From Tuesday's (8/14) San Jose Mercury News:By Sal PizarroMercury News
The code is cracked.
And for anyone who thought a simple message was being transmitted
by the rotating disks atop the Adobe tower in downtown San Jose, boy, were you
wrong.
The message of San Jose Semaphore is the entire text of the Thomas
Pynchon book, "The Crying of Lot 49."
The solution was discovered by two Silicon Valley tech workers, Bob
Mayo and Mark Snesrud, who received a commendation at San Jose City Hall today.
Using both the rotating disks and the art project's audio
broadcast, they deciphered a preliminary code based on the James Joyce novel,
"Ulysses," which was the key to solving the entire message. It took them about
three weeks.
"It was not a real easy thing to figure out," said Snesrud, a chip
designer for Santa Clara based W&W Communications.
Ben Rubin, the New York artist who developed the project, applauded
the duo's "computational brute force" in finding the message.
"I'm especially glad the code was cracked and that it was done in a
very classical way," Rubin said.
The Pynchon book, written in the mid-1960s, is set in a fictional
California city filled with high-tech campuses. It follows a woman's discovery
of latent symbols and codes embedded in the landscape and local culture, Rubin
said.
The semaphore is made up of four 10-foot wide disks, which are
composed of 24,000 light-emitting diodes. The disks each have a dark line going
from one end to another and twirl around every eight seconds to create a new
pattern.
It made its debut on Aug. 7, 2006 as part of the ZeroOne digital
art festival. Rubin said there are no plans to stop the semaphore or change its
message - at least for the time being.
"It'll change the way people look
it," Rubin said of having the solution known. "Maybe in a few years, we'll
revisit it."
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