2012-08-29
Original: 2012-08-29 on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1: An aide with white hair and glasses bursts in.
Aide: MISTER PRESIDENT! INDIA IS SUING FOR HALF OF OUR DATA!
Panel 2: The president, a bald man with a gray beard and glasses, looks alarmed.
President: HALF OUR DATA? ON WHAT BASIS?
Panel 3: (No dialogue.) The aide hands the president a sheet of paper.
Panel 4: The president pinches his glasses, reading the paper, looking impressed.
President: DAMN. DAMN, THAT'S PRETTY GOOD.
Panel 5: Caption banner: SOME CENTURIES PRIOR...
A man (bare-chested, holding a quill/pen and a sheet of paper) speaks to another man wrapped in a white robe.
First man: I CALL IT ZERO.
Votey: A block of binary digits filling the panel, rows of 0s and 1s:
0110001101100101011011000110
0111011001110100011001101101
0111010101101001011010000111
0110001001110101011010010110
0110000100100001001000000110
0011011100100000011100100110
1011010100100000011100110110
0110010101100110011101010110
0001011010010110000111101100
Aide: MISTER PRESIDENT! INDIA IS SUING FOR HALF OF OUR DATA!
Panel 2: The president, a bald man with a gray beard and glasses, looks alarmed.
President: HALF OUR DATA? ON WHAT BASIS?
Panel 3: (No dialogue.) The aide hands the president a sheet of paper.
Panel 4: The president pinches his glasses, reading the paper, looking impressed.
President: DAMN. DAMN, THAT'S PRETTY GOOD.
Panel 5: Caption banner: SOME CENTURIES PRIOR...
A man (bare-chested, holding a quill/pen and a sheet of paper) speaks to another man wrapped in a white robe.
First man: I CALL IT ZERO.
Votey: A block of binary digits filling the panel, rows of 0s and 1s:
0110001101100101011011000110
0111011001110100011001101101
0111010101101001011010000111
0110001001110101011010010110
0110000100100001001000000110
0011011100100000011100100110
1011010100100000011100110110
0110010101100110011101010110
0001011010010110000111101100
Alt text
A five-panel comic. Panel 1: a white-haired aide in glasses rushes in shouting, 'MISTER PRESIDENT! INDIA IS SUING FOR HALF OF OUR DATA!' Panel 2: the bald, gray-bearded president looks alarmed: 'HALF OUR DATA? ON WHAT BASIS?' Panel 3: the aide silently hands the president a sheet of paper. Panel 4: the president pinches his glasses, reading the paper, impressed: 'DAMN. DAMN, THAT'S PRETTY GOOD.' Panel 5: a banner reads 'SOME CENTURIES PRIOR...' and shows a bare-chested man in ancient India holding a pen and paper, telling another man in a white robe, 'I CALL IT ZERO.' The joke: India is laying legal claim to half the world's digital data because Indian mathematicians invented the digit zero, the basis of all binary data. The votey (aftercomic) is a panel filled with rows of binary 0s and 1s, underscoring that all data is built from zeros.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.