Thursday

Nov. 30th, 2006 03:34 pm
jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
On thursday I cycled out to Ninewell, one of the small nature reserves round Cambridge. It's a tiny wood with a sluggish shallow stream leaking out of a number of chalk wells, supposedly feeding Hobson's Conduit.

It's very strange to cycle up to a layby and get out. Normally I'm either going somewhere, and cycle up to the door, or going for a walk in the country, and go in a car/train.

It's pretty. Walking around nature always gets the creative juices going -- I updated the beetles in my flash game (not online yet) making them face diagonally, which makes them feel considerably more aggressive whilst being about as easy to squish -- and enables a few more levels.

Just the other side of the wood is a national cycle route alongside the railway which I incporporated in my route back. Along the centre were coloured footlong stripes, stretching into the distance, which I wondered about, thinking it was a cycle route thing.

Do you know? See http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/transport/projects/cambridge/shelford_addenbrookes_cycle_path.htm -- it's a commemorative depiction of a section of genome, with four colours for G, C, T, and A.

When I was walking along I wondered if I could tell which direction the pattern went. Not really, and of course, it does have one, but I probably could never have told by examining it. But if you had two (or more) colours of stripes you could use but nothing else, could you indicate a prefered direction?

Using a rainbow pattern is cheating. You can't use a 1,2 pattern because that's symmetric. You could have w,b,ww,bb, but only if you know white comes first :) wbwwbbwwwbbb or rbbgggrbbggg work. But are you sure you'd *which* way it was telling you to go? Is there a better suggestion?

Re: You left your bike in the layby?

Date: 2006-11-30 05:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
No, it still works, because reversing the bits reverses the bit-order within bytes as well. You need to get enough context that only the right way round produces english, but then you don't need the message.

That's interesting, actually. Is there a message which encoded in ascii is a bit-palindrome? Other than ZZZZZZZ. I can't be bothered to work it out, but it would be amusing.

Re: You left your bike in the layby?

Date: 2006-11-30 07:19 pm (UTC)
mair_in_grenderich: (Default)
From: [personal profile] mair_in_grenderich
Then surely you can do it with two colours, using one as letter-edge markings, and one for your letter encoding. you'd have to go miles to get so much as a word though...