pi posts

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services

Creating music is as easy as Pi

by Brad Linder Feb 28th 2008

Who hasn't wondered what it would sound like if you assigned each number from 1 through 10 a musical value and then plaid those tones in order corresponding to pi? You haven't? Really? What a sad life you must live.

For the rest of us, there's pi10k. The web site features a Flash-based application that converts the first 10,000 digits of pi into music. You get to influence the results by selecting the first 10 notes. Pi10k will then proceed to demonstrate that either you know nothing about music, or that there's really just about no way to make this experiment sound good.

[via Boing Boing]

Tags: music, pi, pi10k

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Linux, Open Source, Unix, Troubleshooting

Test system stability using Pi calculations

by Simon Kerbel Jan 22nd 2008

There are many unique ways to test your system stability (like faking an earthquake by shaking your desk wildly), but this one takes the cake.

The System Stability Tester, a freeware download for Linux, Unix, and Windows, claims to test the stability of your system by calculating millions of digits of Pi in different threads, and comparing the threads for any disparities. You can also run the test on a single thread for benchmarking purposes.

Originally developed as a system stressing and benchmarking tool for overclockers, the System Stability Tester has since gone open source (licensed under the GNU public license) and more mainstream (e.g., by giving Windows users an easy executable install file).

So after your system calculates up to 128 million digits of Pi, what comes next? Memorization, of course. In "White and Nerdy," Weird Al claimed to know Pi to a thousand places. In the real world, if you can believe it, that number is paltry.

Fun fact for the day: the world record for number of memorized Pi numbers is held by Chao Lu of China. Want to know how many numbers he memorized? Click the jump...

Tags: benchmarking, open source, OpenSource, pi, system stability tester, SystemStabilityTester

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Creating music is as easy as Pi

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