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The Binary Code In Canada's Gov-Gen Coat of Arms
Lev13than writes "Dr. David Johnston, formerly the president of the University of Waterloo, was installed as Canada's new Governor-General on Friday. As de facto head of state and the Queen's representative in Canada he is required to design a personal coat of arms. One modern detail has attracted particular attention - a 33-digit palindromic binary stream at the base. Efforts to decode the meaning of the number using ASCII, Morse, grouping by 3/11 and other theories has so far come up empty (right now it's a toss up between random, the phone number 683-077-0643 and Morse code for 'send help - trapped in a coat of arms factory.') Is 110010111001001010100100111010011 the combination to his luggage, or just a random stream of digits?"
"Hey we need something to make the coat of arms look more modern" "How about that code in the matrix?" "Just put a bunch of 1s and 0s along the bottom"
And then an intern typed enough 1s and 0s to fill up the available space, trying to make it look random.
This number is a prime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindromic_prime in base 2.
In decimal it is: 6830770643
He already told us the answer:
The wavy band inscribed with zeros and ones represents a flow of information, digital communication and modern media.
Not all binary codes are powers of two.
For instance using 5311 instead of 8421
5311
0000 0
0001 1
0011 2
0100 3
0101 4
1000 5
1001 6
1011 7
1100 8
1101 9
1111 10
There are also grey codes from the days of rotaty dialling
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
NATO aircrafts have OTAN printed on it because the two official languages used in NATO are English and French. OTAN means Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord.
The blazon (the heraldic technical description) of the arms is what officially defines them, and it doesn't include the particular sequence of digits; it just says "in base a bar wavy Sable inscribed with zeros and ones Or."
So even if it means something, that particular sequence is just the artist's interpretation; somebody else who redrew the arms would be entitled to change it. Most likely, it's just what the artist liked visually.
Especially believable since it's a mirror image. The center is a 1, and each digit away is mirrored on the opposite side. Perhaps it's easier to see if you add some white space:
1100 101 110 010 010 1 010 010 011 101 0011
Whole summary is pretty corny... Bunching 10 random numbers into 3-3-4 doesn't make it a phone number.
First, 683 is the country code for Niue, and apparently they are small enough to use only 4-digits for their subscribers. So 10 digits is too much. (Nothing is apparent for (68) 3077-0643 either.)
Second, no telephone system that I am aware of supports 0 as the first number of a central office prefix, only as a subscriber number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan#Current_system
http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/
A blog that collects and translates (if possible) the tattoos of mostly Chinese/Japanese/Gibberish characters on people who aren't sure what they really mean.
Some of them aren't that bad, but others make you want to cringe.
[...] zeros and ones represents a flow of information, digital communication and modern media [...] ...signifying nothing.
Hey, it's Fox News!
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
"Informative 3" at the time of this wriring.
You're trying to rate Slashdot mods, right?
In that case, I should say "Informative 3" is quite a bad score considering you gave an obvious hint of how bad that contribution was (a simple binary to hex conversion indeed) including a link to a Wikipedia article that clearly explains why, exactly, the listed number naturally isn't the advertised prime number (2^31 - 1 consists of exactly 31 1-digits - not 33, and no 0-digits).
What? The number is...
110010111001001010100100111010011 (binary)
1972549D3 (hex)
6830770643 (decimal)
Norse runes had meanings on their own, typically used in divination. I.e. you have a bag of runes and toss them on the table. Each one has an associated meaning like, property, heritage, success in war, protection, ect. The way they landed (rightside up, upside down, face up, face down) determined what they meant.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".