can someone explain how they figured out to tell what the sphere was saying?! the whole inverted, sphere like, reflected, binary keyboard scene sounded cool but i didnt get it!
also, when he figured out it was "harry" and not "jerry"...how did he do that?
They surmised that the sphere would see the keyboard as it would be reflected on it. So it would be a mirror image stretched and wrapped on the sphere's surface. Using this idea, they guessed it would number the characters on the keyboard from the centre of the reflected image and spiraling outwards from it.
Samuel L. Jackson's character wrote a script to decipher the numbers using this premise. Later on, Dustin Hoffman's character did the same thing but by hand and, apparently, discovered an error in Harry's (SLJ) script.
"They surmised that the sphere would see the keyboard as it would be reflected on it. So it would be a mirror image stretched and wrapped on the sphere's surface. Using this idea, they guessed it would number the characters on the keyboard from the centre of the reflected image and spiraling outwards from it. "
but what keyboard can it see!? and how is it reversed? wouldnt it just be like looking at a keyboard through glass? and the characters circling out from the middle seems a bit of a stretch!! why not assume they start left to right!?
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but what keyboard can it see!? and how is it reversed? wouldnt it just be like looking at a keyboard through glass? and the characters circling out from the middle seems a bit of a stretch!! why not assume they start left to right!?
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A couple things totally missing from the book may have helped this scene make more sense. At first Jerry sends messages as you see them in the movie (binary numbers scrolling down), but then he starts sending them different spiral shapes, as well as using binary, to help "clue" them into how the code should be solved.
The second thing to note is that in the book Harry solves the code on his own before showing everyone else. He doesn't write a program to decipher the code on the spot for everyone to see. This means that when it came to translating the name "Harry" he probably chose to substitute "Jerry" and hoped noone would notice.
In the movie this mistake is less plausible because it's implied that Harry wrote the wrong substitution letter for "H" and "A", which should have rendered the message "Jello. Jow ere you? I em fine. Wjet is your neme? My neme is Jerry." And (worse later) "I em jeppy."
The best explanation I can offer for the mistranslation in the movie is that Harry knew what the translation would be, but at the last minute he "willed" the screen to print out the wrong name. But that's quite a leap to make without somebody in the movie actually explaining it.
Is it weird that I think your "Jerryese" translation is really funny?
share1.) Well, since "Harry" was improperly translated to "Jerry," then EVERY word containing an "h" or "a" would have its respective letter changed to "j" or "e" thus making a LOT of misspelled, confusing words.
2.) The only reason that the sphere "understood" our planet's English alphabet containing 26 letters was because the movie's characters were conversing with each other, not an actual alien entity.
You're gonna need a bigger boat.