01000 00001 10000 10000 11001 00010 01001 01110 00001 10010 11001 00100 00001 11001

For those of you who don't read binary, today's title translates as "Happy Binary Day." October 10, 2010--10/10/10--is a day on which to celebrate the ingenuity of those who recognized the power of ones and zeroes. Some benighted folks (including, sadly, someone who once worked for us as a math tutor) think we will not see another such day for a thousand years; we hasten to point out that the next binary day will be in a mere one hundred years--or, for that matter, tomorrow (10/11/10).

The concept behind binary language is that limitless amounts of information can be conveyed through the simplest of codes. If you think about it, this makes sense. Pretty much anything that we do boils down to a series of yes/no decisions: Get up? YES/No. Go to the bathroom? YES/No. Lift toilet seat? Yes/NO. Whoops! Coding error.

Of course, binary also makes for a simple (if lengthy) alphabetic encryption. As each letter can be labeled with a number (A=1, B=2, and so on), you can use binary instead of numerals to add a layer of complexity. It works like this:

A binary sequence may be thought of in terms of exponential growth, thus:

1 2 4 8 16 32

and so on.

Switch the numbers around, thus:

32 16 8 4 2 1

Now, you can encode any number between 1 and 63. WOS suggested 44, which would be

101100

The first '1' is the number of 32's, followed by the number of 16's (0), then the number of 8's (1), the number of 4's (1) and the number of 2's and 1's (none). (Since the English alphabet has only 26 letters, there's no need for a 32's column, but you can see that the possibilities are limitless.)

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post spelled the first word of the title, '01000 00010 10000 10000 11001,' which is just stupid. We feel shame and will now go sit in the box.

(Image from xkcd.com)