Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Barcodes

Episode Date: August 29, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy writers/podcasters Robert Brockway and Seanbaby (1-900-HOT-DOG) for a look at why barcodes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Barcodes. Known for being lines. Famous for going beep. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why barcodes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks! Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmitz, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by the great Robert Brockway and the great The Internet's Sean Baby, the two minds, writers, editors, photoshoppers, everything else behind the amazing comedy website, 1-900-HOT-DOG. That has funny articles, also its own funny podcast. I'm going to link everything about that so you can enjoy it. Also a recent new work of cinematic fiction, which is a script called Billy Karate by Robert Brockway. They've both been wonderful on this podcast previously about ham and about thunderstorms and about vending machines and now today, barcodes. Also, I've gathered all of our zip

codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples, acknowledge Robert recorded this on the traditional land of the Podunk and Wangunk people, acknowledge Sean recorded this on the traditional land of the Patwin, Muwekma, and Karkin people, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about barcodes. Barcodes are a patron-chosen topic. Thank you very much to Roger Sobey for that wonderful and self-explanatory suggestion, so please sit back

or continue to self-check out your groceries. That would be an incredibly relevant activity for this topic. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Robert Brockway and Sean Baby. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then.

And Robert, Sean, it is so good to have you back as always. And I always start, of course, by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Either of you can start. But how do you feel about barcodes? When I was 15 through 18, I worked at a hardware store radio shack. So I have a lot of barcode experience. And that was back when I was a young man and my brain was like a sponge. So I took it all in.

The SKU number, the UPC number. I know that the five numbers on the left are the manufacturer and the ones on the right are the product. And I, so let me do these calculations. That means if we ever have 100,000 manufacturers in the world, all items are free. That's how that works. Good podcast, everybody. That about covers it. And then on top of that, there's a SKU number. And that stands for stock keeping unit. And if the barcode doesn't work, you can just plug that in. But that does not work outside of your own store. Oh.

So that's everything I know about barcodes. That's a pretty fair amount. I'm very impressed. Probably about average. I don't know. I've never had a discussion about barcodes. So I might sound like a doofus. People at home are like, i've never had a discussion about barcodes so i might i might sound like a doofus people at home like that guy doesn't know anything about barcodes well if i'm average then yes well above average okay well and brockway do you have as

strong of a relationship to barcodes oh what relationship don't i have to barcodes. He's got like four barcode tattoos. He went through a real barcode tattoo phase. Dedicated, dedicated barcode fan base in my town. Yeah. Used to call me Barcode Bobby. And me and all my friends would get together and we would arrange ourselves by like large to skinny in a big row. And try to get aliens to scan us. And it would say like, welcome friend. But you know, you are tube socks.

I don't know that it saved the earth, but I'm like, yeah, man, it might have. I don't have any relationship to barcodes whatsoever. I feel like cashiers and no one else has a relationship with barcodes. It was a really happy, long winded way to say that. You know, I, that's totally chill. And also, I'm going to have linked for people Brockway's fake alien story. It reminded me of a thing that's very visual,

so I'll just link it for people. But Atlas Obscura has a piece about Edwards Air Force Base, which is a major Air Force base in the US and California. And they have a satellite calibration target that is just a huge chunk of land with essentially a barcode for satellites so satellites can point at the barcode and like make sure they're aimed right so you know I feel like aliens could have that too we basically have that for humans great seems like they really let it go once again my lies come true and it's the best thing ever.

I have learned nothing. I feel like I'm in the middle because I've never worked like retail, but my first summer job was giving zoo tours. And so I didn't learn about actual barcodes, but the tickets for the tours had one single kind of barcode that was only useful for scanning zoo tour tickets. And it was a pretty wonky, not that great scanner system. And so my main memory of handling barcodes is like an entire sweaty family in the Chicago summer heat, just desperately wanting to be on a moving tram. And I needed to scan it faster. Like they were, they just very reasonably wanted this process to be over. And sometimes the scanner wasn't working good. It was a whole thing. So negative. We all hate barcodes. Good start to this podcast. I am usually impressed at how good they work or how well they work. Like when you're doing a self checkout, obviously you've run into some problems. But for the most part, it's just like that robot figured out what I was scanning off, like a curved bottom of a bag of rice.

You know what I mean? It's like that's kind of impressive. Yeah, for real. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I guess I'm always also being a grocery store employee, which there's an old, old episode of this about stores with Jason Pargin, where we talk about how just more and more they're asking us all to work at the store now. And yeah, that part goes pretty smoothly. It's way better than the zoo tickets. Okay. So we've got our roles.

Sean is the barcode apologist. You're the neutral mediator. And I'm here to tell the truth. Right. Perfect. That's the perfect team. I like the idea that I'm a centrist about barcodes like well there's two sides to a barcode it's like no alex there's literally one there's literally one side that's it one side and then there's lunatics

well and as far as the before we get to stats and numbers i want to do a big takeaway because it's the whole origin of this kind of thing. Let's go into takeaway number one. Barcodes started out as an unpopular, circle-shaped technology. The very first barcode prototype, it basically looked like the rings in a tree when he cut down a tree like it was a circular thing and that ended up being a like decades-long impediment to this being a common technology until somebody came up with square yes oh we're all so stupid and deserve everything that happens to us i can't apologize for that that's a bad idea yeah like it workable, but it's less good than...

I mean, obviously, all of us basically on Earth feel like we could have thought of the rectangular barcode because we've seen one. But the first person to think of these basically almost came up with a rectangular barcode and then swerved into making it a circle. And it was less popular. barcode and then swerved into making it a circle and it was less popular. I feel like if it's post like alphabet in on your technology tree and someone's like, Hey, what if we did all of this in a circle? Some other guy would say, actually, uh, I know letters I've, I've written letters. It's much easier to do them in a straight line from left to right. I think.

I'm pretty sure we also just, you you know playing with shapes is one of the first things we ever do so i'm not gonna let us off the hook for this uh we just said that we had a circle shape and we tried to cram it through the square hole for like 40 years until somebody's patient mom came along and it's like honey just try this one right maybe he was just really a boob man he's like guys let's try the boob shape oh hmm i wonder why i like this i like this a lot but i can't figure out why can you guys figure out why guys i love my job like before the circle he does the shape of that stone fertility doll that we always find at old paleolithic stuff like that's the origin of all our even barcode yeah but there's like we have an exact origin story of this and the key sources here there's a book called eureka how invention happens by journalist gavin waitman and excerpted by

smithsonian and then also a bbc obituary of one of the key people in this. His name was George Lorer. But the most common product barcode in the US and Canada, as Sean Nguyen said, it's what's called a UPC barcode. And that stands for universal product code. It was the first major barcode in the world. It's still very common. And the first ever scanning of a UPC happened in 1974. So less than 50 years ago. It's not that old of a technology. It was done at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio on June 26th, 1974. Oh, I hope it was for something embarrassing.

I hope it was for like Preparation H. Oh, that person had to just go down in history. Y'all aren't going to log this log this right this newfangled technology you're making history with that butt cream and we know that man's name today it's i do i love the idea of somebody saying you aren't gonna log this about the first time a product was ever logged is great. Really fun to me. You wouldn't fully understand it. Like, you're not tracking this somehow, are you? With your robot lasers?

This isn't going to go into some sort of computer and be beamed into space, right? You aren't going to start having the most accurate retail information in business history, right? You aren't going to do that. I mean, I basically just want to know that, say, 50 years from now, a bunch of **** won't do a podcast about exactly what I did here today is what I want to know. He might still be alive. I hope his butt's cleared up. Let's get him. Let's just pile on him. Let's pause and figure out who he is. Yeah, well, actually, and so we do know who did this. It turns out Troy, Ohio. It's Western Ohio. It's near Dayton. It was near the headquarters of a couple of

companies involved in the first technology to scan and use barcodes. And the shopper was not a regular person. It was the head of research and development for National Cash Register, which was the company that designed the barcode scanner. So this was all like a planned stunt kind of thing. Like they like behold the first scanning. And the first thing he scanned was a pack of Wrigley's gum. Okay. That's not that embarrassing. I do have a question you might have come up in your research. Like how do they make sure that barcodes don't get duplicated? There must be some sort of regulatory commission or company. Like, how did they do that back in the day? Like, did you just like mail off some numbers to some, some guy keeping books somewhere? And they're like, Oh no, we can't have that one.

I can get you something in a 0 1 7 8 6 3. Cause the barcode will work anywhere. You take it to some other store and it knows it's tube socks. And apparently that's changed a little over time. Today, it's an international nonprofit called GS1, which stands for Global Standard. And then these first barcodes were managed by a group called the Symbol Selection Committee. So I don't know if those two groups have covered all of history, but there have been a few broad nonprofits that all industries agree, hey, it's just easier if there's one group doing this.

There's no competitive advantage to separate barcodes. So it's just held up by the good of the people, like just people donate to this charity? Human goodness. Human goodness. There's no way this is sustainable. You could like donate to like some sort of a, like a foundation for sick children.

And then some guys say, you know who I'm going to give my money to? The guys who run barcodes. Big barcode. Okay. No, I was fine, I guess. Yeah. You could have done some good with that but i guess keeping

the preparation h separate from the wrigley's gum is its own type of public good noble and unrecognized yeah i'm always i'm always impressed and simultaneously disappointed when you just know this, when we pose something, some ridiculous question about it. And you're like, oh yeah, it's this. And we're like, always like, oh, Shmitty's so smart. He always does his research.

But there's a part of me that's always like, ah, I didn't get him this time. Yeah. We'll get you next one. Feels good. Probably. What's the barcode for Preparation H? Oh, I got him with this one, Brockway.

He'll never know this he'll never take him down what if like i did know but i was too embarrassed i'm just like what is preparation h i haven't heard of it my butt works perfectly checkmate i have moved you into yeah yeah oddly this whole thing it did remind me of when I proposed an emoji because I learned all about this group Unicode. That is a consortium that's a nonprofit where it's basically tech company employees volunteering and there's like donations coming in to fund it. But they manage the world's keyboards on devices like the character sets. And I think it's kind of a similar thing. If we can't just pay these people we're again a charity

organization i use their hot dogs all the time that's true who do we pay for the hot dogs i would like to do to pay my share we owe them something we gotta find them yeah let's get they have a heat map of who's using it the most they're like these two guys big time uh lydia as well we can we can never retire the hot dog unicode these guys are just it would ruin their whole life and they're correct i actually i shatter our website i'm actually you know i'm gonna link to because i made a mini podcast about it it's's bisonemojipodcast.com. But I talked to a guy from Unicode who legitimately said, like, we really don't want to retire any emojis because we don't know what role they could take on in the future after we adopt them. Like, it might become important to somebody.

Is the thing a guy actually told me who works there? Yeah. I mean, surely that is the case with the hot dog. They put it in there and were like, why does anybody need this hot dog nobody's gonna use it and then they started just seeing rapid spikes in usage from like two years ago and they're like we can't you see we have a responsibility to society they they have some kind of analytics machine and it just prints out a piece of paper with the word sissy neck on it.

And they're like, what does this mean? I don't understand. I'll link about that for folks who don't know the site. Check out 1-800-HOT-TALK. It's great. But yeah, these barcodes, they're now managed by a group, and it's pretty much a universal product code. Also, when they scanned the first one, they scanned a wrigley's gum pack because that was the smallest barcode anyone had printed at that point like on that little pack of gum and so they

felt like if that worked they could go ahead and roll out the whole thing and it didn't work scan the biggest barcode on like a bus or something that's how you buy buses of course we all know this it's like the costco version of a car like oh you want a lot of car oh you want to you want to buy a car in bulk have i got the source for you yeah oh that might be the dumbest thing i've ever said it comes with a four dollar chicken now that was also pretty dumb race to the race me to the bottom sean but and uh and there's like old pictures of this troy ohio checkout stand and what a barcode was like then and i'm gonna link that picture for people because it's basically what we see now. Like close to 50 years ago, it was kind of the same.

But that technology took a lot of time before the 1970s to get that way. And the first barcode idea comes from the late 1940s, which is earlier than I expected. And the start of it comes from an inventor named Joe Woodland, who was an American inventor. And he just soaked people in radiation. And that's how they detected the barcode. And then he said, no, we should, let's make this a laser. Yeah, all early science is an atrocity. Somebody got cancer from the prototype of everything.

Like he did the Stanford prison experiment, and then he needed to scan some stuff in the experiment. Okay, you're all barcodes, and this is how we're gonna so we're gonna learn some of you are fundamentally worth more than others yeah let's find out via laser when he and woodland he was a at the time in the late 40s he was a recent graduate of drexel institute of technology in Philadelphia. And apparently, I guess this just used to happen more back then. One day, a supermarket manager just showed up to the Drexel Institute of Technology and got a hold of the dean and asked him if the school could invent a way to get customers through the supermarket faster.

And the dean had no interest, but there was a post-grad student named Bob Silver who overheard it, told Joe Woodland about it. And then from there, Joe Woodland made it like his primary purpose in life to develop a technology that would make grocery checkout faster. All because one frantic guy invaded a college. Somebody's got to help me with with this i feel like if you start attacking the problem from that side like you're gonna have some really weird like tries like i would probably have a dog in some point like a grocery sniffing dog that would definitely be part of the first brainstorming i would develop some sort of like robotic bulldozer

to just shove people through the store like like like how in old video game levels the screen move forward but never back i would do like a physical version of that for the aisles yeah an auto scroller grocery store you can never go back and you can advance forward at your pace that's a pretty good idea i feel like another way to do it is to weigh people on the way in have them just carry whatever they want and then weigh them on the way out. That had to have been part of the first brainstorming session. These are all like almost as good of ideas as the barcode. It's like, it is that open ended of a question.

If I'm in that meeting and I give those two ideas and then some other guy says, what if we had a bunch of weird little lines that we hit with a laser? They'd be like, get out of the meeting. This guy has got grocery sniffing dogs. What are you even talking about? Right. Laser. We would need to first invent lasers. Maniac.

Legitimately, that's what becomes one of two obstacles here. The other is the design of the barcode. But because, yeah, this is this story. It's a little bit cinematic from here not just with the guy barging into the school what happens is joe woodland he leaves grad school in 1948 and then he moves to an apartment in miami beach florida because he had family down there and he just spends down his savings in his apartment tinkering with this idea of what's something that can make it faster. And then apparently the eureka moment comes when Joe Woodland is sitting on the sand of

Miami Beach. Like he's staring at the ocean sitting on the sand. He also remembered his time in Boy Scouts and that they taught him Morse code. And then here's a quote from Woodland about all that. Quote, I remember I was thinking about dots and dashes when I poked my four fingers into the sand. And for whatever reason, I pulled my hand toward me and I had four lines. I said, golly, now I have four lines and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes. Now I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing. End quote. That is too wholesome. I have a better chance of finding the doggone thing. End quote. That is too wholesome. I don't believe any of it.

That's the most wholesome thing that has ever happened in Miami Beach. Like, yes. No, you didn't go down there and blow your savings on this. You blew it on Coke and club girls. And then you're like, ah, I got to do something. What was that? What was that one lunatic raving about back in my college years and while he was looking at those lines a shark ate his family and then i thought about my time in the boy scouts and i said golly gee no

i love the idea that he's scarface and then to explain how he was spending that time oh i i invented the barcode while i thought about the Boy Scouts and God and my family, obviously. Just an elaborate lie to tell your family about what you've been doing. And then you're like, actually, that, I mean, that's a pretty good idea. This is like half of my life is I spin an elaborate lie to somebody and I'm like, wait, that was pretty good. What if that wasn't a lie? That was pretty good. What if that wasn't a lie?

And also with this big story, like if people remember the quote I just said, Woodland puts his fingers in the sand and draws four straight lines. Right. So that's a barcode. That's what we think of. However, the quote continues. Here's what happens next. Then only seconds later, I took my four fingers. They were still in the sand and I swept them around into a circle. End quote.

So like he had it. Swing and a miss. Oh, I like that he had the full solution to the puzzle and even the steps where he did it the easy way first and then over complicated it. And it never occurred to him. Yes. About the just easy way. Yes. Yeah.

It's like, I'll even, one of these articles has like a picture of his patent linked. And like the main diagram is a circular barcode that looks like an incredibly complicated bullseye of like a million lines. But then below it are like sub diagrams of what's in the bullseye and it's little pictures of straight lines. Like he's so close to how we did it ultimately. He's right there. Oh, I love I love how stupid humanity is. And just decades later of bashing his head like, ah, how how could I possibly fix this? Yeah.

How could I possibly fix this? Yeah. This is probably why we don't have a barcode movie, because the Eureka moment was also just a giant mistake. Well, the Eureka moment happened first, and then he went backwards to screw it up and then spent many years trying to undo it. Yeah. Like, I don't know that I could live if I remembered that time on the beach and made those four lines and then spent 20 years of my life trying to undo them. I think when I finally realized the answer, I would just quietly walk out into the ocean. Right.

Well, also, I should proceed to share ways this guy succeeded, too. It turns out the circle design, it is functional. It's not as good as the parallel lines, but it can be scanned. And also he was nice enough to like co-patent it with the guy, Bob Silver, who was the postgraduate student who told him about the thing at the school. And, um, so he seems like a nice guy. And then also the, the other obstacle besides the shape is that thing where lasers were not common in the late 40s, early 50s. It took until the 60s for those to be common, but also allegedly Woodland was able to build a working scanner without one. His scanner used a 500 watt light bulb to like shine through the barcode and register something that way.

Ah, see? And that what what they had to use that is what caused cancer right definitely burned a couple grocery stores down yeah like a special kind of light bulb and then yeah that's uh that's why the class action suit happened yeah right just huge circular sunburns all over him. Like, it's going great. Yeah. Okay, well. In the grocery store. Everyone's ice cream is melted. Oh, right. That too. But yeah, and then the other big complication is Woodland's choice of shape. And he said he preferred a bullseye because he could scan it from any direction, which is true. But according to Gavin Waitman's book, it was much harder to print. Like if there was any imperfection anywhere on the circumference of any of the circles,

it didn't work. And so that was the other big limitation. And then it ends up taking until the 1970s for this to be practical and common. Amazing. An inspiring story of human failure. amazing and an inspiring story of human failure there's also there's a fun extra cinematic scene with the next person other person who makes this workable and his name is george laurer he was working at ibm in the 1960s and apparently ibm executives in like the late 60s find this woodland and silver patent from 1952. And they say, hey, George Lohrer, you need to make a practical barcode. And his first idea is vertical lines, just vertical lines. Great.

But also the executives were initially not into that. They all thought that would not work. thought that would not work and so what laura did to win them over is he set up a demo where they printed vertical line barcodes on the bottoms of beanbag ashtrays and i had never heard of beanbag ashtrays but it's like a metal ashtray with a beanbag on the bottom so it's really lumpy and beanbaggy and what they did is they tossed those beanbag ashtrays over a scanner, like through the air, and the scanner managed to pick up a barcode. And then IBM said, oh, well, if it can scan that, great. It's working great. Okay.

So why do I have to scan my chips like 18 times still? Why are we going backwards? Fair question. You just start throwing them across the store like well i said yeah they got gelatinous blobs and whipped them through the air over the scanner and the robot's like no problem got it no problem this one too and then i'm over at the store with like a coke and it takes me five tries it's just we've gone backwards apparently a coke or eight tubes of preparation h sure yeah well there's no point in lying the computer has got it all we're shooting that information into space right now even the aliens will know about my magnum condoms right because they can see it from space and

then additionally there is a barcode to tell them about it yeah they get little updates on their computer and just look at each other like oh let's see this guy yeah well and uh and yeah and then ibm they design this rectangular one and then also they submit that to a group called the Symbol Selection Committee, which picks rectangles over circles in 1973. One year later, Troy, Ohio grocery store, they scan the rectangular barcode. And then pretty much immediately it takes off. By the 1980s, most businesses adopt barcodes, especially Kmart and Walmart and big retailers. And then from there, they're worldwide. I love it. I love that every single step of the way they gave it to an inventor and he's like, bam, rectangles, parallel lines, gave it to a committee and they're like, rectangles,

parallel lines. Every one of them is just in your face. What is up? How did you not get this? Yeah. And Joe Woodland lives to age 91, passes away in 2012. So he super lives to see his invention, but a different shape. He lives to see everybody dunk over him for the next 30 years. Weirdly enough. Just straight over his head. They stuffed him into a round coffin. Sean, what if you didn't know what an urn is?

You're like, look at that round coffin. No, that's not what it's called. That's a beanbag ashtray. Absolutely. I know what that is. Off of that, we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife.

I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie,

Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. but yeah so that's a that's pretty much the history of this item and from here we can get into a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called give me some stats give me some stats fascinating numbers and statistics very nice i'm just checking.

There's no way you haven't already done this, and I'm sorry if it's insulting that I ask, but you've, of course, done Flash Gordon. I think I might have sang that last time we were on. Okay. Somebody has to have done it. That's been a very popular suggestion, yeah. That was on the Pears episode, was the first one.

I'm sorry to have insulted you. I hear music. Yeah, I'm going to do one for you. Schmiddick told me, yeah, he me, facts about barcodes. He also told me, zombie bill, you'll never believe these stats. That's it. Just the other day. I don't need to do the whole thing.

We'll just pause and wait for Schmitty to get as sued as humanly possible i thank you guys for bringing additional wits to the table and uh and this kit kat one was from jonathan smookler jonathan thank you so much they have a new name every week please make a massillion whacking bass possible submit to sitpod on twitter or to sitpod at gmail.com or you know like bring your own when you guessed you know there's lots of ways. And the first number here is pretty simple. It is one or two dimensions and one or two dimensions are the two kinds of barcode technology. And they're both all around us. It turns out like that UPC code, that set of lines, technically that is a one dimensional barcode. I know it's like a

two dimensional shape, but it is only read in one dimension. Like you just read the widths of those lines. Okay. And then the two dimensional barcode, the most common example is a QR code. That's any image that gets scanned in like it's width and height all at once and all the different elements within that. So technically QR codes are a form of barcode. A fifth dimensional barcode. You have to make him say his name backwards to send him back. The only way to defeat him. At the grocery store, like, can I get a price check on this Event Horizon barcode, please?

I don't understand what's going on with it. I've gone mad. I've also gone mad. Barcode that stretches through time. You have to scan this now and then again in seven years or it will not register. Yeah, and these two-dimensional ones, like QR codes could be a whole separate episode, so we're not really going to cover them. But yeah, I like that they're part of the technology family of barcodes. so we're not really going to cover them.

But yeah, I like that they're part of the technology family of barcodes. And also, according to that company, GS1, technically not a company, it's like a nonprofit managing codes. They have an initiative called Sunrise 2027. And I know that sounds ominous. That's ominous. Yeah, it's so ominous. There's no way that's good.

I knew this whole time that barcodes were preparing us for some sort of Mark of the Beast style apocalypse. That had to have happened, right? There had to have been when they rolled out barcodes, Christian movies started, as they do with every single form of technology, making Mark of the Beast movies about it. Okay. So very quickly, Sunrise 2027, they're just trying to get everybody to switch to qr codes instead of one-dimensional barcodes but the mark of the beast but we're gonna go straight into the other main takeaway for the episode takeaway number two barcode design played a major role in the united states satanic panic in the 1970s and 1980s yes exactly what brockway just god all of my lies come true it's like precisely what you said power

yes abuse this power so yeah i don't have movies about it but there's an interesting like set of coincidences i guess it's three coincidences but it led to a subset of american christians deciding that barcodes were the mark of the beast from the book of revelation chapter 13 in the new testament as they simply must did your research uh turn up if they were right or not oh 2027 baby what if like the bonus episode for patrons is just the truth about how the universe works like okay so god's real and uh specifically the methodists were right and the bonus episode is us detailing like the plan to survive the qr code apocalypse okay everybody needs to get on board you need to start stockpiling beanbag ashtrays today.

That's the only way to confound the robots that will be scanning all of us. Buy your gum now, your Magnum condoms now, while they're in one dimension. Yeah, the rollout of regular UPC barcodes. So there's an amazing piece for Wired.com by Cade Metz, and he tracks how in, you know, especially the late 70s and in the 80s when barcodes rolled out to products, this got caught up in the same satanic panic as people playing vinyl records backwards or believing that Dungeons and Dragons was some sort of satanic influence. Like barcodes were another pillar of that movement. And part of it is just because barcodes became popular

like right when that movement was happening. So they legitimately did appear as a mark on a bunch of stuff when people happened to be having this fear. Like the timeline is like that. You gotta really be stretching because I believe in revelations like you had to get it on your body and the idea that like a bunch of lines on some gum counted as that it

seems like even i can tell you for certain the most generous that they would say yeah they would say okay but next it's going to be on okay slippery slope of labeling things sure i mean honestly this was this was easy to call because it's anytime like they're the people that are worried about this they're they're like scare point is anytime there's a mark on something right which is a lot of times there are marks on things yeah yeah it's a it's a very common thing to be scared of. I think you're both exactly right. Yeah. And, and Sean, in particular, you're right about like the text of the scripture here. Cause, um, cause book of revelation chapter 13, there's many translations, but, uh, the revelation describes a couple of beasts in order.

revelation describes a couple of beasts in order and the second beast is prophesied to require that all humans receive a marking on their right hand or on their forehead um always go forehead oh yeah i want let's go around the table the virtual table where are we putting it where are we putting it i think hands myself but, but yeah. Oh yeah. Right hand. Okay. Sean, you're outnumbered. I feel like you're going to lose, you're going to lose a couple hands, uh, just in the warring, just from the bands of lunatics running around. Oh, so like, but better that than your head. Well, I mean, if you lose your head, sure.

But I'm just saying like, you can't count on that right hand being there tomorrow. Right. It's actually, it's actually that's actually pretty good logic uh because if it's your head it's whatever you're done yeah cool whatever right it's pretty good logic if you want to stay on the good side of the beast oh you're saying not beast okay okay okay i want to know both sides. I want to see how this goes. You got left behind, forsaken by your Lord, and you're not even siding with the beast yet. Okay. No, I side with me over the beast. I am my own beast. So the book Revelation, there's this mark, as Sean said, has to be on the body.

to be on the body but i think the the real trouble comes from the book also says that specifically the mark is like a requirement for anyone to buy or sell things once the beasts are taking over the world so that part really looped people into hey barcodes might be this but again it's a very generous interpretation that like hey you're marked to be able to do commerce versus like this mark tells people what gum is. It's yes. Right. But if you take that and put it on a person and then also it means a different thing. Oh my God. It's just like the Bible. It feels like buddy that pump the brakes just a little bit. I bet we could trace it back to like the first time label makers came out and put prices on things they were just like ah it's the mark of the beast what if you put that on me oh my god he put it right on my head p touch touches a sin touches a sin right p touch evil name right

it all comes together six lines on the bar six days in the week six months in the year oh holy cow so yeah because the the other coincidence here is barcode design and specifically people decide that there's a 666 in it yeah that's actually the other part so so uh and this goes back to that first takeaway where this guy george laurer at ibm is the one who makes the vertical design he's the devil he he is saying um but he personally designed upc barcodes so that there would be three thicker bars spread across the code and i i can't find information on whether this is still the way it works. But at the time, it was like three thicker bars that are spread across the barcode to help a scanner take in the whole thing and kind of, you could call it seeing the whole picture. And I know it's not

alive, it doesn't have eyes. But anyway, those guide bars meant that barcodes had a consistent set of three things. And people interpreted that to be like really deep code for a consistent six six six like three matching numbers and again if you're taking the three and saying hey this is the same as a six i feel like i feel like you might be a way to a six slippery slope why this is only two numbers over a six. You can't have eight things. Yeah, yeah. And Revelation chapter 13, it does specifically say that there would be a number of the beast to go with the mark. And the number is 666. Sure.

However, then there's like an additional really weird coincidence here, which is that like IBM, International Business Machines, they made a lot of these barcode scanners and barcode machines. And apparently there was a common practice at IBM to give their products a random number instead of a name. And I'll bet folks can kind of see where this is going. But the IBM product number for an individual barcode scanning device. Here are the digits of the number. Three, six, six, six. Dad. All right.

So you get this one. We've been dunking on you for the others, but this one. Okay. Yeah, that's obviously Satan. Yep. All right. You were right. With that guy.

That guy back in miami beach uh he blew his whole savings on coke and club girls and he made a deal with the devil uh and like all deals with the devil it went horribly awry and he uh he had it at first and then he made it a circle and was doomed to obscurity uh and yeah that's how we wound up with barcode so it is uh mark of the beast all right right. Good podcast, everybody. We solved God. Yeah. Like as much as it's, it's all silly and coincidental, like that part, I can, I can see where people

got something like, sure. It's because it's a one in like 10,000 chance that a four digit number would be that, you know, like, okay. It's a one in one chance that something would be that yeah right also that yeah ten thousand aspects to a barcode every part of the laser printer every guy that's ever handled it every company eventually if you're looking for something you can find three things line up to confirm what you already suspect. I feel like if you have four numbers and three of them are 666, that's proof of the devil.

I mean, that's how science works. Yeah, I'll give you that one. I'll give you that one, guys. Yeah. But yeah, so that panic has mostly gone away. But yeah, at the time when these rolled out, like you can have some sympathy for people deciding that there's a new world order going on. If all products suddenly have a mysterious code, it's they're wrong, but it's only because they're wrong.

Like that is a new change in the world happening. What's great about that, but it's only because they're wrong. It's a great way to put that. What's great is after they were wrong, everyone said, hey, guys, let's keep track of all these people who were very very wrong and not listen to them next time see ya see everybody in 2027 for the not at all ominously named sunrise yeah boy uh sunrise the morning star favorite son of god you see where it is you see that this is going uh subscribe to my newsletter wild yeah i really wish i had more information about gs1 because their mysteriousness is ominous without more detail yeah but they would like us to all

switch from barcodes to qr codes by 2027 that's just what they'd like. It is probably an 85 year old man with like a bunch of punch cards, just like in some deep bunker. Yeah. It's, it's probably the most gentle ones, not scary group, but yeah, that's what's going on.

Go Satan. Well, I, Brockway, congratulations on predicting that takeaway. And so precisely. I'm really impressed. And there's a few more numbers we can get into now after that.

Ha! Got you! We got you! We got you this time. This counts. And the next number here, it ties into what Sean said about how a UPC code breaks down and lays out. The number is 12, and that's the usual number of total digits written below the lines of a UPC barcode. That's twice the devil. Oh, God. Good point. Oh, no.

I can't believe they missed that one. That's right there. It's a layup. So the most common type of UPC, it's called UPC-A. And it has 12 numbers written below it. I'm going to link to Mental Floss piece by Ellen Gatoski that breaks down the different jobs of each digit, because there's a very first digit that's the broad category a product is under. Apparently, for example, the number three is health-related items.

Number two is a lot of products that are sold by weight, such as meat. So very first digit far to the left is a category. And then as Sean said, the next five digits are which company made the product. The five after that are which specific product. And then there's a final digit on the far right. It's the 12th digit. That's what's known as a check digit. And apparently the check digit is calculated from a formula that uses the previous 11 digits. So a computer can scan a barcode and also use that check digit to make sure all the numbers came in right. Huh. But at a certain point, we have to have more than 100,000 manufacturers though, right?

Like we should call GS one and see what happens then. I mean, I guess obviously that's, that's the apocalypse or. Of Y2K7 as we call it. That's the sunrise 2026. Is that what they're talking about? Like eventually. That's when the,

that's when the 100,000th manufacturer is predicted to come online and then barcodes become self-aware i'm not sure we'll just make beasts it's very mayan apocalypse isn't it like we've counted too far yeah we've counted too far the numbers have let us down yeah and also this is especially for listeners beyond the u.s and canada it turns turns out GS1 is running a bunch of systems. And so UPC is within some bigger systems that have some longer numbers. So I'm curious if the next step could be like we go to those bigger systems. Like there's one called EAN13 that is a 13-digit number.

ISBN numbers are 10 digits. They get converted to EAN13. Like there's a really arcane slew of other barcode systems out there. It's all going according to plan. Eat all of Nazareth. It all makes sense. EAN. EAN.

And like super fast other number here is 50%. And 50% is how much of their labor costs the company Walmart says they were able to cut thanks to implementing barcodes in the 1980s. 50% half of them. Every one of them nurturing just a bitter grudge against the barcode. Oh, that's where the satanic panic thing came in that was the first guy was just furious he lost his job to the barcodes i do i feel like a lot of conspiracy theory stuff happens in parallel to like actual phenomena that are totally explainable and very world sweeping and amazing like there there was a huge change to all of business with barcodes. All checkout was faster, all product management was easier. Smithsonian says that in particular, Kmart was the first

main US company to make barcodes common because pretty much every business has benefited. They're easier to scan, easier to track. You also get better information on what's getting bought and sold. Yeah, you see it pays to be at the forefront of technology yeah because look at where kmart is now oh true the first to adopt the revolutionary new technology surely surely it all worked out for them when there's one more big takeaway for the main episode and it's pretty quick too, but I'm very excited about it. Takeaway number three. One team of scientists is using the equivalent of a barcode scanner to study zebras. It's like the exact cartoony thing you think it would be. They're using the stripes of zebras in a scannable database to track

populations of zebras and make that easier and when they find the preparation h zebra they will kill it the magnum condom zebra the the rarest and most sought after zebra nft of the zebra world nfz yeah sure yeah yeah i just want to know if they get to use the gun like do you get to hide out in a tree and like shoot a laser at each one because that's oh that's pretty good that's a pretty good job and the the tools are even simpler it's just any digital camera and then any laptop that is plugged into the internet and has access to this database they're building yeah i would ask for the gun is there any function to the data like can they tell if a zebra is like a boy or a girl or cool

nerd it turns out all of the zebras, every single zebra is a nerd. The entire species. Right. They're like, none of these zebras have like lightning bolt stripes or anarchy symbol stripes or the misfits band logo, or it's a skull. None of them have that. So pretty lame. Let's go scan some lemur tails.

Awesome. Awesome. Lemur. awesome awesome lemur yeah permanently changed who i rooted for in my nature documentaries every single zebra deserves it now get it get lit nerd well and this uh this story it's uh it's coming from an amazing piece for Popular Science by writer Rebecca Boyle. And it's from 2021, so pretty new. But I also, in researching this, there's a ton of Internet headlines that claim there are like, quote unquote, barcode scanners for DNA. And that's sort of a metaphor for quickly tracking DNA. That's not really the same thing. And that's sort of a metaphor for quickly tracking DNA.

That's not really the same thing. But from like a visual sense, the up and down black and white stripes on a zebra are basically being used like a barcode. This is a joint research team from Princeton University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. They built a system called StripeSpotter. And what they do is you take digital photographs of zebras, import that into the software, and then that helps it build out its biometric database of all the individual zebras in a population, just completely based on their stripes,

the pattern of the stripes. And how much everyone is worth. Right. Can you tell if two zebras are related from stripe patterns? Like, is there anything you can do with it other than just say, I know that zebra? double count zebras you'll be like we already identified that and you can also record the individual lifespans of zebras and like by seeing them in different places you can track their movements so i think in a roundabout way like if you caught you know where zebras have been and are going you could start to map out family trees and stuff like that you could track a zebra murderer this is sort of like the uh the chinese sort of camera social monitoring system

but for zebras oh exactly yeah we're doing some like weird dystopian zebras cool gotta try it on ourselves it's about time we do it to other species we can't be alone i hadn't thought of it that way it is like positive that apparently they're using it in Kenya for a group of plains zebras and a group of gravity zebras. And like, it's mainly for conservation, but as soon as we use it to serve ads to humans, like in minority report,

yeah, it's not great. It's not cool. It's the mark of the beast for zebras. We're realizing that every single zebra is born with the mark of the beast on them. It's a mark. It's on their body.

It's all right here. And how many letters are in zebras? Oh, God. It's all right here. 17. Which is only one shy of being divisible into 666. It's all connected.

Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Robert Brockway and Sean Baby for having an astounding knowledge of barcodes and an astounding knowledge of where the episode was going, right? What a tag team for those two skills. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's

bonus topic is the one barcode scanner that helped swing the 1992 US presidential election. That was between George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, in a way that will come up very amazingly. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of nine dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring barcodes with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, barcodes started out as an unpopular circle-shaped technology. Takeaway number two, barcode design played a major role in the United States' satanic panic. role in the United States' satanic panic. And takeaway number three, one team of scientists is using the equivalent of a barcode scanner to study zebras.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. 1-900-HOTDOG is very easy to get to. You type in the numbers 1-900-HOT-DOG.com. That's the URL. It's also on Patreon, so search for it there. A bunch of the site is free to read, and then if you become a hot dog hero, you get so much more. And I'm going to link a lot of 1-900-HOT-DOG stuff this week because there is an entire new movie script on that site. It's called Billy Karate. It is by Robert Brockway. There's all kinds of amazing podcasting there in their show, The Dog Zone 9000. And I've been writing a monthly column for that website for some time now. So I have a lot of comedy writing that you can enjoy. Again, that site is 1-900-HOT-DOG. Many research sources this week.

Here are some key ones. Lean down a piece of a book. It's called Eureka! How Invention Happens. That's by journalist Gavin Waitman, and then it's cross-published and excerpted by Smithsonian Magazine. Also, many online sources beyond that, including Popular Science, Wired, the BBC, Lapham's Quarterly. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus

show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.