Futurama: Bender’s Big Score - Binary Joke
By Ali Karbassi | January 15th, 2008 | General
In Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, Bender reads off a series of 0’s and 1’s to travel through time. Now I won’t go much into the movie1, but the writers are known for their geek humor.
Now, if you take the whole thing by itself, it’s not a 16-bit code, but 32-bit. I believe IBM made a few super computers that handle 32-bit binary. With that said, we can’t just pump it into a binary-to-ASCII converter. Watching the movies I noticed that the binary code he reads is symmetrical. If you take the first half of each line you will notice that the binary is translated to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Wow, that simple.
If you type the actual string out into google, you will notice that the producers have actually registered the domain 001100010010011110100001101101110011.com/ and displayed just one image. How nice of them. Unlike the site ilovebender.com/, there is no other information on the page.
They have set up a nice auto-responder to anything that goes to bender@ilovebender.com. It reads:
Dear New Friend,
Thank you for writing to me, Bender. It really means a lot to me. Not many humans contact me because I am so rude and impatient. You’re starting to get on my nerves now. Quit buggin’ me, meatbag!
P.S. - Buy my DVD.
Love,
Bender
I’m glad to see writers, producers, directors, and whoever involved taking the extra measure to make the experience more enjoyable. Now go by the DVD.
It is not actually 32 bit binary. There are 36 total 0s and 1s. It would actually be 36 bit binary than.
if you actually type the binary code in from top to bottom starting from the left you can get a message that says ≈°¬™d Seems to me that’s the message they want to get across.
Look at the 1s and you can see benders face… yes its a geek joke, but more a joke on geeks!!!
Sometimes its as obvious as the nose (or not) on your face…
Bye guys…
I just found your article regarding Bender’s binary code, and it gave me quite a chuckle. Thanks.
Anyway, if you look at the code the way it is displayed, a couple things are apparent:
001100
010010
100001
011110
101101
110011
The 1’s in the first row are in the center. In the next row, they are pushed out one spot, and after they’re on the end, the 0’s start on the outside and work their way in.
Just my 2 cents.