Finding Waldo in π
With acknowledgement to the palette hack discussed in the other comments, I still think there's a ton of value in this.So often, people observe patterns in nature that appear to be so unlikely as to be by design. I have family members that are superstitious: if a light flickers at the same time that they mention a recently deceased loved one, it must be "a sign". Similarly, they will point to some overwhelmingly unlikely occurrence in the news, and ask, "how do you explain that?" The answer is usually random chance (if not deceit). And this exercise is a good illustration of that."Waldo, in the digits of pi?!? What are the odds??" - To the outsider who is not scientifically minded, this just looks so coincidental as to be magic. But almost any pattern can be found in randomness. It's just that the size of the necessary search space explodes as the query becomes larger / more specific.The average HN reader knows all this, but the Waldo story is still a cool way to describe it to other people.