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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?"
all it says is EH
rewriting history since 2109
that we let Governor General William Shatner slip through our fingers
I think it's safe to assume that it's an aesthetically pleasing bit of random binary to symbolically carry the message that he's in with technology, in much the same way one might tattoo some bitching runes onto one's arm to convey how one is incredibly down with the druids.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I mean, the guy that designed this is still alive, isn't he?
The story doesn't make it clear.
"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.
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.
I think that translates into: CNUS, Canada's Not the United States.
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110010111001001010100100111010011 is 33 successive digits of pi (in decimal/binary/ternary/etc.). Cunningly, he did not choose the first 33 digits, of course.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If he were from New Zealand I would say it's a binary solo, but being from Canada I'm not sure.
This number is a prime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindromic_prime in base 2.
In decimal it is: 6830770643
... Robert Langdon!!! I'm sure that buried somewhere in that seemingly random sequence of 1s and 0s is a code that will shake the very foundations of the human race and expose a truth that has long been hidden!
I can already hear Dan Brown feverishly scratching away at his notepad, as he begins researching and stringing together a load geographically accurate, but ultimately randomly contrived pile of nonsense for his next magnum opus, "The Canada Complex"
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
its the master key for the upcoming DRM, already broken ..
The base64 result, y5Kk6QE=, reminds me of something a url shortener would spit out. But i am unsure which it would be.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It's meaning is "I bet I can get a bunch of geeks to waste a lot of time trying to decipher this meaningless message!"
Monstar L
That OTAN is NATO backwards is incidental, mirroring is not the reason for it. The reason is that France succeeded in demanding French as an official Nato language. OTAN = Organisation du Traité de l'Atlantique Nord.
There is no use for mirrored writing on airplanes, they fly too fast for your cars rear-view mirror, and planes that do have rear view mirror wouldn't wait 'till the bogey is a couple of yards behind them to find out who he is.
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.
You and the article are assuming powers of two, that is not the only binary encoding.
this is one other example, from Bell Labs - the inventors of the modern world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_code
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
it says "OMG! Canada haz teh internetz"
Nothing at all? In katakana?
Maybe it was his name.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Canadian planes should have 'NATOTAN' written on them to please the speakers of both languages ('NATO' 'stylishly' mirrored around the 'O'). Of course, for the Japanese, that acronym would read 'achieving a darker skin tone by slathering yourself in fermented beans'.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
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
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.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
That's okay, the mere fact that you have an interesting anecdote adds volumes to this conversation. No need to share it, that would just be overkill.
"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).
This happens every time a new URL shortening service launches without a preview feature, and n00bs fall for it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I shop often in an Asian part of town. Bought my daughter a lovely pink kitten-infested shoulder bag with "Sing Sing Death House" neatly embroidered on it. With little fluffy sheep dancing about.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Then you get the generation gap. I remember walking through Dresden a few years ago when I saw a young girl (14 or so) wearing a cute shirt, also with a rabbit on it, with "Squirmy Fuck Bunny" in poofy letters. I'm pretty sure that she knew what it meant but that her older, conservative looking mom had no idea.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
get better calculator. Yours has unsigned 32bit integer limit and confuses decimals with hexadecimals.
Correction. "signed 32bit integer limit"
What? The number is...
110010111001001010100100111010011 (binary)
1972549D3 (hex)
6830770643 (decimal)
Drink more ovaltine, eh.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Yeah. In this day and age, what with time travel and all, heck, she might even be her own mother, and that might be her grandmother.
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We have always been allied with Eurasia.
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.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler