Off Topic: Governor General's Coat of Arms has a binary stream [was: OT-GG binary]

[Maureen Thornton]

Want the answer from the "horses mouth!"?
Looking at the explanation of the symbolism on the website, there is the
statement “The wavy band inscribed with zeros and ones represents a flow
of information, digital communication and modern media.”

We are surprised by the speculations that are appearing about the
significance of the set of digits. However, there is nothing significant
about the construction of the digits except to say that the symmetry of
digits presents a better appearance.
 
Sincerely Yours, 
Darrel E. Kennedy 
Assiniboine Herald / Héraut Assiniboine
The Canadian Heraldic Authority / L'Autorité héraldique du Canada
Rideau Hall 
1 Sussex Drive / 1, promenade Sussex 
Ottawa, ON. / Ottawa (Ontario). K1A 0A1 
 
Phone: (613) 998-5481 / (800) 465-6890 
Fax: (613) 990-5818 
Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada
www.gg.ca  (showing our grants of arms at 
http://archive.gg.ca/heraldry/pub-reg/main.asp?lang=e 
Email after 15 Sep 2010: darrel.kennedy-2fiWaKc/skw at public.gmane.org 

Well there you is!



On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 13:27 -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 10:23:52AM +0000, Peter wrote:
> > Well the Romans used biquinal abacii. And they were not new when they started
> > using them apparently. Biquinal means base-2-and-base-5 which is actually
> > clever, you only have one free hand to check things off on fingers while holding
> > an abacus in the other. Of course 2 came from having 2 hands in total (used 1 at
> > a time). Later 2*5 became our current base 10. Apparently biquinal is tightly
> > connected to Roman numbers, the numbers from 1 to 10 clearly reflect this,
> > including the built-in shorthand notation (IIX = 8 instead of VIII etc).
> 
> I have never seen IIX although it has apparently been seen in rare cases.
> It is shorter, but not by much.
> 
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus
> > 
> > According to this calculus may have meant 'playing with pebbles' to someone way
> > back then...
> 


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