The Devil's Product Code
by
Dave Palmer
A correspondent wrote:
>Has anyone noticed that the 1st, middle and last characters on the UPC
>correspond to the 6 character. Hence 666. I have tried to find material
>on the universial product code form various sources. Guess
>what....nothing exists.
Did you limit your search to the Weekly World News? Whole forests have
given their lives to produce documentation on the UPC.
There is also a lot of info on the Net. Try here,
for example: http://www.uc-council.org/
This site has more information that you could ever want on the UPC.
>All I was every able to get a hold of was a
>promotional brochure. There is NO documentation which really explains the
>coding. I have read a book published in the early 80's called something
>like "The coming money system" by a woman author from Georgia. Don't
>remember her name, but she goes into detail on the breakdown of the code.
>Seems there are 2 codes 1 for the right side and one for the left. The
>control characters are the number 6 from the right side. Check it out.
>Any one have any thing more to add, lets discuss it.
Yeesh. Somebody drive a stake through this one's heart...
The book you probably remember is "When Your Money Fails," by Mary
Stewart Relfe, a religious loony with a few too many raccoons in her
dumpster.
The notion that 666 is found in every UPC barcode comes from a superficial
understanding of how digits are encoded...but then, 666 crackpots have never
let the facts stand in the way of a good rant.
Each number in a UPC is encoded by a sequence of 1 and 0 represented by a
thin line or a space respectively.
The end and center "sixes" are actually delimiter markers, and don't encode
the number six at all. The end markers represent "101" and the middle one
encodes "01010."
The misunderstanding comes in believing that a number is ALWAYS encoded
the same way, i.e. that six is represented by two thin lines, which
happens to match the appearance of the delimiters. This is not true. In fact,
the two thin lines only encode the binary sequence "101."
But each digit in the UPC proper is encoded by seven bits, while the end
delimiters are 3 bits and the middle delimiter is five bits. Thus, they
don't encode UPC digits at all, because they have the wrong number of bits.
Further, the encoding for digits is different in the two halves of the
code (on the left and right of the middle delimiter). For example, the
encoding for six is 1010000 on the right side, and 0101111 on the left. And
don't go thinking that the "101" is unique to the encoding of six. Most of
the other digits (depending on if they're on the left or right) contain
the "101" sequence.
Hope this helps.
ObFolklore: Not nearly as well known, though every bit as deadly was
667, the neighbor of the beast...
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