Saturday, May 16, 2015

The Answer to the Riddle


Remember this piece? I wrote about it here.  I feel like anyone who bought this print at The Calgary Expo has now had ample opportunity to decipher it, and so it's time to post the answer.

'I speak a language with two characters. To understand me, you have to ask what time it is.'

That's the riddle written at the bottom of the image. The language with only two characters is binary, which is made up of 1's and 0's. What time is it? If you write down the times on the clocks from left to right, top to bottom, keeping in mind that you only want 1's and 0's, you get this:

01:11
10:01
01:11
10:01
01:10
00:11

That last one is a bit tricky to figure out, since '00' doesn't show up on an analogue clock, but since 12:11 has a '2' and there are no 2's in binary, 00 is the alternative way to think about that time.

011110010111100101100011 translated from binary into english is yyc, which is the airport code for Calgary. The hidden message in the image is 'Calgary'.

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