Articles from March, 2009

Elements of Binary in the NCAA Basketball Tournament

By Rick Regan (Published March 11th, 2009)

If you’re a sports fan, you think of basketball when you see this:

Diagram of the NCAA Basketball Tournament

Basketball or Binary?

If you’re like me, you also think of powers of two, binary trees, logarithms, laws of exponents, geometric sequences, geometric series, and Bernoulli trials — in short, the elements of binary numbers, binary code, and binary logic.

I hope you’re thinking: “wow — all that math stuff I hated actually has a practical use!”

Binary Code on the Pioneer 10 Spacecraft

By Rick Regan (Published March 6th, 2009)

The Pioneer 10 (also known as Pioneer F) spacecraft, launched in 1972 and now on a very long journey towards Taurus, has a plaque mounted on it which is designed to inform alien civilizations about the spacecraft’s origin. The plaque contains a diagram of our solar system, the trajectory of the spacecraft, a drawing of a man and woman, and groups of vertical and horizontal strokes — you guessed it, binary code — that gives information about how to find us: