What is your favorite hobby?

noroute@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 130 points –

;-)

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Encoding/decoding. If something exists, it has a 25% chance of harboring a hidden message.

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Do you look at art and try to decode?

A lot of times, yes. With surprising results.

For example, a form of letter substitution was made where different squiggle combinations were different letters, made so that a drawing can be drawn and the code could be visible in the lined drawing's lines, making sure the code was made in such a way that it could be used no matter what was being drawn.

Colors, shapes, sizes, noise, measurements, anything that can be distinguished into forms and types is potentially someone's communicating.

Oh cool - can you share the name of that work/those works?

I actually meant less "encrypted" artworks, but more "regular" works, where you would wonder the artists intent or try see what feelings the artwork can offer and why it works.

I think it could be interesting to encode messages into the DNA of an ant, for example, then mail the ant somewhere so that the receiver can sequence the DNA and decode the message

That's been done, though it's much harder to do on living things because attempting to change the DNA of something that's still alive opens up a can of worms that makes it not worth it. They've once proved you can encode the whole of Wikipedia on a few strands of hair.