Ignorance: The gift that keeps giving
A hundred residents of a Russian village have refused to switch to new passports because they believe the documents’ bar codes contain satanic symbols, state television reported Wednesday.
“We believe these new passports are sinful,” Valentina Yepifanova, an elderly resident of the village Bogolyubovo, told Rossiya television as she clutched an old, tattered passport she said she wanted to keep.
“They have these bar codes and people say they contain three sixes. We are against that.”
Some residents of Bogolyubovo, which means “God-loving” in Russian, have also stopped collecting their pensions at the local post office because the payment slips also have bar codes that might contain the mark of the devil, Rossiya TV reported.
Superstition is about as useless a means of decision-making still left in our species.
A Procter and Gamble plot, no doubt.
The funny thing is, every standard bar code is in fact encoded with the numbers 666. The start, break and end bars of a upc are the same symbol as the number 6.
Find a 12 digit UPC with the number 6 in it, and look for yourself.
Yes, but ignorance is bliss, right?
Its good to see that the American South is not the only place in the world to have rednecks.
On a slightly amusing (and appropriate not), did anyone else read the village name (Bogolyubovo) as “Bugaboo”?
These people make religious nut jobs around the world look bad.
#3 – We actually have a Russian defector at my work who has a “Redneck” baseball cap on the back dash of his car. Stuck to the cap is a Russian flag. He’s amusing to work with, but he’s no longer allowed to drive us when we go to lunch. Long story.
Do any of you wonder how many people were released from work because of bar codes?
Lost about 1/3 of the working force.
Progress sure is a bitch for the profoundly stupid.
While I don’t agree with #7’s analysis as representative, I did have the “opportunity” a couple decades ago to participate in the study run by the War Department [why use their phony self-description, eh?] evaluating their changeover to bar codes.
The neatest thing about a bar code is that it can’t be mis-read. You either get a reading – or NO reading.
We ran 10,000 parcels through a DOD warehouse and got 99.97% efficiency. They lost three parcels.
#2: Incorrect
in UPC the SME (Start Middle End) identifiers are the bit pattern 101
6 is either 0101111 or 1010000 depending on which half of the barcode it falls in.
Steve
#8– We ran 10,000 parcels through a DOD warehouse and got 99.97% efficiency. They lost three parcels.
Sure sure sure, you got accuracy and efficiency, but was it worth the cost of your soul?
A friend of mine heard that his cousin’s neighbor stared at a UPC barcode for two or three minutes. Long story short, it burned the guy’s retinas and made him go blind. These people in the Russian village are being very, very smart to avoid barcodes altogether.
Don’t mess around with Satan.
Note to #2 GregA, you’re misinformed on this topic. What you’re mistaking for ‘6’ digits are actually called “guard bars.” They don’t even have the requisite number of modules to be decoded as any digit. They are used as one more confirmation that the series of bars is a UPC barcode, and they are also used to establish a local metric for the size of the black and white modules in the barcode. To repeat, they do not conform to the definition of any digit within the UPC design. I only know because I studied the design and wrote software that decoded UPC symbols (plus about 8 or 9 other barcode schemes).
#9,#12,
Yes, but if you LOOK at a UPC, and compare the guard bars to the number six, you will see that truthieness is on my side;)
UPC, that’s so 1970’s. Bring on RFID.
#13 Well, then, I stand corrected. You forgot to explain it in terms of truthiness. My gut tells me you might just be right after all.
You found my soft spot 😉
Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania 15666 Westmoreland County
I’m Screwed!!
RE:: 666.
Some years ago, I bought a few items at a local grocery, and the total came out as $6.66. The woman at the checkout asked if I wanted to get something else… pack of gum or something, and I replied “No! I want to keep that register tape as a souvenir!”
I lost it, unfortunately, a few years ago.
J/P=?
There’s still hope, move to Starford, PA 15777
There’s still hope,I moved to Starford, PA 15777
If they are so intent on avoiding evil, why would they want passports anyway… didn’t they used to think that the desire to fly was a proof of intent on the practice of sorcery?
11, 14 – I heard if you stare at an RFID tag for too long, it not only burns your retinas and makes you go blind, it grows hair on your palms. Is there no end to the eeeeeeviiiil?
#14 – Olo
“UPC, that’s so 1970’s. Bring on RFID.”
Crikey!® If that’s the way they react to simple barcodes, show ’em RFID and they’ll burst into flames on the spot…
#22
Why not give them the option… either bar codes or an RFID… 😉
I dread the day that dullards and Luddites inherit the earth( I’m currently hoping they haven’t already). This has to be the most idiotic superstition ever with the possible exception of Friday the 13th. Nothing makes numbers evil… besides isn’t it 616 anyway not 666? I remember reading somewhere that 666 is a mistranslation.
No, 666 is not an incorrect transliteration (not translation, that’s for verbal language, not text). I’m not sure where you’re getting your info but it’s wrong. A single number isn’t anything but group them together in a particular order in some cases and they are a symbol for something, in this case it just happens to be Satan. Numbers and pictures have been used throughout history as symbols. I thought that was common knowledge but perhaps not in your case. You should do a little research before mocking others beliefs instead of speaking out of complete ignorance.
Well, there’s them that’d say the entire Bibble is a mistranslation…
C’mon. Admit it.
Many of you were just as paranoid and nutty about Y2K as these villagers are about bar codes.
But you had the benefit of education to act more rationally.
#26
FOR SALE: Modified 70’s Muscle Car – Roll cage, armor, autocannon, painted on shark’s teeth. Never Used.
“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to himl; nor can he know them, because they are spirtiually discerned.” I Corinthians 2:14