Gameboy Genius

XKCD Binary Heart Transcription+the SCH mystery

Since I felt like having too much time, here’s a transcription of XKCD Binary Heart.

111011101100110010101
111001010011110111010
101101001011011000100
111101110110011001010
111100101101111011101
010110100101101100011
011110111011001100101
011110010100111101110
101011010010110110001
001111011101100110010
101111001010011110111
010101101001011011000
110111101110110011001
010111100101101111011
101010110100101101100
010011110111011001100
101011110010110111101
110101011010010110110
001001111011101100110
010101111001010011110
111010101101001011011
000100111101110110011

Interpreted as ASCII written with binary, it says:

iloveyOu
ilOveyou
iloveyOu
ilOveyOu
iloveyou
ilOveyou
ilOveyOu
ilOv

That’s the easy part of the mystery. The tricky part is why the O’s are lower and upper case like that. I have no clue, but there’s a discussion on the XKCD forums . Someone called “kemosabi” posted a Perl snippet that produces the letters SCH:

#!/usr/bin/perl
while () {
   $x .= $_;
}
$x =~ tr/01//cd;
$y = pack(”B*”, $x);
print “$y\n”;
$s = $y;
$s =~ tr/Oo/01/;
$s =~ tr/01/ /c;
print $s, “\n”;
$s =~ tr/01//cd;
print ”       ” . join(”       “, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s))), “\n”;
print ”   010 ” . join(”   010 “, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s))), “\n”;
#print $s, “\n”;
$s = “010″ . join(”010″, grep(/\d{5}/, split(/(\d{5})/, $s)));
print pack(”B*”, $s), “\n”;
__END__
011010010110110001101
111011101100110010101
111001010011110111010
101101001011011000100
111101110110011001010
111100101101111011101
010110100101101100011
011110111011001100101
011110010100111101110
101011010010110110001
001111011101100110010
101111001010011110111
010101101001011011000
110111101110110011001
010111100101101111011
101010110100101101100
010011110111011001100
101011110010110111101
110101011010010110110
001001111011101100110
010101111001010011110
111010101101001011011
000100111101110110011

Output

iloveyOuilOveyouiloveyOuilOveyOuiloveyouilOveyouilOveyOuilOv`
  1   0   0   1   1   0   0   0   1   1   0   1   0   0   0
       10011       00011       01000
   010 10011   010 00011   010 01000
SCH

Fast forward a few episodes to this strip:

The three “pointers”, 0×3a28213a , 0×6339392c, 0×7363682e look a bit suspicious… Repeating bytes, MSB is never set. This smells ASCII!
Sure enough, here’s what it says:

:(!:
c99,
sch.

I don’t know what the first line means, maybe it’s a little joke in the style of UNIX shell tricks. The second line could possibly be referring to the C99 standard. And the last line is sch again. It’s no doubt related, but how? There could be a deeper meaning to the letters SCH, or it could just be a reference back to that forum post. What do you think?