99: Binary Heart

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Binary Heart
i love you
Title text: i love you

Explanation

A valentine heart in red is shown on a black background. The medium is a 21 across by 23 down array of zeros and ones.

The digits themselves are an ASCII bit stream reading:

iloveyOuilOveyouiloveyOuilOveyOuiloveyouilOveyouilOveyOuilOv

There are three trailing bits that are the start of an "e".

The capitalization of the "O"s seems too short to carry additional message. There are only 15.

Transcript

[All the numbers are black except for a heart-shaped red section in the middle.]
011010010110110001101
111011101100110010101
111001010011110111010
101101001011011000100
111101110110011001010
111100101101111011101
010110100101101100011
011110111011001100101
011110010100111101110
101011010010110110001
001111011101100110010
101111001010011110111
010101101001011011000
110111101110110011001
010111100101101111011
101010110100101101100
010011110111011001100
101011110010110111101
110101011010010110110
001001111011101100110
010101111001010011110
111010101101001011011
000100111101110110011

Note: Two lines are missing from the original transcript. They are included here, as they are needed to decode the embedded text properly.


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Discussion

The l's and 0's in the binary translation make the code: 10101010011010010, which if you remove either the first or the last digit and convert to text make either, ªi OR TÒ which isn't very helpful. -- ‎LostFire (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

10101010011010010 in hexadecimal is 154D2 which could mean "I'm sad too". Noit (talk) 00:34, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I wondered why he didn't include space characters, but then I realized that ASCII 32 makes for too much white space (only one bit is set) which might spoil the random appearance of the background. Also, shouldn't there be a Doctor Who reference in there somewhere? Just saying... 108.162.219.58 18:28, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

This may be part of the reason for 'O' as well; 'o' only has 2 unset bits. ('O' is '01001111', 'o' is '01101111'). 199.27.128.181 23:55, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Maybe the mixture of o's and O's is only there so that the sequence of bits doesn't contain a single repeating sequence. 108.162.216.84 20:47, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

On the 'o's and 'O's - Converting 011001110010111 from binary to decimal gives 13207. Googling that number only gives hits about Syracuse. Does anyone know if there's a connection there? 141.101.89.205 01:04, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

This Binary-to-Ascii converter or Binary to Text tool can be used to decode the sequence to a string. --Pudder (talk) 12:23, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Some of the o's in love are capitalized and some of the o's in you are capitalized but no other letter in any other position has mixed capitalization. If you take a lower case o to be a 0 and a capital o to be a 1, that gives you the string of binary digits: 011001110010111. Unfortunately that is 15 bits, not 16 so not quite enough for two letters, but apparently the first 8 bits are "g". If we append a 0 to the last 7 bits, it becomes "g.", if we use a 1 it becomes "g/". Neither seems likely to be anything that i can tell. in hex, those 15 digits become 0x3397. Appending a 0 it's 0x672E and appending a 1 it's 0x672F. Negating the bits (in case 1's and 0's were reversed) didn't seem to help either unfortunately. I think there is more to the o and O's but not sure what it is :P Atrix256 (talk) 02:30, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

It could be the start of 'g*d'... 141.101.76.16 16:46, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
Since letters in ASCII only really use the last 5 bits, I tried splitting that into 3 sections of 5 bits then prefixing each section with '010' or '011' leads to either L\W or l|w. Doing the same with the negated version results in 'SCH' or 'sch'. Doesn't really seem like much to me, but it tickles the "potentially meaningful" spot in my brain... maybe someone else sees something? SliceThePi (talk) 08:39, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

The heart pattern isn't symmetric, could the masked-out bits make a message? 141.101.64.29 17:11, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

The binary of the heart only is 11111010010111111011110100111011001101110110011001111001010011110111011010010110

11001110111011001100111001010011110011010010110110111011001001011011010010011100101. I tried entering it into the converter linked to above, and got "�_�;7fyOv����S�-�%���". Z (talk) 21:58, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Somehow despite the comments above, I found this one sweet that Randall drew this. i<3u.Boeing-787lover 07:36, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

using the following tools for binary translation https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/number/binary-to-ascii.html and https://dnschecker.org/binary-to-text-translator.php after deleting the spaces between the numbers, it is a repeating pattern of "I love you" with some o's capital and some not