When we lived in our townhouse, we painted squares of color on a wall in our living room. Each square had a color that matched a different element in the house (chair, couch, rug, etc.). Before painting, I considered putting a coded message in the wall using the colored squares as letters or words, but decided against it. The next time my friend Alex came to the house, he looked at the wall and immediately asked if there was a coded message in it. I should have said 'yes' and then watched as he tried to conjure a message out of random squares, but I admitted that there was no message.Flash forward a couple of years and its time to paint the nursery. Annika found a picture in a catalog online that had cool stripes painted on the wall of varying widths and colors and asked if I would paint our nursery that way. After missing the opportunity at the townhouse, I determined to put some coded message in the nursery stripes. After carefully matching colors of the room with paint, days of preparation, and then days of careful measuring, taping and painting, this is what I ended up with:
Can you read it?
If the resolution isn't good enough, here's a transcription:
There are five colors: brOwn (O), Green (G), wHite (H) and two shades of bLue (L and D) (Light and really Dark). There are six distinct widths of stripe - half (h), single (s), double (d), triple (t), quadruple (q) and partial (p). I ran out of room on the wall despite careful planning and measuring so the partial width should have been a quintuple width.
Any stripe can thus be described as:
Oh, Os, Od, Ot, Oq, Op
Gh, Gs, Gd, Gt, Gq, Gp
Wh, Ws, Wd, Wt, Wq, Wp
Lh, Ls, Ld, Lt, Lq, Lp
Dh, Ds, Dd, Dt, Dq, Dp
Using that shorthand, the wall can be transcribed into this:
Ot Ls Od Ws Dh Ld Os Lt Dh Ws Gs Dh Wd Os Gt Ls Dh Lt Gs Wt Gd Dh Oq Gd Ls Os Wd Od Dh Lq Gs Wd Ls Dh Ws Gd Wt Ls Dh Gq Od Dh Ws Gs Dh Ld Os Gt Ls Dh Wt Gp
