Quote Originally Posted by Witis View Post
Such a small amount of trouble in order to preserve binary purity. ☹
Not so small an amount of trouble. To do a good job with the cutting would have required a special saw, so there would be a fair expense. I did try a bit of cutting with cold chisel, and had mixed results. The lines weren't clean enough to work with.

You mean the error you built into your binary backyard is still there? °o°
There is no error. You simply ignore all red blocks and all is well. Binary doesn't carry any inherent meaning. We impose meaning on it when we turn a binary signal into 1s and 0s, then we impose further meaning on it when we interpret some set of binary digits to mean some kind of letter. Had I used some encoding other than ASCII, or some encoding other than 7 bits to a letter, you'd be sorely pressed to figure any of it out. Only by relying on a rigorous convention does the pattern hold any meaning. After all, since I needed less than 32 characters, I could have made my own 6 bit encoding to write the message, but then nobody would be able to figure it out without putting a lot of effort into it. It might not have contained enough information to be able to figure out every symbol, had I done it that way.

So, I have imposed a convention that makes it readable. There is nothing pure or impure about it. It is what it is, and that is complete. By saying that it is ASCII, and by saying that the red bits are fill, I give you the tools to interpret the binary into text. Had I not given that information, it could have been inferred with some difficulty. The rules are as much a part of the pattern as the bits themselves. However, it is all just binary, with no right or wrong other than that which we impose upon it.