I work in Bloomington, near Minneapolis. The light rail goes by under my office window, and I just realized that the floor of the stop is tiled in what looks very much like binary code. I wonder if it means anything.
0 01 01 10 11 101 1000 1101 10101 100010 110111 1011001 1010000 11101001 101111001 001100010 11101001 11
Weird.
Converting the first few numbers to decimal gives:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34
…which is most definitely the makings of a Fibonacci sequence! I can’t be bothered converting the rest of the terms, but someone else with the tools and/or motivation could check to see if they are 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946.
OK, it appears I do have the motivation, and I found a tool here.
The sequence does start out as a Fibonacci sequence:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89
but then 1010000 appears, which translates to 80. My guess is that you made a typo here, and it should be 10010000, which translates to 144.
Assuming it is 144, it continues for a couple more terms (233 377), and then we have 001100010, which translates to 98. However, if we put a ‘1’ in front of it, it becomes 1001100010, which translates to 610.
The next term is 11101001, which becomes 233. 987 in binary is 1111011011, which looks pretty similar, but I may be clutching at straws.
Regardless, the series looks too close to a binary Fibonacci sequence to be a coincidence.
This adventure is going to end with some startling revelations.
Aurelio Sugundo Mendoza Buendia, a disgruntled mathematics student who dropped out of the University of Brazil, eventually followed his bliss to America where he eventually landed a career doing contract tilework for the Minnesota Light Rail. Some say he left the field of mathematics behind him, others are not so sure…
Google-fu is with me tonight… The brickwork on the platform is a tribute to Control Data Coproration, which used to be at that location.
I honestly expected this thread to die without a response, and wound up learning some really cool stuff. I so love the Dope (especially Mbossa, Shagnasty, Inigo Montoya and gotpasswords!).
FYI – Windows Calculator will convert binary to decimal and reverse.
–FCOD