Am I in Pi? Search the digits of pi for a given string. For example, my birthday “41852” appears starting at digit 63283. “041852” occurs starting at digit 1142308. It didn’t find “4181952”; they only have the first 1.2 million digits of pi. If a string exists, it’s a great way to send it as a coded message by stipulating the starting digit and string length. For example, the five digits beginning at location 8269 would tell the waiting terrorists what day to board the planes and activate their suicide hijacking mission (“91101”). Obviously, even easier for shorter strings. With a codebook, three-digit strings could encode a thousand messages; I’m guessing that the first 1.2 million digits of pi include all of the thousand three-digit strings; any number theorists out there reading this who could verify it, so I don’t have to try all thousand searches, or all ten thousand four-digit searches?

Via boing boing, which I just noticed has an enticing new feature. They give a guest blogger some territory in their right-hand sidebar to do a mini-blog for a week at a time. boing (can I presume such familiarity?), which I’ve been reading ever since it was a print magazine, is one of my favorite weblogs but I can only surf to it around 1:10 attempts these days. Anyone else having difficulties? Is it their server or my ISP? [The other place I can’t get to anymore is Yahoo!’s news coverage; the idiotic form email from Yahoo customer support swears there’s nothing wrong at their end. I also can’t reach The Register most times I try.]