Barcodes, the Mark of the Beast, and why they aren't
Today I learned why many religious circles *cough*HobbyLobby*cough* see bar codes as marks of the devil (guard bars at the beginning, middle, and end of a bar code resemble the number 6, thus each code has '6 6 6' or the mark of the beast). I also learned how a barcode number is determined, and that the guard bars cannot equal six because of spacing issues (all numbers are determined by the order of black and white lines in a group of 7 lines. The number 6 on the right half of the barcode has two black lines similarly spaced as the guard bars, but guard bars, aside from being longer, only take up 3 spaces.
So if guard bars are arranged as bwb, then the number 6 (on the right side of the barcode, not the left. I'm assuming the arrangements are different to prevent the barcode from being read backwards if scanned upside down) is arranged bwbwwww. (I may be wrong about the amount of space a guard bar takes up, but even if it did take up 7 lines, it would be set up wwbwbww which would NOT be 6 on either side.)
So yeah, barcodes are the mark of the beast, except not really because the guard bars aren't sized right to represent the number 6, and that would only apply to the right half of the barcode anyway.
More fun barcode facts! Apparently the barcode makeup of numbers on the right are just inversions of numbers on the left. So the only difference between a 3 on the left and on the right would be the fact that all the white lines are black, and all the black lines are white. Which makes sense and keeps things not as complicated I imagine! (This does not necessarily apply to ALL barcodes, just EAN/UPC classes of barcodes mostly)
