Being able to read ASCII in binary form is really easy, in fact, especially for letters.
Basically an ASCII number starting with “01″ has great chances of being a letter. The next binary number allows to know if it’s lower case or upper case (0 = uppercase, 1 = lowercase), then the 5 next numbers will be the index in the alphabet.
For example 01000010 is easy to read. It starts with 01, then you get a 0 (upper case), then 00010. This can be decoded as: 0×16 + 0×8 + 0×4 + 1×2 + 0×1 = 2. So this is the second letter of the alphabet: B.
This also means that with only 5 binary digits, and knowing where the end is, you can know which letter was there. I tried to read what was written on Barbie’s clothes, I got some unexpected letters (like a Q). Either the designer didn’t care, or it’s just that the letter boundary was somewhere else.
Binary at the bottom of the dress has no clear boundary. I guess the designer just didn’t care about the meaning at this location.
