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- Lately, I’ve been thinking of the spaces between letters. I mean they each have their own form and there must be thousands of them.
- Oh, like the shape between the letters of HI or IN?
- Well, there are a lot of unusual shapes that are stylish, like between R and S or C and J., and there’s
the whole lower case, too. I’m thinking that the mind doesn’t just read letters but also remembers the in-between letters letters, with a subconscious impression coupled to each symbol.
- A subliminal sentiment trigger?
- Possibly. But not just as free floating two-letter shapes; words and phrases have their own in-between letters letters codes.
- So this is an invention? I liked your binary abacus and the Swiss cheese dice much better.
- Think of it as a new shorthand. Every two letters are represented by a new in-between letters letter.
- Yeah, and every two in-between letters letters could be represented by a new in-between in-between letters letters letter, some of which would be ordinary letters. Finally a whole encyclopedia could be reduced to one symbol.
- OK, let’s start with the examples below. Can you decipher them?
examples
http://www.geocitie...nie/inbetween.html?
[FarmerJohn, Apr 08 2005]
Batman logo
http://www.posterpl....net/batmanlogo.htm
[po, Apr 08 2005]
Daft Jewellery
http://www.bathyform.com/daft.html
Hmmm... quite pleased with that. [moomintroll, Apr 08 2005]
FJ boogers it
Booger-Imprinted_20Tissues
[dentworth, Apr 10 2005]
[link]
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that top example looks like EE to me. |
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I had the same trouble with the Batman film logo. it always (to me) looked like a gaping mouth with a few big teeth. |
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so who was your interviewer? Letterman? hee hee I am on a roll today. roll for you, too. |
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The problem it seems with inbetween letters letters, is that you have to take a guess sometimes at what letters are at the begginning and the end of the sentence. |
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Exactly, since I was thinking 'BEER'. |
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It also seems to me that you're only saving one character per phrase there...
"I LOVE YOU" involves writing (drawing?) 8 characters.
"......." (the gaps between - can't find those buttons on my keyboard for some reason) means you have to write (draw?) seven. |
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I actually thought that this idea was going to be for new letters that were halfway between 2 other letters - so you could for instance replace "gh" (gee-aitch) with "gaitch". Not sure how that looks yet though... |
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I think this would work well as single units of jewellery. Will have a play and post something. |
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//writing (drawing?) 8 characters... means you have to write (draw?) seven// Right, the next iteration would be the six "letters" between those, sort of "LOVE YO", etc. One is really just shaving off information at the ends. |
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Think of it as a new shorthand. Every two letters are represented by a new in-between letters letter.// |
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no, cos there are lots of different two letter pairs with the same spacing in between. That is, there is not a one to one reduction between every two letter pair and the space between them. Now, with proper context, you can probably start figuring out the word if you look at all the in-betweens at once, but thats alot like chinese, and that's all greek to me. |
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<link> well, that's an hour of my life I'll never see again ;-) |
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Well, there goes my bone. I eat my words, and they taste sour. Nice work [moomintroll], [FJ], brilliant inspiration. |
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On the contrary, moomintroll. That's an hour of your life that you can see anytime you want to. |
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[moomintroll], that is quite beautiful! |
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Why thank you. I'm pretty pleased with it, I must say. All [FJ]'s idea, though. |
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What denty said, an excellent depiction of attractive jewelry. |
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Let's see: how many would there be in English in any specific font? We need combinatorial statistics. There are 52 characters, 10 digits, and a whole smattering of punctuation that I think I'll ignore for the minute. |
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So let's say 62 character sets, with any possible arrangement (including non-words like qptq34). |
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For any specific word length n, the number of inbetween spaces would be n-1. |
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If we alllow null positions, what we essentially have now is a base-62 numbering system, n-1 units long. So, the formula for the number of whitespace characters would be 62^(n-2)+62^(n-3)+62^(n-4)... or generally, SUM[62^(n-2), from n to 2]. |
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I am thinking that this would work with just the top half of the letter letters too. |
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Looking at this again, I think I calculated it wrong. While there are 62 characters, that makes for a lot more character combinations. It didn't take into account that a whitespace character depends on both characters on it's side. If we exclude the end whitespaces, then there are still n-1 whitespace characters of a word n places long. |
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Also, a whitespace character can be divided in half, between its left influence and right influence, for any given font. Therefore since any of 62 characters are possible, there must be 62^2 character combinations, or 3844 shapes of whitespace, (not including punctuation). |
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[Farmerjohn], could you please post a really really really bad idea next time, for once? |
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If you view the letters from the top, i.e. as if flying along a row of erect letter figures, the interstitial spaces would be much more regular (a nominal width takes care of one of the dimensions), and so possibly describable by algorithmic approaches, yet each in-between letter letter is still unique. The effect would be somewhat like Morse, but with variable lengths of dit and dah, and also variable shades, depending on thickness. Leading to a new coding method? |
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zeno, may I refer you to the link above, that should satisfy your request. |
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Thank you [dentworth], I actually got to bone a [farmerjohn] idea! |
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