Bitch, bitch, bitch.:D Welcome to the Cellar, Divid.

Hey! I was trying to be as gentle as possible. I said nothing about the scale and the visible 'smears' around the guy!

Thanx Bruce...as far as newb posts go, mine seemed to fly-by fairly unnoticed:D

Here's the BBC story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/w...re/3314895.stm

The things I found interesting were that he was stranded for 3 days before he was found, and:

"He had made the SOS sign in wet sand by shuffling his feet below the high-tide line to indicate it had been written recently."

That's pretty clever for someone suffering from heatstroke.

(Of course on the other hand it means that you have to re-do it every 12 hours. And what if a plane flies by at high tide?)

http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au...55E903,00.html

This says that the other stranded guy who died was unrelated to this one.

"A Coastwatch spotter saw the SOS and noticed Mr Holdsworth and his car on a second sweep. They took photographs of a waving Mr Holdsworth and e-mailed the pictures back to Broome police. The pictures were so clear that Sgt Jon Groves was able to read the logo on Mr Holdsworth's hire car. He called the firm to discover the identity of the stranded tourist."

I'm trying to find out how big his SOS was, but nobody seems to say. I can't get a sense of its size from the pictures.

That's because you were supposed to come in and start correcting everyone's spelling and shit and then be shocked when they respond unkindly. Hey, whatever happened to LU...nevermind.

Quzah.

Well, the guy made them with his feet. He's wearing shoes. My feet in shoes are about 12 inches (or one foot) in length. All you have to do is count the footprints he made. A quick look at the footprints, and a little estimating, makes me think the letters are about 40 feet tall, and the entire message is about 100 feet long. You could always enlarge the picture and actually count the feet instead of estimating, and you will get a pretty exact number. But I think I'm pretty darn close.

As a complete aside:
 

Here are a few more words that read the same right-side-up and upside-down:

ale
axe
dollop
hoy
mow
nu
pod
yeah

I've also done a bunch of names, but they require a bit of creativity with the font.

Scott Kim made his reputation on this kind of thing ... both in the pages of Omni Magazine, and as the illustrator of several chapters of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I have Scott Kim's book "Inversions", it's pretty cool.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...l/-/1559532807

I like Wordplay , by John Langdon. I believe he is a protege of Scott Kim.