Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The question card is where he writes. He calls it that because that's where he writes questions.
They also don't encode spaces when they talk to him I always assume that was to save time. They only have about 8 hours a day and they can only send one message every 30 minutes or so. If they take too long to send a message they'll cut into the next message and they need to give him time to go back inside.
Ah so it’s a position where they can read his messages. They does make more sense. However all caps still doesn’t. The messages should have used caps to delineate abbreviated words. Like their first message “HOW ALIVE?” Could have been HwAliv? Which of course could be interpreted as “how are you even alive?” Or “how alive are you?”
The other thing of course is that he just wrote it in all caps because they are simple straight lines. In the book it's explained that the only way he can keep track of what they're writing is to draw it in the dirt with a metal rod. Because all the ink in the pens boils off if he takes them out into Mars's atmosphere and the laptops also break because the liquid in the LCD boils off.
That is also why they need to give him time to go back inside to write the next question. He can't use the pens outside.
Well then the movie makers screwed up when they showed the hexadecimal ASCII lookups, because it’s all upper case.