Apartment Therapy San Francisco

Binary Doormat

We're pushing our glasses up our nose with our index finger as we speak. Can you guess what this mat spells out in binary code?

It "spells" welcome. Made of polypropylene with vinyl backing, we think this 2' x 3' doormat would wear better than the Ikea alternatives.

$39.99, here.

Comments (7)

I must buy for my computer engineer husband...

posted by Signe on December 18th 2007 at 9:22am
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Okay, now I have to buy about 10 of them for my friends.

posted by Lisa Hunter on December 18th 2007 at 9:22am
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Welcome, (Earthling)? My dad would have loved this...

posted by tahitianpearl on December 18th 2007 at 9:22am
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DONE. Living in seattle, binary is about as common as spanish in southwest. EPICLY COOL in a dorky clever way.

posted by wiscompton on December 18th 2007 at 9:30am
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Congrats on putting "spell" in quotes....

If you break it into 8-bit chunks, then translate those into the ASCII standard for character representation, you will get 'w' 'e' 'l' 'c' 'o' 'm' 'e'.

However, without splitting it into 8-bit chunks, it just represents a very very very very very large binary number (larger than 2^55) Also, you need to know that it's in ASCII (or an ASCII-compatible standard like UTF-8 Unicode) or else it won't spell that character sequence at all.

OK, my CS-nerd statement is done.

And Lisa, if you are buying TWO of them, you posted a nerd joke even faster than I could.

posted by briankoenig on December 18th 2007 at 9:45am
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there are 10 types of people in the world... those who know that the ascii binary can't be directly converted into utf-8 octals, and those who don't. i was the former until today, thanks to work....

posted by @jo on December 18th 2007 at 4:17pm
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="Welcome to NY now scram!"

posted by dark on December 19th 2007 at 8:02am
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