ASCII Humor
Reading and then watching the movie of "The Martian", I was always amused by the section where he solves the problem of communicating via the lander by using ASCII.First, why ASCII and not Morse Code? Well, he didn't have a Morse table for one thing. Or did he?
Second, his attempts to find an ASCII table. He finally finds it ... in a printed document? He has a load of laptops available, and he can't find an ASCII table on one of them? What kind of Space Agency(TM) sends a crew without a good online database of knowledge. It does not have to be 'Star Trek' level, but come on!
The problem did bring up a few ideas for kids Science Fair Projects.
Science Fair kinda projects
- Instead of ASCII, assume that you have a Morse Code table too. How would you redesign the Pathfinder lander zone to use Morse instead? Would Morse Code be faster or slower than ASCII with this method. (I'm assuming Morse would be faster in this case, but I could be wrong.)
- Build an equivalent system for both ASCII and Morse, and test it. (Screams Robotics project, yes?) Train other classmates to decode the messages transmitted. How many cpm/wpm can they get to with both systems?
- Assuming you have a laptop available as in "The Martian", what methods would you use to find an ASCII table on the computer? Show and test them.
- Some possible answers (off the top of my head)
- Charmap on Windows (yes, it's still there)
- Spreadsheet using CHAR() function
- Linux: bash script loop using \xNN to print Hex values
- Perl/Python script using ord() or chr()
Now obviously if you are a soft scientist, like say a Botanist, you might not have enough computer software skills to do such programs. But most college educated and office people these days have to be familiar to some degree with Spreadsheets, and using simple formulas. Ah, but would they think to look there?
BTW, whipped I this up on a spreadsheet. I just chose 100 as an arbitrary starting point, guessing like a stranded astronaut might.
Misc Formulas
Just before this post I copied the Morse Code table from Wikipedia into a new tab called 'MorseCode' in my MiscFormulas Spreadsheet. Now I'm not going to get stuck out there without both an ASCII and Morse table!
Be sure to include the Timing diagram near the bottom! That would be a very handy for training.
Other Science Fair Project Ideas?
Project 1: Assuming you only have 1 Terabyte available, how would you algorithmically choose a subset of Wikipedia to take into space? What is the criteria you would use? Would you purge unused pages, or leave at least their titles around? Assuming you could store the text and images, and reproduce it with a local server, roughly how many pages would you be able to take with you? What about the other -pedias under the Creative Commons?
Project 2: Assuming you are on a Mars Colony, set up a server to receive Wikipedia pages every day, minus history and discussions. Roughly how much bandwidth would you require for the Earth to Mars transmissions? Advanced: How could you tell Earth you received all the data for a page correctly? (Hint: CRC codes)
BTW, people are working on similar projects, so there might be good data for students to start with.
Other Hints at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Export
Having some fun, pardners,
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