In article ,
Mike Coslo wrote:

| Key up is "0". Key down is "1". Also known as "space" and "mark",
| respectively.
|
| Unfortunately, there are two separate "1" states, and the zero state is
| not a constant thing.

Your key is either up or down. There is no in between. That alone is
enough to say `binary'.

As for `two seperate 1 states', it's just that one is one 1 state, and
the other is 3 1 states in a row.

| There is the matter of time. A zero might me the space between
| letters, or one half of a dit. It might also mean the space between
| words. All different things.

It's the number of zeros in a row that signifies that.

| That Morse code can be turned into binary is not at argument here. It
| obviously can, just as images, emails and everything else we do on the
| computer.

An image or file on your computer is already binary, pretty much by
definition. But the image you see out your window is not -- it's
analog, and while you can approximate this image with a binary stream,
you can never match it exactly.

| Not really. If you look at the string of 1's and 0's that Doug posted
| as the binary result of my hypothetical CQ, is that something that you
| would recognize as that CQ?

If you played it audibly, yes, you would notice it as a perfectly
timed morse code CQ (my mistake with the C not withstanding.)

Visually, it's not the format that people are used to seeing, so they
don't recognize it at first. Not surprising.

| Why does the - and . method of typing out the code convey the
| information? the dashes and the spaces convey time information to the
| person looking at them. I'm counting more than two states here.

Of course, Morse code is sent as a intermittent tone, RF carrier, or
light. It's *not* sent with strings of periods, dashes and spaces --
that's just a simple way of writing it on paper.

When you look at the tone, carrier or light, the item is either there,
or it's not. Two states. Binary. This is not something that can be
rationally denied.

However, groups of these two states are combined into five states --
dit, dah, intra-character spaces, intra-word spaces and intra-sentence
spaces. This can't really be denied either, and this is how people
generally think of Morse code -- dits and dahs.

This is where the argument lies -- the `I see two states -- binary!'
people look at the first part -- the carrier itself. The `It's not
binary! It's dits and dahs and spaces' people are looking at what the
combinations of the binary states give them, and that's how humans
generally view it.. Both views are correct, so a claim that one view
is wrong is incorrect.

Morse code gives you a way of turning a series of binary states (on or
off) into text. ASCII, EBCDIC, BAUDOT, UTF-8 and oodles of others do
the same thing. Morse code is just as `binary' as they are, but it
just happens to be more suited to human use.

Ultimately, it's a pointless argument, because whatever Morse code is
and is not, people use it, and they agree on what sequences indicate
what letters (of course, this wasn't always the case, but that's
another story), and that's pretty much all that's needed for it to
work, and so on that note I'll attempt to remove myself from the
discussion.

--
Doug McLaren,
Math illiteracy affects 8 out of every 5 people.