OT-GG binary

[Colin McGregor]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 11:56 AM, teddy mills <teddymills-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/55/Personal_Coat_of_Arms_of_Governor_General_of_Canada_David_Lloyd_Johnston.jpg.jpg
>
> any ideas?

First a little bit of background for those on this list who don't live
in Canada or are new to Canada... The Governor General acts as the
Queen's representative in Canada, a very largely ceremonial job. No
bill can become law without the signature of the Queen or Governor
General, but the Governor General is required to sign any bill passed
by Parliament.

On October 1st David Lloyd Johnson became the new Governor General,
replacing Michaëlle Jean (who served as Governor General for 5 years).
As with tradition the new Governor General had a new coat of arms
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms) made for him (see the link above
for an image of his coat of arms). Across the bottom of the coat of
arms are the digits:

110010111001001010100100111010011

Question is, what does the above mean, if anything? My first impulse
was to chop the above into 8 digit blocks ... problem, there are 33
digits so the above can not be evenly broken into 8 digit blocks. If
we assume the above is 4 x  8 digit blocks followed by a 1 we have:

CB 92 A4 E9 1

In ASCII that is E'$e1, which is meaningless to me. For the old school
IBM mainframe programmers the above is also meaningless in EBCDIC
(some of the above codes point to non-existent/undefined codes).
Taking the flip side, assuming a 1 followed by 4 x 8 digit blocks we
have:

1 4B 25 49 D3

In ASCII that is 1K%1O, which is also meaningless to me. The above is
also meaningless in EBSDIC. As a decimal (base 10 number) the above is
6830770643 a number that doesn't have any special significance that I
am aware of.

>From 1943 to 1945 Canadian nickels had a Morse code message ("We Win
When We Work Willingly") around the edge of every nickel
(coincollecting.a-z-series.com/canada-victory-nickel-of-1943-1945-and-its-story)
. So, is the above Morse? Well, Morse is a binary code, but one that
doesn't have fixed length characters, so the above could be broken
down MANY ways, more than I am willing to spend the time to work
through...

So, the digits may have been chosen because they "look good"... Or, as
Mr. Johnson is a former University of Waterloo President (a university
with a first rate computer science department) there may be a well
hidden meaning in the digits. All I can say after a fairly quick look
is that there is no obvious meaning to the digits chosen...


Colin McGregor
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