

Pi in the Sky, Artists Fill the SF Bay Area With w/ first 1000 Digits of Pi - bufo
http://laughingsquid.com/pi-in-the-sky-skywriters-fill-the-san-francisco-bay-area-skies-with-the-first-1000-digits-of-pi/

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matthiaskramm
Looks like Pi is still ahead, in the Tau vs. Pi arms race.

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archgoon
I hate tau. An event like this should be viewed as a cool nerdy thing, a
celebration of the culture and fun of mathematics. Thanks to tau, nerds start
bickering over a senseless and useless distinction as to whether a factor of
two should be present in a transcendental constant. Did we really need another
pointless division and source of argument in our society?

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danielweber
The headline here at HN really needs to add the word "Sky" between "Area" and
"With", put "Skywriters" in place of "Arists", or both.

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dkasper
Interesting that it was a failed kickstarter but they did it anyway.
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ishky/pi-in-the-
sky?ref=...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ishky/pi-in-the-sky?ref=live)

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gms7777
They really should have done this for Pi day. I may have missed it in the
article, was there anything significant about their choosing yesterday for
this event?

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ctdonath
I'm all for obsessing over computing & visualizing pi ... but ... wow. That's
nuts.

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naturalethic
What would happen if you made Pi = 1, then adjust all other numbers
accordingly?

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philh
μ

\--

To clarify, that's not a thing you can meaningfully do. It makes sense to
define your units such that, e.g. c=1, because c has units (distance per
time). You're really adjusting your units, not your numbers. But π is
dimensionless. Diameter and circumference are both measures of distance, and
they are never equal.

If you say "this number times one equals that number", and the numbers aren't
the same, then when you say "one" you don't actually mean "one" the way anyone
else speaks about it. (By convention: whenever you can do multiplication, if
there's something called "one", then "one" is the multiplicative identity.)

There's nothing to stop you from, e.g. renaming all numbers x -> x/π. But you
wouldn't gain anything; you'd just say things like "1/π squared is 1/π", and
"1 squared is π", and "π times 1/π is π". It looks weird, but what's happening
is perfictly ordinary, just with weird names.

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anonymouz
One could sort of satisfy naturalethic's wish by choosing a numeral system
with pi as basis. Then pi would have digit representation '1' in this system.
And yes, mathematicians have studied transcendental bases for numeral systems
(Knuth in particular, see the short paragraph on
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Base.html> which explicitly mentions pi as
basis).

Of course it's not a good idea to base your day-to-day numeral system on pi,
but I know that at least for irrational bases there are actual applications.

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jerf
"One could sort of satisfy naturalethic's wish by choosing a numeral system
with pi as basis. Then pi would have digit representation '1' in this system."

I'm pretty sure pi comes out to 10 base pi, not 1 base pi.

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blacksmythe
Numeral systems are not restricted to the set (base N).

"a numeral system with pi as basis" could be (base pi) _pi, where pi =- > '1'
and pi_pi -> '10' and unity -> '0.1'.

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jerf
I'd refer you back to philh's answer. You can do that and it isn't "wrong",
but it is surprisingly uninteresting, as compared to a discussion of
irrational or negative or imaginary bases.

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alimoeeny
How did they do that?

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modernerd
The artist used a company called AirSign, who fly five aircraft in formation
to write messages as a dot matrix: <http://www.airsign.com/skywriting.php> You
can read more on the artist's website here: <http://ishky.com/pi/>

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Tipzntrix
And people are worried about oil? Not in the Bay Area!

