Geek On The Mountain

I just can’t help it. I just watched the Simpsons and I saw something interesting and I just had to check it out.

In the episode, which is basically just Homer and Marge trying to get some time away from the kids so they can have sex, there is extensive amounts of traveling being done. It is revealed to us that they are using a Viza credit card. Most notably, the card is issued to Ned Flanders and is numbered 8525 4941 2525 4158. Bart and Lisa happen to have a card issued to Rod Flanders (not bad for a 10 (ish) year old), numbered 8525 4941 2525 4158, the same as the other. I thought I could at least use this as an excuse to look up the credit card format and see what it all means. I came across a rather extensive article (which is typical for that site I might add) that covers all kinds of stuff about credit cards, including the number format. What I find is that any actual Visa card (although this is a Viza) would have a number starting with 4. In fact, none of the major cards will start with an 8, so the number pretty much means nothing. Not a big surprise. I should also add, that as of this writing, google turns up nothing but lists of numbers for the CC# with spaces, and returns no hits at all if you remove the spaces or add terms like “simpsons” or “flanders.” Once again, no big surprise, but it shows that there isn’t an immediately obvious pattern when taken as a whole. I can’t help but think that they have some sort of pattern. It just feels that way. It is sufficient for 8 ASCII chars in hex, but the numbers are in the wrong range to be actual letters. On the other hand, speculation like that is largely pointless. I’m no cryptographer, so I would hardly know where to start trying to figure out how text would be encoded into that. Furthermore, it seems most likely that the numbers were just taken completely at random (or at least from sufficiently obscure sources to make it be more or less that way).

I must also confess to having an ulterior motive for writing about this. Don’t get me wrong, this is the kind of thing I would just waste my time on anyways, but I had a thought. You could call it a test really I suppose. The thing is, I have received more searches for people looking for information on lisathemovie.com than anything else. It makes perfect sense to me too. It’s just other people, not unlike me, who wonder what basis in reality that might have so they go poking around the internet looking. The difference in that case is of course that it is a website, so people naturally go online to look for it period. I’m not sure if I’ll get anything of the same response from credit card 8525494125254158, but it seems worth a shot. Not that I’m trying to draw in all kinds of useless traffic about some pointless topic, but more so in that I am curious as to how much people (like me) actually search around for this crap

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