Just to let you know, the title is an allusion to the Alan Parsons Project “Eye in the Sky”. I suppose I could have used Calloway’s “I Wanna Be Rich” which says “I want money, lots and lots of money, I want the Pi in the Sky”.
Yes, this is the Pi that is the ratio of diameter to circumference, and it is that famous irrational number that has been calculated to 10 trillion places. Only 1,000 digits appeared over the skies in Silicon Valley.
How is it that someone could do this? It is by an artist known as Ishky, who used five planes flying in formation equipped with synchronized dot-matrix-like smoke printers. Every digit is about a half-mile in its height, and these planes were flying at 10,000 feet in the air.
I wonder how long these numbers stayed there. All skywriting is naturally temporary. I’m not really certain what sort of statement this is making. I mentioned two songs earlier, so I might as well mention a line from Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” where he mentions that he knows Pi to a thousand places.
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