1. BARCODES in the operating room

2. THE art that is a barcode

3. BREAKING out the box

4. DID you know ?

5. CARTOON

Every year, in the United States about 1,500 people have surgical objects accidentally left inside them after surgery - HECTIC! Read this article by ScienceDaily (Dec. 9, 2007) to see how barcodes have come to the rescue. When interviewed for the above mentioned article Dr. Steven DeJong said that “When there is significant bleeding and a sponge is placed in a patient, it can sometimes look indistinguishable from the tissue around it”  - yummy!

If only they had turned to the reliable old barcode for assistance sooner - so many more sponges could have been saved!

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You see! We are not the only ones obsessed with our striped friends - Artist Scott Blake's understandable fascination has led to him turning the barcode into an art form. He uses standard barcodes to create portraits of iconic pop culture figures like OJ Simpson, Charles Manson and Oprah... and Jesus. 

Blake says, “I started making art with barcodes right before Y2K, inspired by the year 2000 computer bug, and threatening digital apocalypse. Barcode Jesus was born in Photoshop, by creating mosaics with simple shapes. I first tried circles and then squares. The tile patterns morphed into a cluster of lines, and before I knew it, I was staring at a bunch of barcodes. I assigned the numbers to describe each pixel’s grayscale value and grid coordinate.”

Check out more of Blake's portraits by going to: www.barcodeart.com

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Have you noticed how everything these days gets branded? And I'm not talking about some mad man with a cattle branding iron running around burning his mark into anything that moves. Buildings are wrapped in delicious looking alcoholic beverages or lovely Levi models, while cars covered in company colours zoot around advertising on the go.

Well, barcodes are not impervious to the trend; A Japanese design firm, Design Barcode Inc, is breaking out of the box so to speak by creating unique barcodes that compliment  their clients' packaging and branding - how friggin cool!

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The very first barcode ever commercially scanned was a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum at  a Marsh's supermarket in Troy Ohio on 26th June 1974. I just realised that sounds  like a fact you would read off a chappies paper, which is weird because chappies are also chewing gum manufacturers!

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