Tags: mechanical

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight

The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.

Enigma machine / Tom MacWright / Observable

See how an Enigma machine works …and interact with it.

Letters to be encrypted enter at the boundary, move through the wire matrix, and exit.

Emoji Dick

Melville’s masterpiece, translated into Japanese emoticons. All 6438 sentences. Made possible with Kickstarter and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Fossett sought via Google Earth

There's something very Gibsonesque about this real world mashup of Google Maps and Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Does anyone reading this know Morse Code? If so, please let me know what this audio message means (I got as far as figuring out that the subject is “hello”).

I was trying to work out how to solve this conundrum when Brian suggested using Mechanical Turk. Of course! It’s the ideal task for for it. But when I tried to create a request I discovered that I needed an American bank account.

If anyone out there with the necessary connections wants to create a HIT for me, that would me much appreciated.

Go on… decode the message that some smartarse has left for me and earn yourself some Whuffie.

Update: It’s been cracked! Matthew Somerville and Stuart Langridge earn super geek points for doing this. The message reads:

HI. TOM ANTHONY HERE. ON THE PODCAST YOU SOUNDED LIKE YOU REALLY WANTED A MORSE MESSAGE, OR ANY MESSAGE FOR THAT MATTER. WELL, HERE YOU GO. BTW I AM SO WINNING THE GOLF.