reacted differently--"They always represent morse code by tapping on an object. I wonder what the standard means of differentation between dits and dahs is. Maybe they do it with duration, but not as long as the gaps between words? Huh I'll have to ask--Oh, here comes the guard, he's gonna get caught! oh, no, he's just having a cigarette..."

[mathochist.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I always wondered that, too, but not knowing enough about Morse code myself, I just accepted it.

You *could* simply represent each beep by *two* taps. Tap tap = dit, tap pause tap = dah.

[caladri.livejournal.com]

I can't possibly imagine what would be simple about getting the timing consistent enough for that to be reliable unless you were going to take a very long time to send messages so that you were definitely using time durations that were obviously short, long, longer or longest.