unforum

[rose]

Sheet of paper found by Scarlett from the Granier painting

[garethfoot]

could it be something digital on paper? music?

[Skizz]

My first thought was digital encoding but there's no clock signal to sample the information and there are some very short transitions which would either be noise or there's a very large amount of data per line implying lots of consecutive 0s and 1s, both are unlikely.

garethfoot's post made me think of pulse width modulation (PWM). The only thing missing is a duration for the sample, but that can be scaled quite easily. If someone can convert the trough and peaks into pixels I can write a quick program to feed the signal through a PC speaker (which just so happens to be a great filter for convert PWM to audio).

Skizz

[rose]

shading

[hyperzz]

Isn't it solved?

[TheQuestion]

There's a crease in there, like it was folded in half... except the crease is nowhere near the middle. I'm at work, and haven't tried myself, but it almost looks like if you printed it out and folded it, the top two or three lines would still be visible. Just speculating...


EDIT: on further pondering, it could have been a letter fold, where you fold the paper into thirds to put in an envelope... but if that was the case there'd be another crease mark towards the top... which I don't see.

[rose]

two pieces of paper

[makomk]

I originally posted this in the update thread, but it probably fits better here:

Cleaned-up version of the lines (using some simple line-following code). I should be able to get the exact horizontal positions of all the transitions out fairly easily, too...

ETA: These should be all the transitions (fingers crossed that they're right). U indicates an upwards transition and D a downwards one, the number is the x co-ordinate of the transition, and a # sign indicates the end of a line. Lines start at x=34 and end at x=883:

[UKver2.0]

Converted peaks/dips to white/black. Is there an app that can convert it to sound?

[Cabbage]

"One person could look at the pile of square wave tracing and see nothing but noise. Another might find a source of fascination there, an irrational feeling impossible to explain to anyone who did not share it. Some deep part of the mind, adept at noticing patterns (or the existence of a pattern) would stir awake and frantically signal the dull quotidian parts of the brain to keep looking..."
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

This passage is from the chapter Londinium where one of the code breakers is imagining tracing a wave form based on someone walking along pavements (along), down kerbs (down), across roads (trough), and up the next kerb (up again), which could actually give you a map of the street patterns based on the length of the transitions (regular in America - grid system - and irregular in London - higgeldy-piggedly streets). Such a map is graphed out in the book (p 118 in my book) and this is what this piece of paper initially reminded me of. Probably a dead-end, and it's probably something very different but I thought I would mention it...

Cabbage

Edit: OOPS - just (honestly) seen the other post by thalamus along the same lines as this in this thread: [UPDATE] Scarlett Kite - 8 Sept 06 - Success!. Hey, great minds think alike s'pose.

[makomk]

[garethfoot]

[TheQuestion]

...so this is a map leading us to a place, either on the PXC map or on Earth. But in order to have a destination you must have a starting point... the lighthouse perhaps?

[garethfoot]

[BrianEnigma]

So I was going to write about how the waves don't look like a bunch of different things. They don't look like a binary signal with an external clock carrying ASCII (e.g. RS-232 or TTL) because of those really short bounces. They don't look like pairs of data+clock, even given an irregular clock (e.g. I2C or SPI.) While it could be a 12-bit bus (or two 2-bit busses), the way the edge transitions don't line up more often than not makes me doubt this theory.

I was basically all out of ideas, but then Cabbage came along with his Cryptonomicon reference, and I think there just might be something to it. Unfortunately, my copy of the book is at home right now.

Do we have Uncle Sanjean's house on our Perplex City map?