J Banner 7

[ColdGlider]

Converting to ASCII is a trivial task with my analyzer.  The processed data is at the end of this post in both bitwise endian decodings.  I really need to work on getting the UTF decodings in there, too. 
Anyhow, I'm sorry to report that the results of your transformation are not ASCII, Moose.     A quick way to tell if a byte is not ASCII is to check the most significant bit (MSB).  Conventionally, this is the leftmost bit.  If it is a 1, then the value of the byte will be 128 or greater.  Values this large are outside of the range of ASCII.  This does not mean that a value of 0 in the leftmost position will be ASCII- just that it can be decoded as such whether the original data was meant to be ASCII or not.

The hunt continues...

Big Endian Bit Order
01,11110001,{241}
02,00001001,[9]
03,11110001,{241}
04,10101001,{169}
05,00100001,!
06,11110011,{243}
07,00111111,?
08,11010010,{210}
09,11011100,{220}
10,00111000,8
11,10101010,{170}
12,11011100,{220}
13,11100111,{231}
14,11101001,{233}
15,00010000,[16]
16,11110011,{243}
17,00111111,?
18,11011100,{220}
19,00110001,1
20,11100011,{227}
21,10111100,{188}
22,10011111,{159}
23,10110011,{179}
24,10111100,{188}
25,10010111,{151}
26,01111100,|
27,11001111,{207}
28,00110011,3

Little Endian Bit Order
01,10001111,{143}
02,10010000,{144}
03,10001111,{143}
04,10010101,{149}
05,10000100,{132}
06,11001111,{207}
07,11111100,{252}
08,01001011,K
09,00111011,;
10,00011100,[28]
11,01010101,U
12,00111011,;
13,11100111,{231}
14,10010111,{151}
15,00001000,[8]
16,11001111,{207}
17,11111100,{252}
18,00111011,;
19,10001100,{140}
20,11000111,{199}
21,00111101,=
22,11111001,{249}
23,11001101,{205}
24,00111101,=
25,11101001,{233}
26,00111110,>
27,11110011,{243}
28,11001100,{204}

[Dunder Moose]

Rats, that really felt like I was on to something there...  Why would they have such a tantalizing code, and three versions of it if it didn't add up to something more than "it looked cool"?

Other options that present:  8 Dot Braille, Binary clock, I don't know.  Might take some pajama time before I build up the steam to tackle this again.

[Dunder Moose]

I had another take on the dots.  There are 28 in a row.  What if they represent the alphabet with two other characters, maybe space and period, or paragraph?  Then maybe the missing dots highlight the letter for that position.

if
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz_.
* ** * ** **** * * ****** *   (the first line in the J Banner 7 code.)

So the standouts are: be gj oq sz.

So I don't have my alphabet lined up right.

OR

I'm not using the right alphabet.  Swahili is a Bantu Language, but it only has 23 letters.  But it is based in part on Arabic and that has.....28 letters.

Could the spaces in the dot codes highlight arabic letters that might spell something?

Am I going insane?

What do y'all think?

[Apollo Doom]

I think this is a very very good point Dunder.  If I recall correctly the code for IWHBYD was in Greek or some such thing?

Especially since Arabic has 28 letters and there's 28 dots.  I'm off to find an Arabic alphabet and online translator!

EDIT:  A stumbling block: Arabic letters can be written in several ways depending on whether they are represented alone or at the beginning, middle, and end of words.  The possibilities are staggering unless we had someone who could read Arabic.

[Imppa]

I would say you'r going crazy, Moose, but if Apollos reference to IWHBYD is real, it could just be something like that.

[Apollo Doom]

I'm sorry but I cannot confirm this.  I have tried searching for people referencing the search for IWHBYD but I can only find people who talk about looking at the code to discover it.  Consider it hearsay for now.

[Dunder Moose]

This morning it occurred to me that the J banners may be part of a citywide sanitation system.  The Oliphaunts that Jotun Heavy Industries manufacture seem to be unmanned in Sadie's story.  Perhaps the dot code banners are there for them to scan, like checkpoints on their circuit of the city.  A way to test this would be to map out which codes are in which locations and see if they are just Jotun code for the different Districts.

[ColdGlider]

That's a good thought, but there are only three J-Banners and they often appear clustered in the same area.  Squidhenge has two different ones, for example.  I believe all three can be found in D01 at the beginning of CM:CH.  But I like your theory!

[EnigmaBiz]

This puts Braille back on the table..


Braille computer monitor

The Braille computer monitor has rows and columns of rectangular cells. The cells include four rows and two columns of dots that can be felt for interpretation by the user. "The pins are driven by electromechanical impact drivers and are held in position by resilient elastomeric cords. The impact drivers are carried on a bi-directional printhead which travels beneath the movable pins. An erasing mechanism is provided to positively drive the pins downwardly to erase the characters produced by the printhead."[3] The Braille computer monitor is under the United States Patent 6700553.[3

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_Braille_display

[Imppa]

Good show Engima! I know a quy in my judo team who's blind, and he has told me about that. Never realized it would pop back up here.
So...How do we translate it then? 

[EnigmaBiz]

Well, I guess we would need that machine... or at least a detailed picture of the machine.

[ColdGlider]

Well, I guess we would need that machine...

No, we shouldn't need the machine.  We only need the specification for the 8-dot braille it produces. 

Braille has been extended to an 8-dot code, particularly for use with Braille embossers and refreshable Braille displays. In 8-dot Braille the additional dots are added at the bottom of the cell, giving a matrix 4 dots high by 2 dots wide. The additional dots are given the numbers 7 (for the lower-left dot) and 8 (for the lower-right dot). Eight-dot Braille has the advantages that the case of an individual letter is directly coded in the cell containing the letter and that all the printable ASCII characters can be represented in a single cell. All 256 (28) possible combination of 8 dots are encoded by the Unicode standard. Braille with six dots is frequently stored as Braille ASCII.

So I thought perhaps we might simply drop the fourth row if all it contains are alternate versions (e.g. capitals) of the text.

Using the following links:
http://www.brailleauthority.org/
http://www.dotlessbraille.org/displays.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille_Ascii
http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/disabilities/asc_brl.php

...I converted J-Banner 7 to text as if it were normal 6-dot braille.  I simply dropped the fourth row of dots.  Here is what results:

GLYPH #	DOTS	BRAILLE ASCII	LITERARY BRAILLE
01	1-2-6	<	gh
02	1-2-4-5-6	]	er
03	2-4-5	J	j
04	2-3-4	S	s
05	1-3-5-6	Z	z
06	1-2-3-4-6	&	and
07	1-2-4-5	G	g
08	4-5	^	[contraction prefix]
09	2-3-4-6	!	these
10	2-4-5	J	j
11	1-2-3-4-6	&	and
12	1-2-4-5-6	]	er
13	1-5-6	:	wh
14	1-3-5	O	o

So, yeah.  "Gherjsz" to you, too, Bungie.  Onward to the 8-dot spec.

any computer braille displays indicate capital letters with a dot on the lower left (dot 7). There is little consistency in the use of the lower two dots. There are a number of official and semi-official 8 dot Braille codes, mostly in Europe. Very little literature has been reproduced in any 8 dot Braille code.

The website quoted above (http://8dotbraille.com/) provides a totally different method of decoding.  The bad news is that the very first 8-dot glyph we find in J-Banner 7 has no mapped value in 8-dot unified!  (3-4-7 according to their dot numbering scheme)  Maybe I missed something, but I did not find this pattern in their lists of letters, numbers, punctuation, or symbols.

I looked further.  This article (http://www.brailleauthority.org/eightdot.pdf) is a great overview of Braille development and includes 8-dot systems.  From this, I discovered ISO/TR 11548 which defines an 8-dot braille encoding method for computer use.  And you know what?  For $157 you can purchase that document from Amazon.com.  The ISO site itself has a shopping cart application which they use to SELL you the standards documents.

So let me get this straight.  If I'm a blind person who wants to read 8-dot braille, I need to pony up over $100 to purchase a document NOT PRINTED IN BRAILLE in order to figure it out?!?  Sure, I understand that these documents cover the technical aspects of character encoding, blah, blah, blah, and the standards folks have to be reimbursed for their fancy French lunches as they sit in board rooms and vote on the acceptance of new proposals.  That doesn't stop me from wanting to whack them upside their heads with a stale loaf of french bread for selling overpriced digital copies of what are supposed to be International Standards.  Ok, flame off.

Anyhow, we're striking out (once again) on decoding this banner.

I might as well toss out another idea I had while we're on the topic of failed attempts: "BARRETT" as the key.  I reasoned that since the J-Banners have rows of 28 dots and this number is evenly divisible by 7 (go figure) then the seven-character string "BARRETT" (revealed to us in-game though binary) might be the first word encoded in one of the J-Banners.  This seemed logical to me:  use an established encoding method (binary) to give us the means to decode your own custom encryption method (J-Banner dots.)  Sounds fun and exciting, right?

If this were true, then perhaps the first group of four dots in one of the J-Banners is meant to decode to a "B", the second four an "A", the third and fourth four an "R", etc.  If there was indeed a one-to-one mapping between the dot patterns and the characters, then we should observe a repeating dot pattern for the doubled letters in "BARRETT", namely the "RR" and the "TT".  I don't see this pattern in any of the banners.  Please feel free to check into this yourself and prove me wrong.

Finally, in case anyone is wondering "Why does he bother posting all of this stuff if it turns up nothing?"
1:  To record that it has already been tried, how it was attempted, and what the results were so that others can save time.
2:  For others to correct if I made a mistake or otherwise misinterpreted the data or the decoding processes.

There are still some leads in the Braille department.  As the aforelinked article describes, there are Braille encoding methods for music and math, for example.  For now, though- I am spent.  My shift is over.  Next?

[EnigmaBiz]

I am deleting my horrible paint shop graph now!.. I spent all day on it, that and going back and forth on Morse code, Braille and AC. I hate the J banners....makes me want to smoke a "J"( and no, I don't do drugs)

CG did you notice if language mattered?

...Maybe its just like the Pedestals.. just a couple of different versions of the same thing with no rhyme or reason. Maybe its purely aesthetic. 

[Dunder Moose]

Great idea Enigma and well done CG.  Seriously impressed over here.  Excellent. 

The J Banners have resisted yet another attempt.  Gherjsz-it!

I wonder if it isn't time to try brute force cryptography.  I mean if there is a column to letter ratio we could see which patterns repeat most often and try to map them to the most often occurring English letters - ESTONIA-R.  I am super busy this weekend, but if I get some time I will try to map this out and show my work, following ColdGlider's sterling example here.   

Edit:  Let's not toss out Braille hastily. Remember the J looks like an upside down seven.  Tomorrow I will try to recreate ColdGlider's Braille work for the upside down version as well as forward and backward like we did with the binary attempts.  Of course this will be between trying ideas on the Ubiquitous Number, of course...

[Dunder Moose]

...Maybe its just like the Pedestals.. just a couple of different versions of the same thing with no rhyme or reason. Maybe its purely aesthetic. 

Hmm, three J Banners and three Pedestals...and two J Banners in squidhenge.  Hmmm. Maybe one under each J and one in the henge?