But it that's exactly what you don't want: sharper corners means greater chance of getting snagged on the inside of the cable bends or against other bits. What

But it that's exactly what you don't want: sharper corners means greater chance of getting snagged on the inside of the cable bends or against other bits. What you really want is data that is all zeros... nice round, rubbery, flexible zeros, that can bounce off each other. That's impractical though. Did you ever wonder why the zero has a line through it? That is to avoid a one going through the center and changing the parity and checksumming when bits get reordered.