Mysterious X&Y

There seems to be some DaVinci Code level mystery surrounding the cover art of Coldplay's latest album, X&Y. My favorite explanation so far is this, from Marcus du Sautoy writing for The Guardian. Via Design Observer.

If you don’t want me to spoil the excitement of working out Coldplay’s new album cover, look away now. First, the colours are irrelevant. The cover translates the album title into a binary code where each block of colour represents a 1 and a gap 0...

The first column of colours on the cover shows a black and grey block representing a 1, followed by a gap representing a zero, then three more blocks of colour giving three 1s. The first letter in Coldplay's title is the letter X. The last column gives us 10101 or the letter Y.