Secret message of the Stupid Fun Club coin

Here's a puzzle we talked about in the Gweek 050 podcast (we discuss it at the 1:07:26 mark). It's from a coin given to me on my visit to the Stupid Fun Club in Berkeley. What is the secret message?

• [noah django]

   B_E_S_U_R_E_T_O_D_R_I_N_K_Y_O_U_R_O_V_A_L_T_I_N_E

  a crummy commercial?

  • [Art]

     ”Sonofabitch!”

    • [Gene Poole]

       That’s what all of them boil down to, eventually.

• [thaum]

  Guess that I can’t be bothered firing up Gimp for: the pointer at the center of the ring marks the starting radius- mark 26 radii at equal distances from each other where the starting radius is A, and read them off either center out or outer edge in.

• [Dan]

  Yep, thaum had same idea as I did.  Says CREATION from outside in.

  • [Jim Saul]

    Nice job.

    What about some of the symbolism? The symbol in the center, the pointy arm and hole in the foot of the figure?

    Of course, the labyrinth itself has a number of meanings in different cultures.

    http://www.labyrinthos.net/centre.html

    All in all, a very cool artifact.

    • [Andy Campbell Smith]

      Symbol in the center looks like the Freemason arc and compass:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_and_Compasses 

• [Ian Carrico]

  I am with thaum on this one… each ring is a letter, with a single hole about .241 radians (1/26th of a circle). Figure it out from there… I gotta get to class..

• [Robert]

  creation.

• [Gyrofrog]

  I don’t know, but I did notice that every ring (except the outermost border) has exactly one gap and none of them are in the same position.  Someone else can take it from there. Or, not.

• [Finnagain]

  It’s clearly a Rosicrucian labyrinth. 

• [Assault_is_eternal]

  It’s Star Castle.  If you shoot when the spaces are aligned, you destroy the Star Castle in the middle ;)

• [Jason Weisberger]

  ITS A TRAP!

• [archvillain]

  My first instinct is that the 8 rings match the 8 planets of the solar system, thus the message is a precise date – each ring gap represents the position of a planet, and there is only one point in history (or the future)  where the planets will align in this particular configuration.

• [Michael Kellar]

  CUEATHON?

• [Chris S]

  It’s definitely CREATION.

  I drew a vertical line up the middle on another layer, then rotated the coin to each gap from the outside in, recording the rotations. Software wanted to give me +/- 180, which I reset to “0 to 360″. I deducted the lowest number from every value, and divided by 360/26, and then rounded the value (now 0 to 25). I was prepared to have to do rotation shifts on the conversion from number to letter, but the answer popped out immediately.

• [woid]

  It’s the answer to the census taker puzzler.

• [Glen Able]

  “PI EQUALS 3″

• [Mariano Tomatis]

  Just put in two arrays x and y the list of coordinates of the gaps (taken from the JPG file) and you get CREATION. Here is the R code:

  x<-c(103,29,115,77,40,101,70,75)
  y<-c(22,104,49,34,78,85,97,90)
  y<-150-y
  angle<-c()
  for(i in 1:8) angle<-c(angle,atan2(y[i]-75,x[i]-75))
  angle=0 & angle<=90]=0 & angle90 & angle<=180]90 & angle<=180]
  angle[angle=-180]<- 90 + abs(angle[angle=-180])
  angle<-angle+10
  alpha<-c("A","B","C","D","E","F","G","H","I","J","K","L","M","N","O","P","Q","R","S","T","U","V","W","X","Y","Z")
  temp<-""
  for(j in angle) for(i in 1:length(alpha)) {
  intmin<-(i-1)*360/length(alpha)
  intmax=intmin & j<=intmax)  temp<-paste(temp,alpha[i],sep="")
  }
  temp

• [Listener43]

  I read it as “You can’t get there from here.” 
  I read it that way in my finest Down East accent.

• [pebird]

  Bitcoins can be minted?

• [Mariano Tomatis]

  Here a longer graphical analysis: 
  http://www.marianotomatis.it/blog/?post=20120510

• [Andrew Farnham]

  concentric rings from outer to inner point to letters in the alphabet (simply A at 12 and Z at 11:59) spell out the word “CREATION”. 

• [Andrew Farnham]

  I see that Dan and Thaum above came up with the same thing. 
  DRINK YOUR CREATION!