Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Feb. 13 Post Magazine crossword, “Code Words”
You might have spotted a pattern just from these answers alone, but the real key is at the final Across answer (what Matt Gaffney likes to call the Omega Across) at 137A: [Code whose digits can be translated into letters, eight digits at a time] which is BINARY. Binary is the code that translates the digits 1 and 0 into text and commands, and if you look at the answers listed above, you’ll notice that they contain several I’s and O’s. In fact, those are the only vowels that appear in them, and you’ll find eight pairs of adjacent Across words that contain eight instances of I and O in different rows of the grid.
- 23A: [Where to make a House call?] is VOTING BOOTH and 25A: [Hullabaloo] is COMMOTION.
- 36A: [Old masters’ medium] is OIL COLOR and 39A: [Researcher using slides] is BIOLOGIST.
- 47A: [Class of drugs that includes fentanyl] is OPIOIDS and 50A: [Friend of Friar Tuck] is ROBIN HOOD.
- 64A: [Bread served in a kosher deli] is ONION ROLL and 67A: [Desert plant that’s also known as candlewood] is OCOTILLO.
- 78A: [Great ape, e.g.] is HOMINOID and 80A: [Cabernet sauvignon alternative] is PINOT NOIR.
- 95A: [Noise created at a speed above Mach 1] is SONIC BOOM and 99A: [South African plant used to make red bush tea] is ROOIBOS.
- 107A: [Reading with panels] is COMIC BOOK and 111A: [Like muscle contractions that maintain constant tension in the muscle] is ISOTONIC.
- 124A: [Villain’s method in many a murder mystery] is POISONING and 126A: [Voice training institution] is CHOIR SCHOOL.
If you interpret those I and O letters as the numbers 1 and 0, you can create an eight-bit binary code for each of those rows:
- VOTING BOOTH / COMMOTION → 01000010
- OIL COLOR / BIOLOGIST → 01001001
- OPIOIDS / ROBIN HOOD → 01010100
- ONION ROLL / OCOTILLO → 01000010
- HOMINOID / PINOT NOIR → 01011001
- SONIC BOOM / ROOIBOS → 01000010
- COMIC BOOK / ISOTONIC → 01001001
- POISONING / CHOIR SCHOOL → 01010100
The 137A clue for BINARY said you can translate eight of these digits at a time into letters, so all we have to do is convert those eight-bit codes into letters and we’ll have our answer. But before saying what the answer is, I’m going to show you a handy little trick. While you can certainly look up the binary alphabet codes from a website like this, or punch the codes into a binary alphabet converter like this — and there’s nothing wrong with doing that — you can translate the binary codes into letters yourself using simple math.
The first thing to know about eight-bit binary codes is that the first three digits just tell you if the letters are uppercase (010) or lowercase (011). Here they’re all uppercase letters, so for our purposes you can just disregard those first three digits. The last five digits represent the position of the letter in the alphabet. You find it by multiplying each of those five digits by 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1, respectively, and then adding the sum of the products. The fourth digit in the eight-digit sequence represents the multiplier by 16, and the eighth digit represents the multiplier by 1. (Normally I’d work right-to-left to multiply up by 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16, but I think it’s easier to show you the idea working left-to-right.)
For example, the first eight-bit code is 01000010. Disregard the first three digits, so we’re left with 00010. Start with the first digit in that sequence (0) and multiply it by 16, which is 0. Now move to the next digit and multiply it by 8, which is 0. The third digit is another 0. The only digit in the sequence that has a 1 is the one where you have to multiply by 2, so your equation would be:
0(16) + 0(8) + 0(4) + 1(2) + 0(1) = 2
The total sum is 2, and the second letter of the alphabet is B.
For the next letter, the code is 01001001. Again, toss out the first three digits and you have 01001. Work from left-to-right multiplying each 0 or 1 by 16, 8, 4, 2, then 1:
0(16) + 1(8) + 0(4) + 0(1) + 1(1) = 9
The sum is 9, and the ninth letter of the alphabet is I.
Proceed like that for each of the letters, and you arrive at the final meta answer BIT BY BIT. Very much the opposite of PROMPTLY or WITH EASE, but apt for a code about bits.
This puzzle is a little like a 2019 one I wrote with the similar title “Code Breaker,” which dealt with Morse code letters hidden in different rows. Today’s took me a while to complete and the grid was stretched out because there’s a lot more theme material than normal. I didn’t completely rid the rest of the grid of other I’s and O’s — that might have been impossible to pull off well — but my hope is that you could still spot the I’s and O’s that you needed.
What did you think?
