My name is Aperiodical, king of kings;
Look on my news queue, ye Mighty, and despair!
Among other lessons not heeded by your fearless editorial trio this week are those of queueing theory. Our news queue has got a bit out of hand, so it’s time to take drastic action. Here’s what we were going to cover this week, but didn’t get round to. Some of the stories have been stewing in the queue for quite a while, so hold your nose.
Recently I found out via @beverycool on Twitter that Wolfram|Alpha encodes text as barcodes. For example, here is Peter Rowlett:
Just imagine the uses! Well. Hmm. Not sure how useful, but it certainly seems neat! ;)
@beverycool is suggesting the Google Doodle for 7th October (a barcode of the word Google) might have been created using Wolfram|Alpha. From a blog post on walyou.com by Eran Abramson I discover the 7th October was the anniversary of the Barcode patent in the US by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952. And from a comment on that post by Scott Blake I found this video of Scott scanning the onscreen barcode: “Google barcode logo actually scans!!!”.