Posted 03/14/2015 09:26:53

In case you were wondering where TeX's final digits come from: each digit is one meter wide. The polar circumference of the earth is 40,008 km (and it's different from the equatorial circumference, which is 40,075 km). TeX starts out going southbound on OU's South Oval, and thus if he continued his path, he'd be on a polar route. Since TeX is using a non-monospace typeface, I'm leaving a little bit of slack and calling it an even 40,000,000 digits. Thus, the digits in the final panel come from the 39,999,900-40,000,000th digits of pi. I am, of course, ignoring the difficulty of burning digits into the surface of oceans, but, eh, details.

Oh, and kids, don't try this at home. Would probably be considered vandalism. Feel free to use the sidewalk chalk idea, though. We actually did that when I was in college.

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