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October 1, 2010 6:46 PM Subscribe
Metafilter designers, codebreakers - David Johnston, Canada's new Governor General has a coat of arms that incorporates a long string of ones and zeroes, but that does not directly translate as binary. Of course it could simply be that "The wavy band inscribed with zeros and ones represents a flow of information, digital communication and modern media."
And the wavy pattern has a 1 at every peak and a 0 at every valley. It looks purely decorative to me, but I hope I'm wrong.
posted by Balonious Assault at 7:04 PM on October 1, 2010
posted by Balonious Assault at 7:04 PM on October 1, 2010
Fwiw, you're missing a leading digit, 1.
It's the decimal number 6830770643 in binary. Or in hexadecimal, 1972549D3. In what way are you expecting it to "translate" into something else? The linked article is attempting to apply numerology to a binary string that was likely chosen for aesthetic value.
posted by dodecapus at 7:10 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
It's the decimal number 6830770643 in binary. Or in hexadecimal, 1972549D3. In what way are you expecting it to "translate" into something else? The linked article is attempting to apply numerology to a binary string that was likely chosen for aesthetic value.
posted by dodecapus at 7:10 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
Morse code? If 1 = - and 0 = . , then...
G R O I N ... (oh, I give up)
posted by Sys Rq at 7:14 PM on October 1, 2010
G R O I N ... (oh, I give up)
posted by Sys Rq at 7:14 PM on October 1, 2010
If you break it into 4 digit increments and apply a 1=-, 0=. Morse conversion it starts out as Z Y X. I thought I was on to something, but it sort of breaks down after that.
posted by jedicus at 7:24 PM on October 1, 2010
posted by jedicus at 7:24 PM on October 1, 2010
What the hell does "directly translate as binary" mean, anyway? ASCII isn't everything. You have to pick one encoding or another. They're just ones and zeroes, man.
posted by base_16 at 8:05 PM on October 1, 2010 [4 favorites]
posted by base_16 at 8:05 PM on October 1, 2010 [4 favorites]
Thank you base_16. Ones and zeros could represent pretty much anything. It could be encoded audio for all you know. That's sort of the point. The fact that there are 33 bits (not a multiple of 8) and the fact that there are no occurances of "1111" or even "000" strongly suggests that it's purely decorative. Which is fine with me. If the GG's coat of arms held a sekret message it would get a lot of really inane press and I am just fine without that.
posted by PercussivePaul at 8:48 PM on October 1, 2010
posted by PercussivePaul at 8:48 PM on October 1, 2010
ASCII isn't everything. You have to pick one encoding or another. They're just ones and zeroes, man.
If you throw it into an EBCDIC converter you get garbage (.kuZ followed by a code for Start of Heading).
If you go for Baudot you get BCDRDG and then you're left with 011. If you assume zero padding you get a final N. Other than BCD being, coincidentally, the initialism for Binary Coded Decimal, that doesn't ring any bells. (Baudot is pretty archaic but it was invented by a French guy, so there's some vague connection to Canada there).
Playing around with Unicode gets one printable character that isn't just a Latin letter with a diacritic: 쮒 It's Korean, I think.
All of the other encodings seem either too obscure or too unrelated to be worth analyzing.
I'm going to go with the other folks and say there's no meaning to it. If there's any meaning to it, Morse code seems most likely, since at least that could account for the odd number of bits.
posted by jedicus at 9:07 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
If you throw it into an EBCDIC converter you get garbage (.kuZ followed by a code for Start of Heading).
If you go for Baudot you get BCDRDG and then you're left with 011. If you assume zero padding you get a final N. Other than BCD being, coincidentally, the initialism for Binary Coded Decimal, that doesn't ring any bells. (Baudot is pretty archaic but it was invented by a French guy, so there's some vague connection to Canada there).
Playing around with Unicode gets one printable character that isn't just a Latin letter with a diacritic: 쮒 It's Korean, I think.
All of the other encodings seem either too obscure or too unrelated to be worth analyzing.
I'm going to go with the other folks and say there's no meaning to it. If there's any meaning to it, Morse code seems most likely, since at least that could account for the odd number of bits.
posted by jedicus at 9:07 PM on October 1, 2010 [2 favorites]
According to his Wikipedia article, that element is merely specified as "a bar wavy Sable inscribed with zeros and ones Or." The blazon contains no specification of the message the zeroes and ones are to confer; one could create any permutation of zeroes and ones sufficient to fill the bar and still be true to the description.
I am not Canadian--I am from the United States--but my love of order and computational precision compels me to ask that the people of Canada should call upon His Excellency the Right Honourable Mr. Johnston and the relevant heralds and have this lacuna filled. Perhaps the Governor-General's initials, or those of his motto, in some suitable encoding, could fill the space.
posted by tellumo at 9:44 PM on October 1, 2010
I am not Canadian--I am from the United States--but my love of order and computational precision compels me to ask that the people of Canada should call upon His Excellency the Right Honourable Mr. Johnston and the relevant heralds and have this lacuna filled. Perhaps the Governor-General's initials, or those of his motto, in some suitable encoding, could fill the space.
posted by tellumo at 9:44 PM on October 1, 2010
Or the identifier of his PGP key.
posted by hattifattener at 12:27 AM on October 2, 2010 [2 favorites]
posted by hattifattener at 12:27 AM on October 2, 2010 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks all, I know it was kind of an open ended question. I appreciate the answers.
posted by acro at 12:58 PM on October 3, 2010
posted by acro at 12:58 PM on October 3, 2010
The Slashdot story on this resulted in some interesting observations. Perhaps most meaningfully, it's a prime number and a palindrome, so that makes it a palindromic prime.
posted by jedicus at 8:17 AM on October 4, 2010
posted by jedicus at 8:17 AM on October 4, 2010
Hmm...if you convert it to base64 and plug it into bit.ly you get this, which redirects to www.illuminati-order.org. Mysterious! And almost certainly coincidental!
posted by jedicus at 11:02 AM on October 4, 2010
posted by jedicus at 11:02 AM on October 4, 2010
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:01 PM on October 1, 2010 [1 favorite]