Text of LOT 49 article

[Paul Di Filippo]

San Jose Semaphore's message atop Adobe building is . . .
By Sal Pizarro
Mercury News
Article Launched: 08/14/2007 11:09:29 AM PDT


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."



Contact Sal Pizarro at spizarro at mercurynews.com or (408) 627-0940 and  
read him online (http://blogs.mercurynews.com/pizarro).

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