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Helping you to sip from the information firehose
Remember the good old days, when the person at the checkout used to read little labels with the prices on? You'd walk up and discover that the magazine you'd picked up had somehow lost the little sticker. The cashier would look at it in confusion, turning it over and over in the vain hope that a conjuring trick could be performed and the sticker would magically appear. Customers behind you would start to form a line, and you'd feel their sullen glares burning into the back of your neck. Finally the cashier would give up and call out to someone at the other end of the store: "Hey, Dave, how much is 'Naked Buns'?"
Then suddenly, everything changed. A little rectangular zebra marking appeared on all the magazine covers. Soon it had spread to books, tapes, cans of food... eventually everything carried the enigmatic stripes somewhere on its packaging. And at the checkout, the cashier would simply point a Star Trek phaser at the stripes, and the computer would magically know what the item was and how much it cost.
How quick, how convenient, how... sinister. You and I know that the real bar code conspiracy is that it allows the store to print one price on the shelf and charge a different price at the cash register. Some Christians, however, feel that there's something even more nefarious going on.
Now Dial-The-Truth Ministries explains the sinister secret behind the innocent-looking UPC code. If you're impatient, skip about half way down the page to the diagrams.
UPC codes are split into two halves, separated by what appears to be a pair of stripes. The left and right edges of the barcode are also marked by the same stripes, so that the scanning laser can find the barcode, work out its orientation, and so on. If you look at bar codes which include the number "6", you'll often find that the same two stripes are above. It's almost as though the UPC code uses a "6" as the divider... Two sixes at either end, and a third in the middle... six six six... The Number of the Beast!
So goes the conspiracy theory. However, if you look at a lot of UPC codes, you'll find quite a few where the stripes above the sixes aren't like the divider lines at all. The reason is that in bar codes, the gaps between the stripes are relevant -- it isn't as simple as "two thin stripes = 6, two fat stripes = 5," and so on. The dividers really aren't sixes, because the surrounding blank spaces are wrong.
But then again, maybe that's what they want us to think. This particular bit of Christian nuttiness has certainly spread far and wide; Rudy Rucker pokes fun at it in his book "The Master of Space and Time", and it's featured on the album "Orblivion" by The Orb.
The Dial-The-Truth Ministries page adds an interesting new twist to the story. They theorize that the extra boxes which appear under some UPC codes, with the letters "F" and "H", indicate whether you need to carry the mark of the beast on the forehead or the hand before they'll let you purchase the product.
Everything -- from ISO 9000 certification and Social Security Numbers through to Robot Buddhas and the New Age Movement -- seems to be part of this massive "666" conspiracy. Prophecy Central features a page about the mark of the beast, and they seem to think that maybe Bill Gates has something to do with it. They fail to mention Intel -- yet I always thought that "Pentium" sounded uncomfortably close to "Pentagram"...
If you want something even nuttier, try Living Truth Ministries. As well as books on the great bar-code conspiracy, they have information about the secret plot to make Jerusalem the world capitol, and Newt Gingrich's connections to the New World Order of the Illuminati conspiracy. (Sounds uncomfortably like a certain board game from Steve Jackson Games -- but then, perhaps they just want us to think it's a game?)
Or how about some audio tapes? Living Truth Ministries have cassettes dealing with topics such as Satan worship in the Vatican and the Third Dimension of Evil. There's also allegedly a tape explaining 666 (again) and its links to UFOs, but some sinister force seems to have removed the HTML file... Then again, I recently got an Omnipoint mobile phone, complete with a sinister European smart card... so it's probably too late for me already.
But in the context of electronic commerce, the concern about the number '666' is starting to look pretty mild compared to the concern about the number '2000'. The Y2K problem is being hailed by some as proof that the apocalypse is at hand.
Banks will crash, planes will crash, the power will fail, looters will go on the rampage, hospital equipment will stop working... Or so some people would have us believe; I was surprised to find that the Christian Y2K site is reasonably sane. The irony about the whole Y2K issue is that as I see it, it's only a big life-or-death problem if enough people become convinced that it's a big life-or-death problem. I expect a few people will die as a result of software faults, but many people die every day on the roads without massive media panics. So let's try to keep a sense of perspective; the alternative is that the survivalists busy stocking up their secret hideouts ready for the End Times will create the very conditions they say they are afraid of. Meanwhile, the Republicans are already gleefully planning how they can blame it all on the Democrats...
mathew
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Last updated: Wednesday, 30-Nov-2005 17:06:10 CST
