The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

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Binary Cover Art
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xandy.gif When Coldplay released their latest album with the cover at left, fans were apparently really curious about what the image meant. So they did some voodoo and discovered that the image is a graphical representation of a code invented in the 19th Century by Frenchman Emile Baudot. I wonder if Coldplay knew this. (Via The Modern Age.)

3 comments

Am feeling somewhat dumb b/c I can’t see the code in there. The linked article says X is represented by 10111, but I don’t see any pattern in there that could be 10111… where is it?

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Dan says…

I was confused for a few minutes as well. Each bit is represented by two vertically joined blocks and each 5-bit word is written vertically. So the 10111 is represented by the left-most vertical line of blocks. 10101 is the right-most.

The second-to-last line is wrong according to the article, which leads me to wonder: what if this interpretation is wrong, and simply shows how facile people are with picking out codes in any old thing. I don’t think that is actually the case, but wouldn’t it be funny if it were?

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According to the code table I got, it’s

10111 -> X

11011 -> figure shift

00011 -> (fig) 9

10101 -> Y

Some keyboards are different especially European keyboards in terms of upon which keys the @#$(%)& symbols are placed. So maybe on the keyboard they were using, or the keyboard used to generate their code table, the ‘&’ is on the ‘9’ key.

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