I came across this on someone’s blog about a week ago, unfortunately I can’t remember who it belonged to. I recall seeing the press release back in 99, the idea was to a) come up with a message to be broadcast in the direction of nearby stars, b) devise a universal but error-correcting way of encoding that message, and c) perform the actual broadcast. What I didn’t see at the time was the actual message in a graphics format — interstellar communication aside, decoding it makes for a nice time waster. I got to page 3 in about half an hour, before remembering that I’m in crunch mode and should probably be coding instead screwing around; for the rest of us, here’s the site.
The press release makes for an interesting read as well.
codeland 