In Carl Sagan's book Contact, towards the end of the book, the main character Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster
in the movie) is instructed by the alien being to apply her pattern-searching software towards the number pi,
instead of towards radio noise gathered from deep space. When she does, she ends up finding a small picture
(of a circle inside of a square) buried deep down in the digits of pi, when those digits are displayed in graphic
form.
When I read this, it made me want to see pi represented in graphic form, so I searched for it on the 'net,
and it wasn't there. So I did it myself. The link below will show you the first short bits of pi represented in binary
and converted to black and white squares. (Assuming I did my math right. I'd love it if someone would double-check
it for me.) Or course it is kind of arbitrary that I chose to look at it shown in 128 columns instead of another
value.
What you want to do is look at the images, and try to think like you are a caveman looking at the night sky,
kind of blurring your eyes and saying to your caveman buddy, "you know Og, if you look at that group of stars,
it kind of looks like a big dipper." Find what section seems to look like something to you, then let me know what
you see.
I've found one already, which I call Sagan's Oval--it is in image 2. I have placed a version of image 2
on the bottom of the page with the find highlighted in red, but of course the real test of whether I have found
something interesting is whether you can see it in the image 2 without the red highlighting. To me it looks like
Carl Sagan wearing a space suit, doing a kind of "keep on truckin'" boogie. (But what is he holding in his hand?)
If you find something, highlight it and email or snail mail it to me, and I'll give you credit for it and post it
here. You'll see what I mean when you look at the page. If people get interested in this, I will re-activate the
database-driven version, which allows you to change the number of columns used and shift what bit starts in column
one for a particular page.
