The errant 'h' is almost certainly not a reference to the Planck Constant; much more likely it's a mistake for an open paren as the author mentions.

You have to wonder why the crop-circle artist didn't use the same number of ascii characters to make the much more clear message:

    01100101
    01011110
    00101000
    01101001
    00101010
    01110000
    01101001
    00101001
    00101011
    00110001
    00111101
    00110000

e^(i*pi)+1=0

Making a crop circle with that equation in it is one of the most awesome things I've ever heard of anyone doing.

Somehow that makes it extra tragic that they got it wrong (it's missing a rather critical +).

Talking about coincidences. The top post right now is about John Resig going to Khan Academy. So I am watching the Khan TED talk and in the beginning there is a video in which the equation is mentioned. So I am wondering, what is THAT equation? And bam, this article answers my question. Hmmm....

the thing that really bothers me is that the 'aliens' are using ASCII and not unicode

No, it makes sense. While the humans were busy debating how many codepoints the character 愛 should have, the aliens standardized on ASCII and invented intergalactic spacetravel instead.

>愛

It's funny because you picked the Chinese character for "love". I'm not sure if that was part of your point but it adds another layer of interpretation into your reply.

太好了！

Wouldn't UTF-8 without a BOM look identical to ASCII for the "normal" characters?

Yes because UTF-8 doesn't have a BOM. Well, it's not recommended at least. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark#UTF-8

Yes.