Slashdot Mirror
Wednesday Is Pi Day
mrbluze points us to an AP writeup on the upcoming Pi Day — 3-14 (which some will observe at 1:59 pm). The article notes: "[T]he world record [for reciting the number Pi] belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness," and mentions in passing a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.
So I won't get a Pi day, you insensitive clod!
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
And of course, the best way to celebrate is to eat PIE!
...a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.
:)
Shouldn't that read "Mental health patient ?"
None the less, that is still very impressive. I wish I had a memory for that kind of thing.
22/7 ?
You insensitive clod!
I live in rural Indiana. We have a whole pi MONTH!
That's just plain crazy!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
It's only actually 'Pi Day' for a limited number of people (Specifically, those in the United States). The rest of the world uses little-endian (dd/mm/(yy)yy) or, as is more appropriate for us geeks, big-endian (yyyy/mm/dd).
In rhymes inapt the great
Immortal Syracusan rivaled nevermore
Who in his wondrous law
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate
Continuing to 100000 or so is left as an exercise to the reader.
The joke is that in writing this out I have to remind myself, as a non-American English user, that "rivaled" is spelt like that, and to do that I have to recite the numeric value of pi up to that point...go figure
Pining for the fjords
These people are really useful member of society, like people who can play monopoly with one foot.
Name that (probably inaccurate) quote.
Max.
If I put together all the digits I know by heart about anything at all, phone numbers, dates, train schedules, computer IPs, heck even application version numbers...
:-)
I don't think the total would be more than a thousand digits
How do they do it?
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Can you image if he gets a mail from Guinness saying "Sorry , you missed the record by 10. Or at least we think you did but tape 26 got chewed by the machine at digit 54166. Bad luck son, try again next year and next time use Memorex!"
Following the discussion about the date/time format, in continental Europe we proud ourselves in experiencing 13-3-7, or 1337...
..."One day I shall know them all. I mean, how many more could it be, right?"
Quoth Monty Python, "You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going "squawk, squawk, squawk..." And then you can go "Neurhhh! Neurhhh!" and then you can roll around on the floor going "pting pting pting"..."
Well, it's one kind of counselling...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
which some will observe at 1:59pm
;)
It can also be observed at 3:49 a.m., which is then 0.159 of a day; it's also much easier to have a minute's respectful silence at 3:49 am
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I feel it's only appropriate to add that march 14th is also international steak and blowjob day
See link, but who am I to question slashdot?
They say:
"Akira Haraguchi, 59, managed to recite the number's first 83,431 decimal places, almost doubling the previous record held by another Japanese."
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
I ask because when I was a child, I remember reading about the "reciting digits of pi" record in the family Guinness Book of Records. It had a photo of the then record-holder, standing in front of a chalk board, upon which was written "3.142857142857142857142857..."
It's not hard to recite the decimal expansion of 22/7.
jmp
... in the comments? I mean, seriously, who cares about Pi when you can get a steak AND a blow job (and if you're good, at the same time?)
On a serious note, check out the website of your local Engineering school... a bunch (here in Canada anyway) have a Pi Throw on March 14th for charity. You pay $10, somebody gets a cream pie in the face (or, often, they can pay $20 to redirect said pie back to you). The proceeds usually support something worthwhile.
A pi recitation was mentioned on "60 Minutes" a couple of weeks ago.
The european record holder is Daniel Tammet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet/ who has autism and recited 22000+ digits.
Lets see the date is 2007-03-14.
Ignore the year and you have 3-14
Not a huge stretch from taking the year off 3/14/2007.
Now I make a reply involving my clever trick for rusty memories. Mnemonics usually challenge one; my own Slashdot post offers an easier path. You can memorize, and my account retrieves karma!
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
This is the Wrong Pi day. The correct one falls at precisely twenty-six and half seconds past 01:59 hours localtime on the 31st of April! :P
As for the blackboard, it's probably just there for the sake of the photograph. A picture of someone reciting pi probably wouldn't be too remarkable.
See?
e ak+and+Blowjob+Day
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=St
So you do get 3.14. Or, more preciselly, [2007.]3.14, but you can skip the first part.
Tuntematon Muukalainen
does steak and a blowjob day get buried when talking about March 14th. Of course, that's probably because most people here won't be celebrating.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
in the first hours of the day at 01:59:26 by drinking 53 beers with 5 strippers, 8 friends and the volume turned up to "9" while watching the movie "SE7EN"
The original generic sig.
those who celebrate pi are just showing their inferior education :-)
I recall a certain rivalry over memorizing digits of pi back in high school. Everyone was around the 2-3 hundred mark when one guy threw down the gauntlet - 500 digits. Well, I put the memorization effort into overdrive and reached about 2,500 before being "crowned" the undisputed school champ. (Yay!)
Interestingly, that fall in my frosh year at university, reciting pi turned up as a big contest among the first year math students. 2,500 was enough to take the crown at university also.
There is actually a very efficient way of memorizing strings of random digits one you get the hang of it - the key is groups of 5. The technique works well enough that 25 years later I still remember 500 digits. And the workout I gave my memory skills serves me well today still. Strings of digits are simple - tell me your phone number just once, etc.
100,000 - now that's impressive. I can tell you from experience, that memory will serve him well in chemistry, especially organic. More power to him!
For the non-Don McClean / Madonna fans it's July 22nd or 22/7 as we'd write it.
April has never had 31 days. Check Wikipedia.
n/t
Why oh why does everyone ignore the fact that 3.14 is Einstein's birthday too? :'(
Wow, I can recite 42 digits and I thought that was a lot. Guess I'd better lock myself in a dark room for a couple years...
I'm not a mathematician but I wonder why it took 26 tapes to record 24 hours..?
Logic? What is this logic you speak of? Can I buy it at the mall?
WEDNESDAY IS EXACTLY 3!
Steak and BJ Day!!
Guys need to stick together and make this new holiday a success... quickly. But just like how my wife is always more excited than I am about 2/14, I am definitely more excited than her about 3/14.
Go figure.
mrbluze points us to an AP writeup on the upcoming Pi Day -- 3-14
Ok, which retarded state legislature is trying to redefine Pi as -11 now? Is there new Biblical evidence that those people who claim that Pi is exactly 3 were off by 14?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
To be fair, the mnemonic I quoted was the only one that actually refers to pi indirectly in the text - because, for the classically challenged, the "immortal Syracusan" is Arximedes who identified the invariance of pi. However, the version in your link is impressive, though as literature it sucks badly and the author obviously needs to get a life.
The mnemonic that most clearly reflects its purpose is, I think
How I wish I could recollect of circle round
The exact relation Archimedes found.
Short, but to the point.
Pining for the fjords
While there are certainly ways to memorize lots of things, the extremely high number of digits leads me to suspect that they are calculating rather than memorizing. If you got good enough at doing the calculations in your head, you could effectively go on reciting the digits indefinitely.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
The month is before the day because it is a larger unit. Just like we put the tens before the ones in decimal numbers. the year is last because generally we remember what year it is, so when we think of the date, we say "March 14th". then the year after a comma/pause. Makes more sense to me than saying 14th of March. That would be like saying "the fourth of teens", instead of saying "fourteen".
Weebl say, "WANT PI NOW!"
four-ten
fourteen
14
I see it...
One of the designers at our game company posted this poem a month ago for a company poetry contest. He declined to have credit given for fear of all the hate mail that would pour in :)
It is a favorite project to I,
To reassign the value of pi.
I would make it just 3,
For it is simpler you see,
Than 3 point 1 4 1 5 9
I like this one: Memorize this: 113355 -> 113\355 -> 355/113 = 3.141592...
last year the news about approaching pi-day contained this info: :-)
3-14 also was einsteins birthday
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
If you want a tip, here's something a read in a book by a Norwegian memory world champion
5 10582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706 798214808651. That's from memory and with no tricks.
I've memorized pi to 110 digits past the decimal point - 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937
I have gotten to the point that I have no doubt whatsoever that I could fairly easily memorize it to thousands of digits without using any such mnemonics or other tricks. I just choose not to put the effort into it. Although, I will say that practicing for such "frivolous" things has improved my memory in many ways. For instance, I have every credit card that I own (five) memorized including numbers, expiration, CVV2 and toll free customer service numbers. Makes it much easier to order things online!
I'm convinced that I'm not special. Anyone is capable of doing it, it just takes work. My 2 year old son has memorized dozens of books that I've read to him and even if I don't read one to him for months, he still remembers it. I don't think 2 year olds are special either - I just think he hasn't been taught that memorizing things is hard yet so he naturally does it.
Everyone's brain is capable of more than we give it credit for, it's only our laziness that makes us rely on calculators, PDAs, etc.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This thing has got all of you beat.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
March 14th is also Steak and BJ Day!!
Exactly one month after Valentine's Day where the ladies get just what they want, they created a day for us guys. I told the g/f and she is down with it. She just said that as long as she is involved, she's game.
Oh, and I once recited Pi to something like 45 digits. Not too impressive, but I memorized it just a couple of hours before a competition and came in 3rd. Ah, college.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
So lets sum from n=1 to infinity 1/b^n. Basic Calculus returns a value of 1/(b-1)
This is the probability that the partial digits of pi will be a pallindrome, for base 10, the probability is 1/9. Though it is almost certainly true for binary.
For the existence of a odd length Pallindrome, I exclude the trivial singleton of length one. So as from two to infinity. This comes out to 1/(b-1).
since he discovered the fastest-known algorithm for calculating pi, the one still in used today. Perhaps also noteworthy for the 65,000+ digit reciters is that only 39 places of pi are sufficient to calculate the circumference of a circle around the known universe to within the radius of a hydrogen atom. "The Man Who Knew Infinity" has more.
I come here for the love
Similar to the Four Nines Puzzle, and Four Fours Puzzle:
What numbers can be made with four copies of the number "pi"?
Jonathan's page hotlinked here includes a complete list of equations representing,
with four "pi", every integer up to 1,000, and many beyond that.
http://magicdragon.com/4pi.html
Where do you even find 67,890 digits of Pi to memorize in the first place?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This was a great issue of debate, but it was silenced after the World Trade Center was attacked on the 9th November 2001. Bizarrely, we were united after the attacks in London on the 7th July 2005.
Shouldn't that be at 1:59 AM ???
My (hopefully) interesting pi anecdote:
While living at a dorm at Kansas State University in the '80's, I used to do my laundry in the wee hours as any self-respecting college student would. On occasion, Rajan would shuffle into the basement laundry room, as I studied while my clothes agitated/spun. In his hand would be a book of Pi. He'd hand me the book and ask me to follow along as he recited. We'd start at the beginning, then after a while, he'd have me start flipping open the book at random locations and ask him the number at any particular spot. It was quite interesting to experience, to say the least...especially considering I lived several rooms away from him, and on several occasions saw him rifling through his pockets, trying to remember which one he had put his room key in.
He (Rajan Mahadevan) held the world record in the early '80s with something like 30K decimal places (which he had recited to a national Indian audience on the radio), and was trying to reclaim the title from someone from Japan at the time who I think had pushed it to 40K+. I don't think he ever succeeded however. He was quite a likable fellow.
Bought this can one time, expiry date says "02-09-06". Should I toss it?
"... but that Pi day was more than 4 centuries ago: 31.4.1593"
You shouldn't cut off your approximation like that. Now you're a year off!
Pi =~ 3.141592 6535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058...
Guess your calculator cut pi off after the 6th digit or so?
It's one of those things that not-so-smart people do because it seems like something that smart people would do. Reading digits of PI for 24 hours? What a waste of time. Why not spend that time trying to understand some of the math involved rather than reading seamingly random digits in front of a video camera? Obsession with the digits of PI is about as intelligent as visiting every Starbucks in the world or whatever. The trappings of intelligence, but not the substance of it.
...Actually one number, made up of a chain that is known -- so far -- to be more than one trillion digits long. I think the mean "known to" rather than "known to be", since the sequence of digits of pi are known to be longer than any finite number!!Pi Day should *NOT* be celeberated at 1:59 PM but at 1:59 AM...if you're going to be all technical about the time then 1:59 PM is the 13th (almost 14th) hour of the day. No, I have never been in the military, it just doesn't make sense at PM is all.
Visit www.seriouslythough.com
new metric system: it took him 26 tapes long to spell out pi ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
355 / 113: Much better than 22/7
"I stomp in clown shoes where daemons fear to tread."
some examples in use: in Belgium/NL: Donderdag, 15 maart 2007 - short 15/03/2007
In Germany: Donnerstag 15 Marz 2007 - short 15.03.2007
In France: Jeudi 15 marche 2007 - short 2007-03-15 There are so many different notations; some use dashes, some use minus, some use dots; although the date order is mostly similar in every country
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
actually, if you consider 3 as being the month, then .1415926... must represent the fraction of the month...
Therefore, PI day is actually at 03/05 @ 9:20:42
* 744 hours in March.
* 105.34493 hours to Pi - 3 (fraction of March represented by the fractional part of Pi
hmm
Actaully it would be March 5th (1 based vs 0 based)
105 hours is 4 complete days
with 9.3449343 hours remainder
Resulting in 03/05 @ 9:20:42 AM
hmmm
(My roomate calcuated most of it.
Quote from article:
There's a popular chant, an MIT rallying cry, that includes "3.14159." (It rhymes with "Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
OK -- at RIT hockey games we would cheer
"e to the x, dx dy.....secant, consine, tangent, sine....3.14159....pi r time 3 --- let's go let's go RIT
------
Let the riducule begin
We celebrate by switching mobile phone carriers. Wireless number portability is finally here.
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_SHT/t1021.htm
(Sung to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious)
(Note also that all digits should be read separately, as "Three point one four one five etc"!)
To find a circle's area will often make you queasy,
It's not just simply length by width or anything that easy.
But then one day you'll find a number that will help your brain,
It might be transcendental but it's sure to save you pain!
Oh!
Chorus:
3.141592653589
If you were to say it all then you'd be here a long time.
Multiply by two r and then you will have a curved line
3.141592653589
For the rest of the verses, visit my Pi Song page! :)
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
I'm going to celebrate pi day by taking some e :) I know it's a little irrational, but it could be a transendental experience.
I'm a big fan of pi, but I think we should also celebrate e on Feb 7th at 6:28pm (2/7 18:28).