Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Binary Dates and Princess Lime

This is something I realised a couple days ago. And by a couple of days ago, I mean a couple of months ago. I left it to stew, and had left it as an unpublished post. Now that I have completely formed the idea, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the theory of Binary Dates.

Every century, there are thirty-six binary dates that occur.

Since binary is composed purely of zeroes and ones, this means that all these dates are squeezed into the first eleven years of said century, of which only four years contain them.

Each year that will have a binary date ends in '00, '01, '10, or '11. There are nine dates in total - three in January, three in October and three in November.

Understanding Binary

Binary comes in a sequence of eight digits, each of which can be a zero or a one.

00000000

Each of these placements indicates a different number, starting from one and doubling eight times. A one in the sequence of eight indicates one of those numbers, which can be added to other ones in the group. The highest number in this string of eight possible is two hundred and fifty-five.

Simply, read it like this.

128  64  32  16  8  4  2  1            (Base 10)

  0     0    0    1   1   1  1  0            (Base 2)

0+0+0+16+8+4+2+0 = 40

And that's how you learn binary in five minutes.

I had been working on this since last year, when I realised that the date set out would be binary in nature.

And since I was awake with a flat iPod on the way out of Paris on the Eurostar just over a week ago, I decided to write up the dates and do the maths.



I didn't have anything normal, 80gsm paper to write on at the time. So it's scribbled on a tissue.

I'll type it all out anyway because that doesn't look like the most legible stack of numbers ever written.

Binary Solo!

2000                    2001                  2010                   2011

00010100            00010101          00010110           00010111
00100100            00100101          00100110           00100111
00110100            00110101          00110110           00110111
00011000            00011001          00011010           00011011
00101000            00101001          00101010           00101011
00111000            00111001          00111010           00111011
00011100            00011101          00011110           00011111
00101100            00101101          00101110           00101111
00111100            00111101          00111110           00111111

Okay. I'm beginning to feel a little weird. Typing lots of zeros and ones does strange things to the inside of your head. Anyway, I'm pretty sure this happened when I wrote it out the first time too. What was freakier was when I started translating those dates into numbers.

(oh, and BTW Blogger doesn't do columns. So if my formatting starts getting weird you'll at least know what's going on.)

2000                    2001                    2010                    2011

  36                        37                        38                        39
  68                        69                        70                        71
100                      101                      102                      103
  40                        41                        42                        43
  72                        73                        74                        75
104                      105                      106                      107
  44                        45                        46                        47
  76                        77                        78                        79
108                      109                      110                      111

For all my non-numerical friends or those who are starting to think I should start on the medication, hang in there.

The numbers for a year don't line up. But the same date over the course of the years escalates the number. I was honestly weirded out by now.

Post Eurostar, I had not done any more of this work. After all, it's all translated from Binary. Tempted to thread it into an ASCII chart though.
(What the heck, I'll do it anyway.)

Understanding ASCII
ASCII is a little easier for people to understand I think. Most people have encountered ASCII art at some stage. After all, the little emoticons we create every day - :) :( XD :P - are all ASCII art.


If you are having difficulty seeing the image, move your head back further from the screen. Make sure you come back to see where this goes, because I don't know what the ASCII-filter will do.

Anyway. ASCII is the code that computers use to generate letters and characters. They can only comprehend binary, so what happens is that a number is attached to each character typed and the computer can respond to that number.

For example, the number 65 is a capital A.

You know what? I can't explain it that well. I'll just assume that if you're still reading, then you understand what I'm babbling on about. If not, then accept that ASCII is a code. Like Binary. This number = this character.

Let's do this.

2000                    2001                    2010                    2011

$                          %                        &                         '
D                         E                         F                          G
d                          e                         f                            g
(                           )                         *                           +
H                         I                          J                           K
h                          i                           j                            k
,                           -                          .                            /
L                         M                         N                         O 
l                           m                         n                           o

Formatting doesn't work. Woop.

Well, that was anticlimatic.

I mean, what meaning can you pull from that?
I've got HIME (Japanese for princess)
and LIME.

There's our century, folks.

PRINCESS LIME.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a mascot for a drink of lemon lime and bitters. Princess Lime and Prince lemon have an argument that gets bitter? I am an hilarious genius.

    ReplyDelete

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