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?"

Comments

Has anybody asked him?

[Stween]

The story doesn't make it clear.

Palindrome

[dissy]

The first thing I notice is the binary string is a palindrome, the same forwards or backwards.

Being 33 digits, that is just strange. Dropping the first 1 to make 32 would be more fitting, but the first digit is still a 1, so unless he is into ANSI art, I doubt this is ascii encoding.

Just the fact it is the same both ways leads me to think an artist designed it, a lot more so than it converts to anything meaningful.

Which is a shame really, but not unexpected.

Re:Palindrome

[binkzz]

Even more reason to believe it is totally artistic and not a meaningful translation of anything though, as coat of arms and crests tend to do that sort of thing over the entire imagery, typically only exception for items added in later, which doesn't seem to be the case here.

Still, it's amusing to think how many people will spend their Monday trying to decode this heh

Yea, and while I agree with you that it's most likely a random number, I can't help but keep wondering. That it's a prime number doesn't help much either.

If you were the designer, what would you encode? It's hardly big enough to fit a four letter word in. I think I would probably go with the boring ol' date of birth.

Re:Palindrome

[ThePromenader]

Wait a sec - if the artist had used '01100101 01101000' (reading away from a middle '0', ), the binary would have translated into 'eh'. Now ~that~ would mean something Canadian!

palindrome

[Anonymous Coward]

It's symmetrical, so probably just random code for aesthetics.

Although I hope I'm wrong -- it'd be cool if it contains meaning as well. And just running random number for the effect of code is a disheartening waste of opportunity, and makes a sad statement about preferring form over function.

Can get even worse

[Moraelin]

It can get even worse. At least "chop suey $3.99" is clear where is came from.

Funnier stories are those like the guy who got "pig meat" in chinese letters because it was copied off a can of that. But I'd imagine that the latter realization comes after seeing that this guy has "pig meat" written on him. Yeah.

Then there was the guy who thought he got a tattoo saying "wise dog that guards the pack", but it actually meant "dog's ass".

In the same vein of "you're not going to get hooked up with any woman that can read that", one guy got a tattoo which he thought was totally bad ass, until a Japanese girl told him it means "abusive husband". Well, I guess at least it works as a warning.

Conversely one woman got the longer version of that, and it translated to "my abusive husband beats me." It's one of the things that aren't even funny but make one wonder if she got ripped off or it's a cry for help.

Though to be entirely fair, apparently cool kids in Beijing tattoo themselves with nonsensical combinations of English letters too, like "TWARP", "GWIPO", "FRUNK" and get told by unscrupulous tattoo parlor artists that they mean stuff like "old soul with young spirit" in English. (Actual example. If you were wondering what FRUNK means in English, now you know;)) Also apparently both CRYMPH and DLECH mean "beautiful flower dancing in the wind" in American according to one tattoo parlour in Beijing. In case you were wondering ;)

Luckily individual letters are not whole words in the Latin alphabet, so most are just nonsense. But you just have to wonder if there's some brave soul somewhere in China wearing a tattoo that says "I suck cock" and thinks it means "loyalty, courage, honour" ;)

That said, since runes were an alphabetic system, I would assume most of those are equally nonsense combinations. I wouldn't wonder if some guys out there were running around with tattoos that just say "FUTHARK" because someone just copied the first characters of the runic alphabet.

Re:The number is a Palindromic Prime in base 2.

[horza]

Well found. The page also explains for dissy above why it has 33 digits:

"Except for 11, all palindromic primes have an odd number of digits, because the divisibility test for 11 tells us that every palindromic number with an even number of digits is a multiple of 11."

Phillip.

Re:Random?

[symbolset]

I put the answer already in the first sumbission. I don't know why the second sumbmission was picked.

It's a black and white binary image, three rasters of 11 pixels. Combined it makes a scrollwork that can tile horizontally. It's ornamental. It's an italic mirrored N and a /.

not rs232

[Uzik2]

RS232 sent 11 bits for every byte, It could be an RS232 string of three digits but I don't think so. It's garbage in ASCII.

Re:The number is a Palindromic Prime in base 2.

[maxwell demon]

Well, 33 itself is also a binary-palindromic number (although not prime): 100001
And of course, 33 is a palindrome in base 10, too.

Moreover note that the sum of the binary digits (which equals the number of ones) is 17, which is also prime, and in binary is written 10001, so this is again a binary-palindromic prime, and the binary digit-sum here is 2, which again is a prime (although not binary-palindromic).

Re:I still can't believe

[rickhend]

That we still have a Governor General at all, and that we pledge allegiance to a foreign head of state.

Re:The number is a Palindromic Prime in base 2.

[FrootLoops]

A quick Python script shows there are 81 primes (including this one) in the 2001 numbers a distance at most 1000 from the above. So, for this large a number, a random guess would give *around* a 4% chance of getting a prime. Adding in the constraint that the number's a palindrome (which makes the picture look nice) may or may not make it more rare. I just tried randomly generating 10,000 33-digit binary palindromes which resulted in 418 of them being prime, giving the same *around* 4% chance of getting a prime palindrome of this length randomly.

So, given the available space and the artistic desire to choose a binary palindrome, they only had a 4% chance of getting a prime--a coincidence? Probably :(.

World population

[sik0fewl]

It's awfully close to the estimated world population.

In decimal, the number is 6,830,770,643. According to Wikipedia, the United States Census Bureau estimates the world population to be 6,872,800,000.

Re:Not necessarily binary

[beav007]

The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.

* Early FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers