I’m waiting for someone to do it for the rest of us. Provided that the sequence is not random noise but supposed to contain some structured information.
Then again, the avoidance of digital noise is what tube amplifiers are all about these days, are they not?
Does this mean she’s a digital music fan? I thought with the power amp tubes, she’d be an analog audiophile.
Or it could just mean it’s all noise to Dietzel…..
so far I’ve tried binary, trinary, octal, hexadecimal with no results that make sense. Even checked to see if the letters they converted into was a cipher and did not find anything. Of course I still have not checked for internal break downs into nibbles, bytes, etc. But that is probably going too far.
Oh, trust me, that ship left dock some time ago. What has been done thus far in deciphering something which is likely meaningless in the first place, is already “going too far.”
You’re off boy roughly 80 digits.
The 298 digits long binary line translates to anywhere between 0 and 5,0925899408362152156711142210234e+89. So it’s a -really- big number.
Try breaking it down into 4-digit expressions of binary. That would give you a string of numbers that can be converted into hexadecimal (base 16 numbering system, numbers from 0-9 with letters A-F). Hexidecimal is considered to be “shorthand for binary” & is what the computer uses to translate a programmer’s language into hexidecimal, then into binary. Hexidecimal is also referred to as Machine Code, because all computers use it to feed the data in for processing.
no, no, no…. first you need to transcribe that into machine code, and then take it to the library, where they have the mayan codec…
.
.
.
.
.
and then play that through your PC…
.
.
.
.
.
.. and you will hear pablo chuckling to himself…. 😀 😀
Try converting the binary into hexadecimal first.
The reason for this is that binary/hexadecimal conversion (each 4 digits of binary = 1 digit of hexadecimal) is literally *hardwired* into every computer processor. In turn, programmers refer to hexadecimal as “shorthand for binary” which is what Machine Code actually is.
Not the slowest digital computer I ever saw in fiction. I think that goes to the demon-based computer in Lyndon Hardy’s Riddle of the Seven Realms. Each operation took many seconds to over a minute.
Stephan is right. Every 4 digits of binary = 1 digit of hexadecimal & is referred to as a “nibble.” It takes 2 nibbles to make 1 byte (Get it? 2 nibbles = 1 full byte/bite). It takes 1 byte to translate into 1 character of ASCII code.
Great work on the poses and expressions in this one, Paul, especially Dietzal, who endures so much but at least gets a pizza lady or two to cuddle him. 🙂
I guess it is noise to Dietzel. Dietzel can understand some language(apparently enough to understand the automated pizza-ordering-service 😆 ), but if Monica gets really audio-techy, he’ll hear…..noise, white noise to be precise…
A tube is what was used before transistors. Glass container with electric components inside to amplify or alter the signal passing through them. Just big, use a lot of energy, and burn our a lot faster than transistors. lol.
Good article. I knew little about tubes before this. I know a great deal more now. Even what a magic eye is and how they worked. They are also an excellent example of incremental design and the ingenuity of people. Integrated circuit devices even more so. The 256 bit digital storage tube I ran across in the process was amazing.
I am *just* old enough to remember the tube-testing consoles that used to be in grocery stores, hardware stores, drugstores and the like. If something was wrong with your TV, radio or “hi fi set,” you pulled the tubes, took them to the store and stuck them into the appropriate sockets on the console. If the console’s “OK” lamp lit, you knew that tube wasn’t bad and tested the next one. There was a shelf full of tubes in boxes, same as with buying lightbulbs today.
My mom managed a Radio Shack back in the early 70s, and I would take the discarded tubes by the testing machine, carefully break all the glass off, plug ’em in, and hit TEST.
Poof! 😀
I used to catch Holy Heck. Even though there was no line-of-sight, the smell was unmistakable.
Transistors largely replaced Vacuum tubes for low power applications, because the tubes required a hot, glowing filament (think cool orange light bulb) to work.
For high power and specialty applications, like Radar, Microwaves, and X-Rays, tubes are still the best way to go due to the heat involved. Even communications satellites use Traveling Wave Tubes for their signals because they’re small. efficient, and durable.
And, of course, there’s the Good Old Television Tube (before flat screens), the Cathode Ray Tube!
Even Fluorescent lamps count as a type of Vacuum Tube because they use the electrons released by the filament to make the phosphors glow. And yes, the lamps are sensitive to electronic emissions — Fluorescent lamps will glow by themselves near strong electrical or radio activity, such as in or near radio transmitters and antennae!
I can’t say I care one way or another about the binary code’s lack of meaning. It’s Monica’s pose and expression in panel 3 that I love. She looks so happy and adorable!
I knew someone would do all that work for me. Zachanriha gets the brass ring for trying as many options as he did, the lack of quinary and duodecimal notwithstanding. If there’s a hidden joke in there, I’m missing it.
Hmm…
My grandfather worked for RCA- when he moved out of his house a few years ago, I took boxes and boxes of tubes he had, and all kinds of old test equipment. But I don’t have anything that uses tubes. I bet they were for his old 1932 standup AM radio. But my uncle took that…
Oh, I take that back. I have an oscilloscope he built himself in the late 40’s, using a military surplus radar screen off a B-52… It has a huge tube power supply. Still works great, but he never labled the dials, so I have a hell of a time using it! Takes like 5min to warm up and you could fry bacon over the power supply!
I agree sound is noticably different with tube amps.
I once sold off a whole 105MM howitzer box full of old-but-still-functional tubes left by my father, and realized a good return from them, too–several hundred bucks, more than enough to pay the income tax on his estate that year . . . .
Don’t sell them as a grab bag, though. Group them by number, and you get a better return. If you got any of the real oldies like 42s and 45s, you can see some nice money.
And then what tests bad, you sell as a grab bag for somebody to make a avant-garde art installation.
heh i personally think she is saying ‘this will amuse and entertain the readers of this comic in their discussions trying to work out the meaning of random 0 and 1’
🙂
Speaking of getting the mail, when are we going to see a wedding invitation to Owen and Lakshmi’s wedding? Those two just dropped off the surface of the earth!
>That number is binary for 4,893,317. Which doesn’t >make much sense either. Unless I misstranscribed?
-stjason
“Digital signals and frequency correction in a digital wireless system
United States Patent 4893317”
I get the feeling from the look in the last panel, Monica is basicly say … “Can You Hear Me Now?”
Like how the old digital data storage worked, where are the start bits and stop bits?
and I like to know where number 4,893,317 comes from – if you take the sequence as one number it equals about 2.97065487540229e+89 (a decimal number with 90 digits)
when i tried to convert it myself, i figured it out. most binary to decimal converters only take the first 16 bits or so because the algorithm they use for conversion can only handle that much. you would have to dig really deep to find a decent one.
I have a decent ear (despite all too many Very Loud small venue rock nights), and about the only place that tubes sound any better than good solid-state designs to me is in performance amps. (They might sound better to me in home stereo, except that i can’t imagine driving anything in the home hard enough to reach the part of the curve where it actually makes a difference.)
In general (as with taste tests of USAian beers), in well-designed double-blind testing, even the people who claim to have the best ears generally cannot consistently identify one over the other.
But, when they can “see the labels”, they pretty consistently choose the one with the most intense propaganda in its favour.
This is why Budweiser and Monster Cable are so popular…
(USA brewers spend hundreds of millions making sure that all USAian beers taste pretty much the same – like love in a canoe – and then spend billions trying to convince the public that theirs is better.)
Without getting into the partisan rhetoric employed by either side, there is one obvious thing affecting the sound in tube amps that’s usually absent in solid state equipment: output transformers. Regardless of the care taken in design and construction, a transformer’s distinguishing characteristic is a tendency to resist changes in current, thus ’rounding off’ waves… some solid state equipment also has output transformers, and the sound is similar, if not quite identical. Close, though.
Actually, a lot of the best amp designs (that i’ve seen) don’t use amps.
What gives tube amps that “warm sound” is the introduction of harmonics when the amp is driven hard.
Since tubes go into saturation/cutoff gradually, they produce both even and odd harmonics. Solid state devices have a very sharp characteristic curve in those regions, and produce almost exclusively odd harmonics, which give a harsh edge to the sound.
Ooh, good point! You can see I don’t get out in the fresh air often 🙂 …well, and I’m tired. But when not driven hard, the transformer presence or absence seems to make the most difference to my ear when we’re a/b testing.
Main problem with those types of designs is that you can blow a final awful easily if you get too low an impedance (or a spike, sometimes)…
I had a really good amp; one day i accidentally dropped the tone arm and the spike that caused blew a final. (This was about 1973.) I was able to buy a new final and install it myself – the transistor cost about $10 at 1973 prices.
As soon as i switched it on … it blew again.
So i bought another new final … and a $2 driver transistor, too.
I’m inclined to agree with you. Given the irregular and inconsistent line count, that speech balloon has more in common with Kryptos than with binary code. I also had a crack at it in an “ahrteest”-ic fashion, but with inconclusive results.
Second thing I did. A grid is out of the question because of the inconsistent number of characters per line. I was a bit sloppy. How far would away would you like to stand?
Did anyone check if this was the string of binary used in Futurama Bender’s Big Score for time travel? She is using items made specifically between like 1991 and 1993 or so.
I’d type that into a binary converter if I weren’t so tired. 😛
Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will be bored and or bloody-minded enough to want to do it…. just hope they’re kind enough to share.
I’m glad the tubes are alright. I’d hate to think of the feud started over her losing those.
I’m waiting for someone to do it for the rest of us. Provided that the sequence is not random noise but supposed to contain some structured information.
Then again, the avoidance of digital noise is what tube amplifiers are all about these days, are they not?
Does this mean she’s a digital music fan? I thought with the power amp tubes, she’d be an analog audiophile.
Or it could just mean it’s all noise to Dietzel…..
I agree. A digital happy dance over analog components seems a bit off…
It’s gobbledygook. Here’s what I wrote down, and the decoding of it:
010010101010101010000101
0111010010110011010101110
1010101111010101101101000
1110110101111101010110101
0101101010101100110110100
101101011010110101010101
0101101110101011010101011
0110101010111011110011010
1100010101101001100101101
0111101010101101001101010
1111010010011101000011001
1011001010111010110101001
Jª…t³WUêÚ;_V«U›KZÕUºµ[UÞk¦ZõZjô Ù]j
You prolly need to feed it into an A to D converter to see what it sounds like.
I would have thought that would have needed a D to A converter.
Arrrghh!
ADD converter?
No – Digital to Analog… *sigh*
I would’ve thought more of a DD to A converter.
Sacrilege!
That’s because you are trying to decode binary into ASCII. Which really doesn’t make much sense unless you are a computer.
That number is binary for 4,893,317. Which doesn’t make much sense either. Unless I misstranscribed?
Could she be making fun of digital while listening to analogue sounds? Kinda like la-la-la-la-la taunting.
so far I’ve tried binary, trinary, octal, hexadecimal with no results that make sense. Even checked to see if the letters they converted into was a cipher and did not find anything. Of course I still have not checked for internal break downs into nibbles, bytes, etc. But that is probably going too far.
Oh, trust me, that ship left dock some time ago. What has been done thus far in deciphering something which is likely meaningless in the first place, is already “going too far.”
how about inverted? or at 90 degrees, or right to left, that’d mean 15 untried options for each encoding method.
You’re off boy roughly 80 digits.
The 298 digits long binary line translates to anywhere between 0 and 5,0925899408362152156711142210234e+89. So it’s a -really- big number.
Looks to me like a patent number. What’s the patent number on those tubes?
Try breaking it down into 4-digit expressions of binary. That would give you a string of numbers that can be converted into hexadecimal (base 16 numbering system, numbers from 0-9 with letters A-F). Hexidecimal is considered to be “shorthand for binary” & is what the computer uses to translate a programmer’s language into hexidecimal, then into binary. Hexidecimal is also referred to as Machine Code, because all computers use it to feed the data in for processing.
Roughly Translated: Jª…t³WUêÚ;_V«U›KZÕUºµ[UÞk¦ZõZjô Ù]j01
Though if you drop the first two instead it could be 01*ªÒÍ]W«hí}ZVm-kUVêÕmWy¬V™kÕi«Òt3eu©
But what if it’s using the 16 bit per character standard?
no, no, no…. first you need to transcribe that into machine code, and then take it to the library, where they have the mayan codec…
.
.
.
.
.
and then play that through your PC…
.
.
.
.
.
.. and you will hear pablo chuckling to himself…. 😀 😀
Try converting the binary into hexadecimal first.
The reason for this is that binary/hexadecimal conversion (each 4 digits of binary = 1 digit of hexadecimal) is literally *hardwired* into every computer processor. In turn, programmers refer to hexadecimal as “shorthand for binary” which is what Machine Code actually is.
Last time i saw tubes and digital data in the same context was crypto gear designed in 1952.
Hey! Tubes are all about digital data. Just not much of it. One tube switched on, one tube switched off..
Not the slowest digital computer I ever saw in fiction. I think that goes to the demon-based computer in Lyndon Hardy’s Riddle of the Seven Realms. Each operation took many seconds to over a minute.
On the other end of the spectrum is the quantum computer which and give results even before anything is input.
Haven’t seen Dietzel for a while.
No one notices he’s a mutant super dog?
I swear, Dietzel should have thrown a pie at Monica yesterday. Particularly at 1:59
there are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
I tried to post the binary translation to that, but it was apparently too long.
Just take the binary saying one letter at a time …
01010100 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 00110001 00110000 00100000 01110100 01111001 01110000 01100101 01110011 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00101110 00001101 00001010 01010100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101111 01110011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01101111 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 10010010 01110100 00101110 00001101 00001010
Thanks. You’re obviously one of the former types.
Ha! Do they know the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything? (101010)
Would that be – 43 ?
All these higher maths are hurting my brain.
One…two…many.
Lots!
PratchettPratchettPratchettPratchettPratchettPratchett
42, Douglas Adams
I do not have the authority to claim ‘ultimate’, but the answer to the meaning of life is “it was an accident.”
If you’re still talking Douglas Adams, the meaning of life was “Out of order. Sorry for the inconvienence.”
Stephan is right. Every 4 digits of binary = 1 digit of hexadecimal & is referred to as a “nibble.” It takes 2 nibbles to make 1 byte (Get it? 2 nibbles = 1 full byte/bite). It takes 1 byte to translate into 1 character of ASCII code.
Why is she “flapping” her ears?
I think her hands are acting like dishes or weird ear antennae…either that or she’s signaling you…
It’s probably a gesture indicating listening to something. Probably waxing on about how great the sound will be.
What, I’m the only one who recognizes the Caramelldansen dance here? 😉
Now that is what a true GEEKGASM looks like.
Great work on the poses and expressions in this one, Paul, especially Dietzal, who endures so much but at least gets a pizza lady or two to cuddle him. 🙂
That’s awfully digital for an analog tube fan.
I guess it is noise to Dietzel. Dietzel can understand some language(apparently enough to understand the automated pizza-ordering-service 😆 ), but if Monica gets really audio-techy, he’ll hear…..noise, white noise to be precise…
i’ll ask
what the heck is a ‘tube’?
It’s a device, formerly sold even at drugstores, for making me feel incredibly old when questions like that are asked.
A tube is what was used before transistors. Glass container with electric components inside to amplify or alter the signal passing through them. Just big, use a lot of energy, and burn our a lot faster than transistors. lol.
And still used in *place* of transisters by lots of musicians. (Me, I use either or both, depending on the gig.)
If you are British, substitute the word “valve”.
I say, old man, you beat me to it!
Which is one reason the schematic diagram label for tubes is “V”.
(Another is that transformers already had “T” nailed down. The label for transistors, BTW, is “Q”…)
ah i’ve heard of a valve 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube
Good article. I knew little about tubes before this. I know a great deal more now. Even what a magic eye is and how they worked. They are also an excellent example of incremental design and the ingenuity of people. Integrated circuit devices even more so. The 256 bit digital storage tube I ran across in the process was amazing.
I am *just* old enough to remember the tube-testing consoles that used to be in grocery stores, hardware stores, drugstores and the like. If something was wrong with your TV, radio or “hi fi set,” you pulled the tubes, took them to the store and stuck them into the appropriate sockets on the console. If the console’s “OK” lamp lit, you knew that tube wasn’t bad and tested the next one. There was a shelf full of tubes in boxes, same as with buying lightbulbs today.
I loved playing with those as a kid…
My mom managed a Radio Shack back in the early 70s, and I would take the discarded tubes by the testing machine, carefully break all the glass off, plug ’em in, and hit TEST.
Poof! 😀
I used to catch Holy Heck. Even though there was no line-of-sight, the smell was unmistakable.
I remember them too. And the Drug Store sold slide rules too.
HEY! Don’t Diss the Slide Rule!
I still have handy, near the computer, at all times.
At least one Long and one Circular.
Transistors largely replaced Vacuum tubes for low power applications, because the tubes required a hot, glowing filament (think cool orange light bulb) to work.
For high power and specialty applications, like Radar, Microwaves, and X-Rays, tubes are still the best way to go due to the heat involved. Even communications satellites use Traveling Wave Tubes for their signals because they’re small. efficient, and durable.
And, of course, there’s the Good Old Television Tube (before flat screens), the Cathode Ray Tube!
Even Fluorescent lamps count as a type of Vacuum Tube because they use the electrons released by the filament to make the phosphors glow. And yes, the lamps are sensitive to electronic emissions — Fluorescent lamps will glow by themselves near strong electrical or radio activity, such as in or near radio transmitters and antennae!
Tubes are going to be around a long time.
A “Tube” is a member of the iconic orange-clad rock band of Michael Beck’s roller disco fantasy in “Xanadu”…
I think I could find out what she said.
Pure bibble. It doesn’t translate into anything, forwards or backwards, as far as I can see.
I can’t say I care one way or another about the binary code’s lack of meaning. It’s Monica’s pose and expression in panel 3 that I love. She looks so happy and adorable!
Is it live, or is it Memorex?
Neither! It’s Monica!
I knew someone would do all that work for me. Zachanriha gets the brass ring for trying as many options as he did, the lack of quinary and duodecimal notwithstanding. If there’s a hidden joke in there, I’m missing it.
Argh, that’s “Zachariha” 😐
That’s OK. You used the Portuguese spelling. 🙂
Yes, I see it as simply a way to convey that she is going on and on in the ultimake in geek-speek. To many humans it would sound like that as well.
Here, have a cookie.
You got the prize! The “You’re all speaking binary’ gag has been used in a more literary sense in a former comic.
Dietzel does not talk, so ,the esteemed writer used “visuals” to convey what Dietzel thinks…
As opposed to the more time honored bla bla bla
If you have not checked my answer above, has anyone heard of googlewhack??
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=googlewhack
If pgn674 copied it right, that is what is is!! 🙂
Now we just need Phix or Nudge to run it through the Dewey-Decimal system (dives behind cover).
Hmm…
My grandfather worked for RCA- when he moved out of his house a few years ago, I took boxes and boxes of tubes he had, and all kinds of old test equipment. But I don’t have anything that uses tubes. I bet they were for his old 1932 standup AM radio. But my uncle took that…
Oh, I take that back. I have an oscilloscope he built himself in the late 40’s, using a military surplus radar screen off a B-52… It has a huge tube power supply. Still works great, but he never labled the dials, so I have a hell of a time using it! Takes like 5min to warm up and you could fry bacon over the power supply!
I agree sound is noticably different with tube amps.
Answer, if you got a working tube tester: eBay.
I once sold off a whole 105MM howitzer box full of old-but-still-functional tubes left by my father, and realized a good return from them, too–several hundred bucks, more than enough to pay the income tax on his estate that year . . . .
Don’t sell them as a grab bag, though. Group them by number, and you get a better return. If you got any of the real oldies like 42s and 45s, you can see some nice money.
And then what tests bad, you sell as a grab bag for somebody to make a avant-garde art installation.
Heart Dietzel. 🙂
Okay Paul, Everyone has taken a ‘crack’ at it Now, What is Monica saying???????
heh i personally think she is saying ‘this will amuse and entertain the readers of this comic in their discussions trying to work out the meaning of random 0 and 1’
🙂
She could be singing “She’s a beauty, she’s one in a million girls…..” in digital.
Maybe Lady Googlicious here is belting out the classics
We have the time, we have the power
This could be our finest hour
… But …
All we hear is radio gaga, radio goo goo
http://www.nerdnirvana.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/got-my-tube.jpg
nice. probably nailed it. XD
That website doesn’t exist anymore. For those of us coming along years later…
What?
Hotlinking to the image is disabled.
http://www.nerdnirvana.org/2011/02/23/got-my-tube/
hotlinking possible with Opera!! 😀
I don’t particularly care what she’s saying in panel 3, she just looks really good in that pose…
Point…
A cute girl in shorts having a nerdgasm–its enough to make any nerd have his own. (And Panel 4 is pretty good too.)
Speaking of getting the mail, when are we going to see a wedding invitation to Owen and Lakshmi’s wedding? Those two just dropped off the surface of the earth!
>That number is binary for 4,893,317. Which doesn’t >make much sense either. Unless I misstranscribed?
-stjason
“Digital signals and frequency correction in a digital wireless system
United States Patent 4893317”
except that is only the first line. we need the whole number…
I get the feeling from the look in the last panel, Monica is basicly say … “Can You Hear Me Now?”
Like how the old digital data storage worked, where are the start bits and stop bits?
and I like to know where number 4,893,317 comes from – if you take the sequence as one number it equals about 2.97065487540229e+89 (a decimal number with 90 digits)
when i tried to convert it myself, i figured it out. most binary to decimal converters only take the first 16 bits or so because the algorithm they use for conversion can only handle that much. you would have to dig really deep to find a decent one.
I have a decent ear (despite all too many Very Loud small venue rock nights), and about the only place that tubes sound any better than good solid-state designs to me is in performance amps. (They might sound better to me in home stereo, except that i can’t imagine driving anything in the home hard enough to reach the part of the curve where it actually makes a difference.)
In general (as with taste tests of USAian beers), in well-designed double-blind testing, even the people who claim to have the best ears generally cannot consistently identify one over the other.
But, when they can “see the labels”, they pretty consistently choose the one with the most intense propaganda in its favour.
This is why Budweiser and Monster Cable are so popular…
(USA brewers spend hundreds of millions making sure that all USAian beers taste pretty much the same – like love in a canoe – and then spend billions trying to convince the public that theirs is better.)
Without getting into the partisan rhetoric employed by either side, there is one obvious thing affecting the sound in tube amps that’s usually absent in solid state equipment: output transformers. Regardless of the care taken in design and construction, a transformer’s distinguishing characteristic is a tendency to resist changes in current, thus ’rounding off’ waves… some solid state equipment also has output transformers, and the sound is similar, if not quite identical. Close, though.
Actually, a lot of the best amp designs (that i’ve seen) don’t use amps.
What gives tube amps that “warm sound” is the introduction of harmonics when the amp is driven hard.
Since tubes go into saturation/cutoff gradually, they produce both even and odd harmonics. Solid state devices have a very sharp characteristic curve in those regions, and produce almost exclusively odd harmonics, which give a harsh edge to the sound.
Ooh, good point! You can see I don’t get out in the fresh air often 🙂 …well, and I’m tired. But when not driven hard, the transformer presence or absence seems to make the most difference to my ear when we’re a/b testing.
I meant “don’t use transformers”.
Main problem with those types of designs is that you can blow a final awful easily if you get too low an impedance (or a spike, sometimes)…
I had a really good amp; one day i accidentally dropped the tone arm and the spike that caused blew a final. (This was about 1973.) I was able to buy a new final and install it myself – the transistor cost about $10 at 1973 prices.
As soon as i switched it on … it blew again.
So i bought another new final … and a $2 driver transistor, too.
I don’t know much about tubes or beer, but I have to make one small arguement…
…microbreweries.
Where is her man right now and WHY O WHY is he not all over her for the cute’n’sexy right this minute?!
I think he knows not to get between her and her hifi…. :p
Nah, don’t bother translating.. it’s basically saying “Here is something to keep You geeks busy till the new comic” in binary 😆
It’s binary bubble-wrap.
on second thought, seeing the sudden frenzy to translate the string: It’s catnip for geeks.
He just wanted to see how obsessed people would get with it. 😉
Whoops. new earworm now that I’ve finally kicked Queen out:
Calm down, it’s only ones and zeros
Calm down, it’s only bits and bytes
Calm down. And speak to me in English …
http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/k/kathy_mar/calm_down.html
OH GOD! My sister is playing ” John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and now thats all I can imagine Mon listening to in the last panel.
http://www.scoutsongs.com/lyrics/johnjacob.html
I have to agree with whoever said that Dietzel’s expressions in this strip are perfect…
I think Mon is doing the robot dance and singing her own dance beat.
the comment counter was ‘101’ just now!
I tried to copy down the binary but I went cross eyed >.>
I’m inclined to agree with you. Given the irregular and inconsistent line count, that speech balloon has more in common with Kryptos than with binary code. I also had a crack at it in an “ahrteest”-ic fashion, but with inconclusive results.
How about if you put it on a grid and fill in only places with a 1. Then hold out at some distance until you see an image of something.
Second thing I did. A grid is out of the question because of the inconsistent number of characters per line. I was a bit sloppy. How far would away would you like to stand?
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l273/karlmonster/nope2.jpg
73 74 75 70 69 64 20 4a c3 82 c2 aa c3 a2 ef bf bd c2 a6 74 c3 82 c2 b3 57 55 c3 83 c2 aa c3 83 ef bf bd 3b 5f 56 c3 82 c2 ab 55 c3 a2 ef bf bd c2 ba 4b 5a c3 83 ef bf bd 55 c3 82 c2 ba c3 82 c2 b5 5b 55 c3 83 ef bf bd 6b 15 c3 82 c2 a6 5a c3 83 c2 b5 5a 6a c3 83 c2 b4 20 c3 83 ef bf bd 5d 6a 20 49 20 73 70 65 6e 74 20 61 20 6c 6f 6e 67 20 74 69 6d 65 20 74 79 70 69 6e 67 20 79 6f 75 20 69 6e 20 61 6e 64 20 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 74 68 65 20 6e 6f 6e 73 65 6e 73 65 20 49 20 67 65 74 20 62 61 63 6b 2c 20 77 65 20 67 69 76 65 20 75 70 20 50 61 75 6c 20 63 6f 75 6c 64 20 79 6f 75 20 70 6c 65 61 73 65 20 6a 75 73 74 20 74 65 6c 6c 20 75 73 20 77 68 61 74 20 69 74 27 73 20 73 75 70 70 6f 73 65 64 20 74 6f 20 6d 65 61 6e (this is my answer to this in hex)
Nobody remembers “blah blah blah bowl blah blah food, blah blah blah sleep, blah”?
Panel 2 onward is Dietzel’s perception. Binary is another language. It’s meant to be meaningless.
Aha! So that’s what us silly humans sound like to dogs! LOL!
Did anyone check if this was the string of binary used in Futurama Bender’s Big Score for time travel? She is using items made specifically between like 1991 and 1993 or so.
So she listens in analog but speaks in digital?
Did anyone, after all these years think of it as a yodel?