## Archives for April 2012

April 2012 (8)
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## Visualizing four million digits of pi

I came across this remarkable image a couple of days ago. It shows four million digits of π encoded as colored pixels, with one pixel per digit. Each digit has a slightly different color. The page also allows you to search for digit strings up to six characters long and the page will find them in the image, if, of course, the string is there. This raises a couple of questions. The first one is this: given that π expressed as a decimal is infinitely long, can you find any digit string in it...

## “The Islanders” by Christopher Priest

While we were away last week in Paris for the Marathon, I finished The Islanders , a novel by one of my favorite authors, Christopher Priest. Well, actually, I find it hard to call it a novel. It is novel certainly, but a novel? To call it so might imply that it has some kind of plot and a protagonist who changes and learns throughout the story. Instead The Islanders is something way more. First of all, it is structured as a gazetteer, a guidebook to the Dream Archipelago, a belt of islands that...