Vegas Sphere UPDATE: we fixed it!
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- čas přidán 26. 10. 2023
- Here is the original video over on the main channel: • Why does Vegas have it...
The photo of the wall was thanks to Lee Pospisil!
Check out Linus' channel for more typography fun: / @linusboman
This is the page on the Sphere's site with the now-correct value of pi: www.thespherevegas.com/science
Thanks to everyone whop got in touch and helped in various ways.
Join the craft team of Patreon supporters: / 91629849
And thanks to whoever at the Vegas Sphere who decided to very quietly fix the site. - Věda a technologie
Engineer here. I have no doubt that there are several versions of the drawing for this wall between the architectural drawings, engineering drawings, contractors drawings, as built drawings, and they may very well show different alignment due to differences in font used or other architectural, engineering, or construction changes made to this wall.
Yes, now the burning question is: did they get the wrap correct as built. As in, does the "end" of the first line wrap correctly to the start of the second line '9209…'?
Engineer here. I agree.
@@akda5idI would be amazed if that was the case. It’d be rather impressive attention to detail if so.
Like they would have had to have Matt or a writer from the Simpsons right there with them.
That's my thought - that the wall got slightly longer at some point so they had to regenerate the drawing.
With all those lines of digits, I assume the fire extinguisher is there in case of pi row maniacs.
Surely this deserves more likes
Best thing I’ve read all year
I can't believe you've done this.
This is one of the best puns I've ever read.
I absolutely hate that I thought this was just an inane comment, and it was only when I left the video a few seconds later that I got the joke. Hate hate hate love.
You know, I'm kinda even happier about them putting back that small 2 that was omitted before than about the big fixed PI digits image.
It’s the little things in life.
And now to disappoint you by letting you know they still have a more obvious mistake the Geodesic Math graphic (as of time of writing)...
As a graphic artist that does a lot of design work for physical spaces, I am eternally grateful that nothing I work on is ever going to receive the same level of scrutiny as this, haha.
I've done so many hacky little cut-and-paste jobs and (even as a math nerd) I can absolutely see myself making this same shortcut. I know that if this was my workplace, for some reason the only version of that pi wall design that anyone could give me is an (outdated) version that's been flattened and outlined, (i.e. the text isn't editable anymore). Given the change of font on the updated website, this might actually be the case 😂
+
@@MCAndyTI have a feeling graphic designers flatten their text on purpose to keep you dependent on them for any changes, speaking as a video producer who works with graphic designers (I have asked, and I've never gotten a straight answer)
@@thecianinator It's probably more that it is easier to export in a way that flattens it than any actual malice (Somewhat "Hanlon's Razor") because knowing the sorts of programs they use, the formats that don't do that are often proprietary, while you're probably looking for them to send you them in other often proprietary formats.
@@thecianinatorflattening text is the only way to guarentee that the end result is identical to what you send them, because different programs interprit text differently
@@hoorahforsnakes and, well, different systems might not have the required fonts installed
And of course to honour Matt they have renamed the older version "The Parker Pi".
It's so satisfying that they've changed it, no doubt as a response to your audience.
Sidenote; The developers and designers of the site got started _waaaaay_ before the final design for that wall (or indeed most things within the building) was finalized. So yes, they've undoubtedly used an earlier InDesign/Illustrator/cad file. We developers tend to use early design files/mockups during development and it's shocking how often those files end up being part of the final version. I've been a web developer for over 20 years now and even though the final TODO is always to clean up old mockup imagery, there's always something that is missed. It's usually not that big of a deal though.
You MUST make a long video on the sphere. Im sure there are a lot of easter eggs there. I hope they get in touch and officially invite you to make a video with them.
Agreed!
Yes, they definitely should invite Matt and thank him in that way. Hope they will do it.
I think Matt is angling for the same a bit. Mathematical Tom Scott.
I want Matt to find out whether the sphere is actually a true sphere with the bottom cut off, or if it is something like a slight oblate spheroid. Using trigonometry and laser rangefinders. And some oranges.
@@tomsixsixlaser orangefinders.
I am almost disappointed you didn't went on and estimate the length of that corridor based on that photo. I was sure that it was where this was going.
Ditto, I thought the same
WOW! I did not anticipate this happening! I am glad they cared enough to address this.
Them putting in the effort to explain all the math and describe the science on the site made me 100% expect they would fix it. I'm a little surprised they heard about the issue so soon, but not very surprised; Matt's influence on the world is growing.
@@KyleJMitchell I think they just left it to the designer to add in the values of pi. Maybe the maths guy sent it in hard paper. Of course, how hard is it to include the first few digits of a well known mathematical constant? Everyone could it, right? Right? Right?
there was a situation with the film titanic, where a astronomer wrote to james cameron, that the star constellation during the scene of the sinking titanic was all wrong.
in a later release of the titanic on dvd (maybe within the production run of the dvds), he actually changed that to reflect the correct star constellations (as they know the date, time and the location where the ship sank, they easily could recreate the sky from that moment and location, they first just did not bother).
@@robertheinrich2994 That's interesting. Thanks for sharing that story.
@@robertheinrich2994 Yup. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson btw.
The restoration of the missing '2' digits in the arches is so satisfying! May the gods of mathematics bless all involved in this effort who somehow are still active despite the building project having been completed.
I find it pretty funny that they made an entire new image for the website when, at least in my eyes, they could have just had the right edge fade to black to imply that the text continues off the page until it wrapped around for the second line
You know that an "entire new image" is a piece of pi compared to making an appealing fade to black?
But this is about science not artistic license.
yeah although it looks like the font they were using was wrong/out of date so it was a branding correction as well
It's all well and fine that they fixed the website, but what about all the damage it caused? How many interstellar spaceships will miss their targets because someone relied on this version of Pi?
If the ships are larger than a meter or so, they will be fine.
Don't forget the emotional scarring
@@mal2ksc
Hitchhiker reference acknowledged.
not to mention the fact that thats the version of PI they used to actually build the dome
@@presto709 As an (apparently fake) fan of hhgttg, I don't get the reference:(
You should show the Feynman-point. It has to be somewhere on that wall, because it's just after the 762nd digit, where you'll find 6 consecutive 9s.
I'm a vegas local and I was hoping I could just swing by on the way home from work and walk in and try to convince staff to let me take a picture of that premium suite, but it looks like you need a ticket to even enter the building. the next event is something called "the sphere experience," which does actually seem pretty cool, the next showing is oct 29th but tickets are a bit expensive lol. I'm glad someone else local was able to get a picture. still might check out the experience this weekend tho
Same! lol
That moment when you're having a sphere experience.
And they didn't call it the Exspherience? Sad.
I am also local and just tried to look for it instead of talking to the cool robots. As I have learned from staff, the wall of pi is on the event floor, only open when general admission tickets are sold. So the regular "Sphere Experience" show, aka "Postcard From Earth" would not include admission to the wall of pi.
As a graphic artist, I think they just grabbed some interesting looking numbers and thought "no one's going to check that!" And as a graphic artist having been in the field for over 35 years, I know *they always do.*
Matt Parker is so strong that he influenced them to change their website
Well, but not strong enough to change the incorrect stylized representation of footballs on UK highway signboards.
You're saying he's the Chuck Norris of the maths world?
I still think the spacing between numbers might not always be perfectly even, for the sake of making them align at the right edge.
Spacing between characters is usually different for aesthetic reasons, kerning is an art and not an exact science. Some characters have bits that poke out and sometimes you can move them closer than just using a simpler bounding-box separation algo for example. On a wall as large as the ones in the sphere I bet it's basically impossible to tell that there's more or less space between numbers to make em all fit nicely since it'd be so distributed.
The Solution would be to use a monospace font. Even letter width promotes even spacing.
@@RhinoRapscallion i don't think the designers would do it, the 1s would have a disproportionate amount of dead space around them and it'd look a bit odd
@@RhinoRapscallion The 1s would look weirdly separated from their surrounding digits if you used monospace. Every "1 1" or "1 1 1" would create a black blob on an otherwise uniformly-shaded wall. This is why kerning exists.
You need the tail end of the wall too - to see if they truncated the design when they changed the wall length or if they wrapped the text correctly.
If they muffed it, we can be quite certain that they won't fix it.
Yes, I agree that we need a photo of the other end to confirm if they are wrapping at the right point.
Oh wait.. the website itself shows that end doesn't it? Ima check right now
edit: Nope I can't see the digits properly without the fancy saturation tools from the original video.
edit2: Found the spot in the first video - czcams.com/video/tLPL8pM8Xkw/video.htmlsi=9qSoNZCMjnF_3MlC&t=971. unfortunately the image doesn't show the right hand edge. So yeah, we still need the photo from the far end.
You know you’ve made something amazing when communities on the internet want to fix the tiny details ❤️
As soon as you showed the extinguisher I started obsessing about whether they'd spaced the digits round it or not. Chuffed you addressed it in the video
I was so sure this will happen. Congratulations for having such an influence!
Hi, I also posted this on the other video, but I'll try again here:
I found a way to replicate the number wrapping (although with a different font) :) At 11:38 (of the original video) I paused and wanted to try it with all fonts. And then the 5th font in my list matched^^
Steps to replicate:
Take "3." + 1382 digits after the point. (Or 1059 digits, if you don't want to fill the 4th row)
Open mspaint (windows 10), make the canvas bigger than 2799x112 px.
Add a textbox, paste the string of the first step.
Select all of the text, change the font size to 12, the font to "Bahnschrift".
Resize the textbox to a width of 2799px. (2798 also works, but shifts the last 1 to a 5th line)
Important for the resize: Keep the zoom to 100% otherwise the status bar shows a different width!
Also, I noticed that you can use ctrl+mousewheel inside the textbox to zoom the text but that is ignored after completing the text placement.
I saw this comment there too. Bahnschrift matching widths is cool, it's a fun display font for special uses.
Web Developer perspective. I've seen such things many many times. The website designer simply took the sequences that are similar in width - so it looks nicer. IMHO the previous version looked much nicer than the fixed version😅
You can have it look nice, or you can satisfy the pedantic nerds who make up the exclusive audience for the page in question. They're very proud of their math, and Matt isn't the only one who commented, I'm sure lol
My only issue with that is that there are two different pages... one title the artists and one titled the science. If it's on the science page where you display all these mathematical formulas to me accuracy is first and visual appeal second so long as its not horrible.
if they took sequences with similar width, it's still suspicios that these sequences appear aso far from each other at roughly the same intervals. plus, they didn't aling the first row with the rest of them, "6" hangs by half its width
2:11 "20/20 vision" is not perfect, it is typical/average.
As for the digits on the wall not wrapping at the expected place, it is unlikley that the plans filed with the county go into the specifics of the text on the wall. The instructions to the builder might have been specified as "the digits of pi" (or more likely they provided the digits so as not to expect the company doing the actual decorating to know what they were) in such-and-such a typeface and size. The lines would have been wrapped based on how the digits actually ended up filling the length of the wall which would be very unlikely to match how they wrapped in the designer's CAD software.
Was scrolling to see if anyone had pointed this out! Pet hate of mine when 20/20 (or 6/6 as it would be written by almost any optician outside of the US) is referred to as perfect.
The retina limit is typically in the 20/10 to 20/13 range (or 6/3 to 6/4 in metric).
Yeah the digits are just a fancy vinyl wrap or something similar, I don't see why that would ever show up in building plans
Not only is the sphere website fixed, but also this video
Nice. I'm looking forward to the revised update.
Really, shoutout to the website maintainer of the Vegas Sphere!
That was such a minor and esoteric mistake but they still go out and fix it.
Kudos!
I would have thought that Matt would be satisfied with their "Parker value" for pi.
Great to hear you got this sorted out! 👍👍
Just a quick tip: If a website won't let you zoom in on a picture, the easiest way to get around it is to right click -> open image in new tab 🙂
It's a background image, so the process is a bit more tedious.
I can't stand websites and browsers that don't easily allow you to zoom.
In my experience, if you open the page source and do a text search for file extensions (jpg, jpeg, png, etc.) you can usually find the original image. Also, text searching "og:image" can work as well sometimes.
I right-click, select copy image, paste in Paint, then use Paint's zoom capabilities. Because sometimes the browser will not let you zoom an image no mater what you try.
I just zoom on everything using my laptop's cursors
Aah, man! I was frantically trying to post the new value they're using, and here you have it already. You're quick. Good one.
That's awesome! You proved that math is important once again! (Imagine if they will fix fonts on the whole website because of this video)
So glad that someone was able to find it and take a pic! Didn’t even realize the mystery was already solved 3 days ago. Thanks for the update.
To do my calculations I always used the pi's number from Sphere's website but could not figure out why my calculations were 0,00000001% off. Thank you for fixing it!
I am heading to Vegas tonight! And I will visit Sphere tomorrow!
Your second channel is truly a pinnacle of math nerdity and I’m here for it.
I went to the sphere this week shortly after seeing your original video and happened to be in one of the suites and took a picture of the start if the wall, then I was sent this video showing me I'm too late
Great result. BTW Did they wrap around per panel or over the full hall (4? panels)?
My wife thinks I'm OCD because I align the labels on the cat food cans in the pantry. You, sir, are on a whole other level.😀
My son is Asperger's and he arranges everything in our pantry cupboard, sometimes it'll be by size and other times he's done it by brand. He'll do the fridge also occasionally.
Somewhere, there is an executive in charge of the communications and marketing for this business watching this video with hand on brow going, "OMG are you kidding me?! Let it GO!" 🤣
All publicity is good publicity, particularly when this is being done respectfully (he's made several attempts to find reasonable explanations for the errors). I'm sure they would love it if it becomes a subject for Half as Interesting or a similar channel.
Or the exec is happy putting in a mistake like that amplified their new building into conversation and they rapidly fix it which is good pr.
This is so pedantically nerdy…. Loving it!
How sure are you Matt, that the print on the wall is correct? They might have cropped that too.
Good point! We could need to verify it against the far end as well.
@@mattparker2 Next video headline: "Vegas Sphere UPDATE 2: we fixed the wall!" :D
This is why every business needs a style guide (and their team to actually follow it).
Someone from the QA team (might be a subscriber) probably put the Jira ticket with the title like "Incorrect Digits of Pi Used as Images in Website Design". With the screenshot from the video attached :)
Love it. Keep us advised
Thank you for solving our worlds problems. This kept me up at night. I didn't know how to function as a person... UNTIL, the exact number of Pi, on one website, (that isn't used to confirm the exact number of Pi) is correct. I can sleep easily now.
Love your content Matt ;)
Next step: Get them to let Matt run some fancy python scripts (christmas led style) on the sphere :p
When I saw the new version of the website I immediately thought it was a different font, and I'm glad I thought to wait and see if it was addressed before frantically skipping back and forth to see if I could spot differences between the two 😅
In the last video we saw gaps between the panels, they'd push numbers on the first line onto the second. Could be that the whatever CAD file they used for the website didn't take into account the practicalities of installing the panels.
Part of me wishes for some mystery to still be unexplained until one day one person gets in touch (hopefully in a ridiculous way, like at a show or something) and just flat out tells you. :D
That fire extinguisher placement is cursed.
Thanks for a quick dirty video Matt, helps a lot.
Speculation on Clark County rules regarding fire extinguishers is exactly why I'm subscribed to this maths channel
Amazing how fast that was fixed. Or just another good example for the small-world-experiment in combination with modern communication.
You should have worn the "Fix the stadium ball" shirt for this
THIS needs a deep dive Matt - STICK WITH IT!
I think what this shows is the diversity of how the mind works across populations. Some folks, usually the very technically minded who are 'wired' for STEM topics will find it very troubling that pi is incorrect here, and maybe think something like "How COULD they write out pi incorrectly! Wow, what's going on with those designers that they messed this up!". That is reasonable to a lot of people. Some don't care as much about appreciating the overall design, and pi being incorrect is a big mental hurdle for that.
However - the beauty of that webpage is somewhat lost on technical people, while it is thoroughly appreciated by the more creative and artistically inclined people. It's a tremendous bit of graphic design, and a lot of work went into it, and they see that. The fact that the pi expansion is technically wrong barely affects their opinion of the design at all! The artists who drew that webpage are creative people, and art is about how everything comes together in the end, and the overall concepts and themes in the artwork as a whole. So they didn't think to double check the digits of pi - it wasn't a priority at all! The overall communication of the art was the priority.
To the artists, the digits in that section were just a microscopic part of the overall look and feel of the art - mathematical precision was not of utmost importance to them. But it is like kryptonite for the technically minded people! I have no problem with either viewpoint. People's minds work in different ways - and thank goodness for that!
I agree, mathematical faux pas aside, the graphic designers did a wonderful job. To them they are "just numbers". They are probably amazed that anyone even checked them. I made a comment on the main video likening their attitude to the digits to the shifters in an art gallery that chopped about a foot off a large masterpiece because it was too big to get through a door. To them, it was "just a picture".
The mysterygift that keeps on mysterygiving!
Perhaps the mismatch between wall and the old website image is from messing with font size when designing the wall? You could use the height of the wall and see if a nearby font size that fits an integer number of rows on the wall has each row starting as on the website?
You are doing the Lord's work, Matt.
Congratulations! You did it!
I've never thought about that MC Escher drawing in the background: It looks like a tessellation of a hyperbolic disk. So nerdy, but cool.
Now I'm curious if the digits of pi wrap properly at the end of the wall...
Finally the answers we need.
Note to self: never get wallpaper for wall of pi unless you’re prepared to check every digit or if you do don’t invite nerds over.
Yay! The bridge is fixed as well! :D
They absolutely saw your video. No doubt about it!
I'm very impressed. First that they've put a math and science education page on their site and even featured pi in the design of that awesome looking hallway -- particularly impressive given that it's something as mainstream as a concert arena. Second that you guys figured out their mistake so well. And third that they took the time to fix it.
I suspect they didn't use your image because the right hand edge of it doesn't align very neatly. Looks like Graphie uses fixed-width numerals which guarantees perfect alignment and improves readability of numbers. But then the first line still doesn't align neatly because of the decimal point, which is variable-width since the same character is used for periods in sentences and it's mostly a variable-width font.
I thought the numerals looked more aesthetic in Acumin than Graphie, but it's better to have the correct value so it's overall a win.
If the wall in the hotel is several subsections of wall (say every 5 feet you get some sort of repeating installation unit), check to see if the digits line up to create the original "wrong PI" if you remove 1-2 of these subsections. My thinking is, maybe the wall was intended to be shorter (or longer?) and the original CAD file for the PI numbering was for a different length wall, which of course would impact where you start your 2nd, 3rd, etc row of digits.
Same thing could be from a change in font size?
Are you able to calculate the length of the wall based on the writing/Font? Figure out where the 2nd line is in Pi, and therefore how many digits go down the hall?
There are irregular gaps where each panel ends because they couldn't/didn't print across panels so you wouldn't be able to get an exact number, you might be able to be close but you could potentially be off by a digit width or two per panel
This video made me giggle so much.
after seeing the fixed site I'm pretty sure some designer/layouter removed the single digit "2" from the bridge because they didn't want to have the same digit twice vertically (the row above also ends in "2"). Making the display area a bit narrower to move the line break around would've been a better fix, but removing that digit was easier.
This is hilarious, and amazing.
This was my favorite internet drama of the year
They could have picked any random sequences of digits for the 2nd and subsequent rows, and those sequences would have been found *somewhere* in the digits of pi.
I don't think that's known to be true
@@HugoNobrega87 if the digits of pi are known to be an infinite sequence, and are known not to repeat, then it follows that every combination of digits must be found somewhere within the sequence.
Nope, that doesn't follow.
For example, 0.101001000100001... doesn't repeat but doesn't contain all sequences
(not even all sequences of 0s and 1s. for example "11" doesn't show up)
@@HugoNobrega87 Argh, you've made my head hurt. I see how my logic is wrong here. A bit of research shows me that we'd at least need proof that all digits are equally probable, which we don't have. I know when I'm beaten.
The next question, considering you now have the left and right ends of the wall, is whether the end of one line matches up with the beginning of the next line of digits.
Is it possible to calculate the wall width based on the character spacing and the line offsets?
That might be more complicated than it appears at first glance. The spacing between, say, a 7 and a 4 might be significantly less than between a 4 and a 7. Just makes it slightly more interesting, far from impossible.
This is so cool!
Acumin Variable is a wonderful typeface for a standard sans-serif that includes variable widths and weights. I like it as a body font with Bebas Neue headings.
I think Matt here deserves Waldo's prize for having made the correct value of pi a justice in the USA.
Just from a cursory search through the digits of pi, it seems the wall digits are correct (about 330 digits per row), but the picture on the website is not of the last panel; there's presumably one more panel to the right that's out of frame. For example, the "2222" that occurs at the right at 3:53 is at the 4902nd decimal place, but the next row is the one that starts "1447" (fourth from the bottom at 4:26) which is at the 4960th decimal place.
"Viva Maths Vegas on Ice"
Sounds like a great show!
Also likely, the CAD file was designed elsewhere, sent to the company to make the wall covering. That file had to be altered or scaled to fit the wall as measured, resulting in a deviation.
Looking forward to "Viva Maths Vegas on Ice"!
The wall was probably shorter when they had the graphic designed originally.
Or possibly pi was going to start after the fire extinguisher (you'll notice the ...1715... bit starts just after the fire extinguisher.
Those are the two likely options. Either the wall increased in length or the graphic increased in length.
They mightve changed the font size ever so slightly to make some features in the wall line up with the numbers. or maybe the wall had a bit that extended out further but they removed that bit.
Either way, changing the wraparound slightly.
I think you should still go on a trip to Vegas!
137K subs
137K views.
Love your videos Matt!
❤ from India
My guess is the wall continued in a previous version above the passage and they changed it so the opening is from floor to sealing instead of open door or so..
Looks like a new font, so they couldn't find the font either!
Yeah this makes it seem likely that the website designer only had access to some sort of flattened version of the original pi digits design, thus why they settled with cropping it, instead of just reflowing the text into a smaller box.
I'm now wondering if the wall wraps the digits properly or whether there are digits missing or repeated.
Viva Mathsvagas on Ice - now that's a show id like to see
Significant figure skating.
You've got a photo of the left and right ends of "the wall". It should be easy enough to look at what the last digit is on the top row on the website and see of the next digit is the first on the next line in the employee photo to determine if it is the same wall or not
Using a font with monospaced numerals (like Graphie) and not kerning the decimal point looks awful.
I don’t think I’ve properly found a home for part of my personality. It’s the part that falls in love with solving the most minute puzzles and non-conformity. I watched your first video and I loved, instant like, subscribe and bought your book, and then I finished the video and loved how you clarified how small of a difference the incorrect pie would cause. And then today I saw this video and I just feel so much less alone in the universe. Thank you!!!😂
It's impressive how much effort goes to mathematical pedantry :)
Hooray! I love results~ π
You guys 100% got someone fired over that mistake
Wow, that second part where you're trying to figure out if those cropped numbers come from the same wall seems like an unnecessary exercise in frustration. There's any number of reasons that would be, so many in fact, that I was going to list some examples but decided not to because you can think up your own.
I think they had a 100% detail 3D model of the building and the webpage developer had access to it so they took a screenshot. Then either they changed the length of the wall, or when they sent the font to the machine to do the work it didn't have that exact font so they had to use a slightly different one, or maybe the machine had a way to display the font that was different than their architecturing program, because some programs display the letters as is, and some programs add a space. Hmm. Sub-pixel rendering? The architecture program might have snapped the fonts to the nearest pixel, but the building machine might have had many more degrees of accuracy, so its fonts can be scaled to be fractions of pixels, but the Architecture program defaulted to full pixel widths.
The old font looked more sophisticated.
Might be simply based on just picking strings that fit in the image dimensions so they're all the same length in pixels or very close to.