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Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also ~~both him and~~NASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.
The question card is where he writes. He calls it that because that's where he writes questions.
They also don't encode spaces when they talk to him I always assume that was to save time. They only have about 8 hours a day and they can only send one message every 30 minutes or so. If they take too long to send a message they'll cut into the next message and they need to give him time to go back inside.
Ah so it’s a position where they can read his messages. They does make more sense. However all caps still doesn’t. The messages should have used caps to delineate abbreviated words. Like their first message “HOW ALIVE?” Could have been HwAliv? Which of course could be interpreted as “how are you even alive?” Or “how alive are you?”
The other thing of course is that he just wrote it in all caps because they are simple straight lines. In the book it's explained that the only way he can keep track of what they're writing is to draw it in the dirt with a metal rod. Because all the ink in the pens boils off if he takes them out into Mars's atmosphere and the laptops also break because the liquid in the LCD boils off.
That is also why they need to give him time to go back inside to write the next question. He can't use the pens outside.
Well then the movie makers screwed up when they showed the hexadecimal ASCII lookups, because it’s all upper case.
I found this post hilarious.