About 01101001

About 01101001

01101001 is geek chic. While 01101001 may look like random binary junk, it is easy for my software- and hardware-engineer friends to remember.

01101001 in decimal is 105. 01101001 in hexadecimal is 69. 01101001 is the ASCII encoding for the character i.

The choice of 01101001 was influenced by the art of ambigramming. While any binary number is an ambigram by virtue of the symmetric shapes of the digits 0 and 1, 01101001 also represents other character strings that have ambigram nature.

Its hexadecimal value, 69, is a classic case of a number, and the smallest non-trivial one, that can be read the same upside down as right side up. The character i, ASCII-encoded as 01101001, upside down, is the exclamation mark. Upside down, capital I is itself, I.

The logical inverse of 01101001 is 10010110 and 01101001 rotated upside down, inverted physically, is also 10010110. 10010110 in hexadecimal is 96, another rotationally symmetric number.

01101001 rotated about its horizontal axis is itself, 01101001. 01101001 rotated about its vertical axis is 10010110.

If you write out 01101001 as words, with carefully designed letters, and rotate that upside down, you get zero one one zero one zero zero one.

Finally, the digits 0 and 1 can be read ambiguously as the letters O and I. Unfortunately, OIIOIOOI conveys no meaning.

On another note, 01101001 is the beginning of the infinite Thue-Morse sequence: 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1... The logical, and physical, inverse of 01101001, 10010110, is the second 8 digits of the sequence, and it is the third 8 digits of the sequence. 01101001 is the fourth 8 digits. Each subsequent grouping of 8 digits, to infinity, is either 01101001 or 10010110.

01101001 is cool.