Pi in the Sky over Austin

Coming home at 6:30 PM, I looked up and saw a strange cloud formation... it resolved...  3 141592...

Five sky-writing aircraft from AirSign, a Florida aerial advertising company, will write out π, the Greek letter pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The calculation produces an unending series of digits, beginning with 3.141592. In a press release, the company said that its pilots will produce “several hundred characters” of the numerical sequence.  Tomorrow, the company explained, is March 14, or 3.14,  national "Pi Day."  Building on that, the company says the planes will begin their 90-minute writing process at 6:28 p.m. because “6:28 is pi times two, a number some believe is the truer reflection of the power of the circle.  (The Austin-American Statesman here.)

They circled twice continuing the expansion.

If you want a quick approximation, 355\113 = 3.141592... which is better than 22/7 = 3.1428...  and it has an order and symmetry that makes it easy to remember: 3 55 over 11 3: all the numbers are odd, 1-3-5: 355113 starts and ends with 3.  It's a piece of cake, well, okay, a piece of pie...

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Happy Pi Day 2013
Patterns in Pi

Images from SXSW 2013

Another day and night of fun and splendor as 6th and Congress remains the focal point of energy in downtown Austin. On Saturday, March 15, Oliver and Wilder Lee moved across the street. Balafon player Abou Sylla returned from last year. The Yellow Roses returned from yesterday. The Magician and Sonia did not. 

A rapper with his own videographer and a portable generator to power the sound took up the northeast corner. The valets at Ruth'sChris could not park in their garage because a pianist and his lively and talented skittle band blocked the entrance. Also making a video of some sort, a fake priest declaimed to his cast of actors and actresses about "The Church" (whatever he might have meant about that.) As the night ground along, the crowd flowed back and forth more quickly and also slid down the socio-economic scale. I finally had to warn a mild vagrant and his really nice dog that they were not going to sleep in the doorway of Brooks Brothers. 

Oliver on bass and Wilder Lee with banjo and percussion

The flash is connected to the camera ...

Thursday, March 14, was "Camera Day." Cameras are common enough at SXSW, of course, but the shutterbugs swarmed the streets with equipment closer to field artillery than to anything you carry in your pocket.  This was a professional shoot. They took about 50 clicks with her sitting and then standing on the corner in "Vogue" poses.

The camera is connected to the flash over the model

YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS,

a gentlemen's club

Right space; wrong time. He missed the Yellow Roses.

Sonia was more interesting with eight knives stuck in the box.
She assisted her father with his magic tricks.

Even blindfolded Sonia can see what is behind her.
She actually missed this one: Dad's fault of course.

These were some of the people who worked the intersection of 6th and Congress on Thursday.  Blues and bluegrass, rock or skittle, tuba, xylophone, acoustic and electric, break dancing, no corner goes unoccupied for long.  These shots were possible only in the moments when the on-lookers were sparse.  To get me to work, we just waited for traffic to stall and did a "fire drill." Later, on my way to a bus stop after work, I found the poet Bill Keys up a block, once again surrounded by girls. (Oh, why I did choose technical writing?)  

Friday the 15th Abou Sylla plays the balafon

Saturday the 16th
Signing the "Charity Life" tour bus (www.MyCharityLife.com)
This is basically a clearing house for small and local charities.
You can pledge as little as $5. Your favorite charities save
the burden of administrative staff.

Saturday the 16th "Chico Chico" plays "Puttin' on the Ritz"

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

South by Southwest 2013

South by Southwest 2012

Formulas for Success

Austin at Night

Around Austin

SXSW 2013

South by Southwest is iconic. Music is the core experience, but much more is associated and affiliated from Interactive computing to a Film Festival with multiple venues. Technically not an SXSW event Bill Gates was here to dedicate a new computer engineering lab at UT.  As a security guard posted to 6th Street and Congress Avenue, SXSW comes to me.

Bill Keys writes poetry on the spot.

Round here we're all swimmers
Everything that has ever breathed this sweet air
was conceived in a liquid medium
Blood is smarter than the nerve
              the heart quicker than the brain
Swimming is more sensitive than a jog.

Photographers are ubiquitous.  I like to take snapshots, too.  I wonder what they see that I do not.  Of course, I see them: gangs, droves, clubs, and clutches of them.  Austin is no more or less photogenic than any other town, but they are here for SXSW.  My ex taught me that the best camera is the one you have with you right now; and so, therefore, the best subject is the one before you.

Posed, but nice.

My buildings are the Scarbrough and Littlefield, both built in 1910 and both competing to be the tallest -- but, by law, no taller than the State Capitol Dome.  That has changed, but the Art Deco of the Scarbrough and the Beaux Arts of the Littlefield draw photographers.

SARAH, A PEDICAB

Pedicabs work for tips and they are regulated by the city.  They are limited by law in where they can go and what they can charge. Austin is a one-party people's republic, politically like Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Portland.  The city council just outlawed disposable plastic bags.  So, now the stores give away plastic bags even larger and thicker than the old ones, very undisposable.  And paper.  Lots of paper. The Austin City Council chose to chop up the Amazon, rather than drain Saudi Arabia.  Moral choice are so difficult...  But, that aside, pedicabs may be the sine qua non of capitalism.

Pedicabs wait out the rain at Halcyon coffee shop

In the late 1600s, in London, bank runners were supposed to carry papers from place to place.  However, they stopped at coffee shops and there they exchanged their notes.  This was the origin of the merchant banking clearinghouse as we know it today.  The same coffee shops also gave birth to the insurance industry.  It was at the Lloyd's Coffee House in 1688 (the year of the Glorious Revolution), that news of shipping was posted, bringing in the modern insurance industry.

Previously on NecessaryFacts:
Images from SXSW 2013
South by Southwest 2012
Stadtluft Macht Frei
Around Austin
Austin at Night

Around Austin

Texas has no income tax. Sales tax is 8.5% here in Austin because 1% goes for CapMetro, the bus and rail lines.  Dell, Motorola, and a dozen more are here, hundreds of small high tech firms and design studios dot the economic landscape which is dominated by the University of Texas and the state government.  Then, there are cinema, music, and fine arts. KMFA-FM plays no NPR or other news; and Composer's Datebook reminds us that "once all music was new." (The NPR affiliate is KUT-FM, which also launched an alternative format KUTX-FM.) I live in a Mexican neighborhood (no surprise), but a mile up the road, two banks have signs in Chinese.


5th floor near 6th and Lamar looking north
(Whole Foods HQ not visible at far left).
Note all the trees.

You don't see a lot of people getting speeding tickets here. In fact, as a Michigander, I find it downright frustrating to be behind two enormous SUVs each doing 25 in a 40 MPH zone, along the main drag, Lamar Boulevard.  (The street honors Mirabeau Lamar, second president of the Texas Republic.  Houston Street is a small lane, easy to miss.  Sam Houston wanted the capital someplace else.)  Freeway ramps are longer than the roads between towns back East.

The Bar Crawler caught in broad daylight.

But business is booming and bursting and reforming and reformulating.  You will find real estate, minerals, computer chips, computer games.  The culture - music, cinema, fine art, theater - is an economic sector, of course. NPR-affliate KUT-FM provides a deep playlist of local and contemporary music. In addition to Whole Foods, Schlotzsky's home office is here.

The McCombs College of Business at UT is one of several
to have received an antique stock exchange station.

Michael Dell began building personal computers in his dormitory room at UT.  The town as seen busts: people turn nostalgic about the good old days of the 1980s.  An Austin American-Statesman article last year offered hand-wringing because recovery from the Dot Com Meltdown still might not yet have reached the gaming coders.

The Goodwill stores have a computer museum,
funded in part by Dell.
A Cray stands among the vintage machines.

The land is diverse, more like Ohio than it is like New Mexico.  We went through a drought last year with record highs for record days, but that, too, is one of the environmental textures.  When it rains, it pours.  We just passed the apex of cricket season.  You get so many in one place, you can smell them.  Same with grackles.


At the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Austin offers much.  Nearly two million people agree.  Housing is disproportionaltely expensive as a result.  The city owns the electric power company and rates rise as their operating costs fall.  Taxicabs are regulated and all charge the same rates.  Pedicabs are regulated differently.  In a lot of ways, Texas is very much like Massachusetts.... but don't tell them that.  The Texas flag flies at the same height as the American flag; and the Texas flag is larger than the American flag. You don't get that in Massachusetts.

Also on Necessary Facts
Austin at Night
Stadtluft Macht Frei
South by Southwest 2013
Images from SXSW 2013
South by Southwest 2012