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March 14th Officially Becomes National Pi Day
whitefox writes "The scoop from CNet is that 'The US House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a resolution introduced two days earlier that designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day. It urges schools to take the opportunity to teach their students about Pi and "engage them about the study of mathematics."' The resolution is available online. I doubt it'll ever become a national holiday, but the Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."
your elected officials...HARD AT WORK!
Steak and Blowjob day has already claimed March 14th.
http://www.steakandbjday.com/
Ahh, Congress. Finally get around to encouraging schools to use this for educational purposes on a year when it falls on a Saturday. Brilliant.
What makes pi so special? Support making February 71st e Day!
"Pi string in the article is pretty cool in a nerdy sort of way."
First thought: Ah, they have some kind of string representation of pi instead of just using a double. Excuse me, I'll kill myself now.
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
I never get used to the MM/DD way of typing dates. If it wasn't for the sarcastic remark (3/14, get it?) I wouldn't have caught it. Unfortunately, we will never get a Pi day over here, as 3/14 doesn't exist. A sad day for the European lovers of Pi (a secret fraternity of which we do not speak)
Underholdning.info
On a saturday!?
Someone didn't think this through...
Anyways, I hereby reappropriate this holiday as National Pie Day. I'm having strawberry-rubarb.
The last one was March 14, 1592. There will be another in 13917 years.
Ian Ameline
[curmudgeon]
Good work on declaring a National Pi Day on 3/14, for whatever significance a Congress-designated "National * Day" has, but they had to do it when it falls on a Saturday? Methinks that schools won't do much to teach about Pi and math on a Saturday, and a lot of the significance of the date would be lost if they taught about it on Friday or Monday, neither of which are 3/14.
[/curmudgeon]
Those who anthropomorphize science and/or nature already believe in an intelligent designer.
What a better reason to be caught in the perplexity of deciding what do get for celebration: Boston creme or Apple?
Unfortunately, we will never get a Pi day over here, as 3/14 doesn't exist. A sad day for the European lovers of Pi (a secret fraternity of which we do not speak)
No problem. Define Pi day to be 22/7.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
On a SATURDAY! Clearly we need to change the value of Pi to something like 3.13 or 3.16.
I just told my girlfriend it was National Pi Day, and she asked me what kind I wanted ;)
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
National e day....2/73 which could be 2/((28|29)+31+(14|13) -> 13/4 or 14/4
Heh.... in that way it can have two... trumping Pi!
Well, except in Alabama, where pi day is 03/01. :D /yes, it's been debunked //it says something that people believed it ///i still think it's funny
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Th US has so many serious problems that need addressing and they waste their time on this?
How about teaching children about all the ways mathematics is useful in the sciences, engineering, public policy making, risk analysis, investments etc. rather than advocating pointless numerology that makes "mathematicians" look more like deranged Pythagoreans who worship numbers?
...conspiracy literature and impact drills to students with number affinity should not be recommended considering the consequences where they may already suffer from teachers like these.
The last one was March 14, 1592.
If we are going to use the Gregorian calendar, then we should probably see what Europe knew about Pi in 1592. According to Pi History, there was no significant contribution to the understanding of Pi in Europe after Archimedes until Ludolph van Ceulen came up with a 20-digit approximation, in 1596. I'm afraid he was 4 years to late for Pi day.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Two quotes from MIT admissions correspondence:
"MIT Regular Action admissions decisions will be made available online on Saturday, March 14 at 2:00 PM EDT... actually, we'll probably have decisions posted a minute before 2pm."
"Receiving your decision online is as easy as pi."
As if your culture isn't already obsessed enough with food.
Because I love a parade! And those geeks are just so darn cute!!
Actually, I don't know what to say. Really, no idea at all. Although I have to admit that anything that raises math-awareness in school is good, but will it lead to that?
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".
This means that every person you know speaks English. This is not the case in Europe...
us brits have to wait till 31st of april
schools to instruct maths classes that "Pi is a theory, not a number", give equal time to all 10 alternatives of its last digit (the value of which they invited their critics to "simply prove") and make sure all books contain respective warnings as drafted by the Landover Education Board.
;-)
SCNR
It's bad enough that I had to put up with pointless shit like this from the idiot teachers in High School, and now this is becoming official?
Pi day? Really? You just happen to celebrate the alignment of a set of three numbers? Who the hell cares?
I wish they'd approve holidays for subcultural groups, like the "National Day of Slayer" (National Day of Prayer needed a counterpoint). It's for metalheads and anyone else who appreciates that Slayer is like Dvorak with balls.
National Day of Slayer
Futurist Traditionalism
Well, it doesn't matter, because after you've taken care 3 and 14, you still have the rest of the decimal precision to consider: .0015926...
To be certain not to miss the critical moment, the students would have had to have been celebrating at some point between 137 and 138 seconds past midnight this morning.
since the 3 and the 14 part are in different units one might as well continue that strategy. If you celebrate at 4 pm then on a 16:00 hour clock that is 15:16 to give
3:14:16
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's probably a personal problem, but the representation of dates has always confused me. Once I found out about the ISO format, I was like "That's it!" Now I only ever use ISO, because it's as close to self-explanatory as you can get - everybody knows it's not their native cultural format because it starts with the year, and if follows logically with the next smaller time measurement in each position. I'd like to see us forget all date formats but ISO.
We write 22-7 in the Netherlands, pi isn't close to 15.
Come on, seriously, this is what the house of representatives is doing? Wow, just wow.
If pi was a country this would be the national anthem : http://pi.ytmnd.com/
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
3.1415926
March 14th, 26 seconds past 1:59 AM!
I could rip it all the way down to picoseconds, but I'm fscking lazy. DO YOUR OWN DAMN MATH!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
In Europe we celebrate Pi on the 31st of April...
...oh!
http://xkcd.com/10/
I'm surprised no one beat me to it. I guess all the real geeks are out drinking 3.14 PInts of PIlsner in celebration.
What's 14/3 got to do with pi?
Everyone knows the real pi day is July 22.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Methinks I'm going to watch the movie "Pi" by Darren Aronofsky :D.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I think the true "Pi day" starts at
January 3rd at 03:23'53.60469... and ends 24h later...
Any other "monthDotDayHoursMinutesAndSoOn" or "DayFirstDigitOfMonthDotSecondDigitOfMonthHourMinutesAndSoOn" is absolute nonsensical.
I should recall that some nations also use different calendars.
Methinks you underestimate their ability to multitask in such endeavors. They have been wasting time on frivolous stuff just as long as they have been raping our rights and pocketbooks. (Even with pi-related matters for that matter, for over a century!)
How about teaching children about all the ways mathematics is useful in the sciences, engineering, public policy making, risk analysis, investments etc. rather than advocating pointless numerology that makes "mathematicians" look more like deranged Pythagoreans who worship numbers?
Okay, but only with respect to important sciences, engineering, etc. Throw away all that crap that only exists to help people accumulate and manage their imaginary currency. You can't take it with you, so why waste time on it? Only facts of true, undeniable, universal importance should be taught.
In UK, the day number is written and then the month number. So 3/14 is an illegal date. However, we have 22/7 (22nd July), which is our pi day. AND it is a better approximation to pi than 3/14. Yet another reason to change US date formatting to UK style.
designates March 14, 2009 (3/14, get it?) as National Pi Day
Jeez, can't you guys get anything right? 3/14 is about 0.214 not 3.14. No wonder your economy is fscked.
22 July = 22/7 = 3.1429
While it's always easy to bash politicians for doing something meaningless, to some extent that is inevitable in a system where powers of legislation are separated from powers of execution. Individual Congressfolk are not the ones hiring and firing the school chancellors, teachers, admins, etc., nor do they set the property tax rates (the most common way local school systems are funded in the USA) or school budgets. The effects they can have on education are at the broadest level only, like federal budget suppliments, standards setttings before such suppliments can be recieved (see the NCLB...), etc.
The reality is in the USA, the primary education system is a highly local affair, with standards set by local sensibilities. This is one reason you keep seeing movements to push creation 'science' (it doesn't deserve the word unless surrounded in scare quotes) pass or nearly pass school boards in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas, to name a few. In the USA as a whole, about a third of the population rejects evolution outright (see National Geographic or a gazillion other polls). The evolution deniers are not evenly distributed across the USA, but more clumped. Certain congressional districts, I'm guessing, have half of their voters (or more) who would vote against a congressperson who declared that they would vote for a bill to promote science standards if the mandatory teaching of evolution was a part of those standards. With a constituency like that, the odds of passing (at the federal level) a significant, science-standards based education bill are slim. Remember, 1/3 of the USA population rejects evolution outright. That's a lot of people. So, instead, we get National Pi Day.
So, look on the bright side. Now that we have a National Pi Day, maybe we don't have to worry about attempts to legislatively redefine pi any more....
I can not see anywhere in the House resolution that Pi Day is March 14. It only says that it supports the designation of a Pi Day and its celebration. Is this just me or the date of Pi Day is actually left undecided?
Did anyone else read this and think "WTF?, why are they wasting time on motherfscking stupid crap like this?" or something to that effect?
How do you verbally say a date? Every person I know says "March fourteenth two thousand nine", not "fourteenth March two thousand nine".
No actually I always say 14th March and I write it that way as well. That is how it is written and spoken in English. Even you Americans refer to the 4th of July and not July 4 so clearly you used to pronounce it that way but have somehow lost it over the years. So if you are speaking American you are probably correct (with the one exception) but when speaking/writing English the correct way is always 14th March 2009. If you don't knwo any English speakers then there is no reason for you to have known this though.
Just wait for the party on 4 October, good buddy.
and yes, I know its just supposed to be funny, and I agree its worth a chuckle but it just pisses me off that congress will argue for weeks about things that really affect peoples lives and add all sorts of riders onto it for some pet project of theirs that has nothing to do with the main item but they trivial crap like this gets cleared in a few days.
I'm tired of all the talking, its time for deeds, not words.
Just for the sake of argument, has it ever seemed to anyone else that measuring a stright DIAMETER with a straight stick and a curved CIRCUMFERENCE with the same straight stick was just bound to cause trouble? How are a curved line and a straight line equivalent enough to measure with the same stick? Yes, you can measure both kinds of thing with string, but if you start going around corners with a piece of string, haven't you accidentally discovered the old dee-wye-dee-eks-iness of things?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Be careful what you wish for. I think it would be worse if trivial crap was also bogged down for weeks in pointless debate, and crammed full of riders, wouldn't it? ;)
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
One appropriate way to celebrate is by calculating it. Here's a one-liner for Ubuntu/Debian:
It would be fun to have a program implementing a digit-extraction method that would just keep on printing digits of pi until you turned it off. (This is different from a traditional method, in which you have to decide how many digits to compute before you start summing the series.) Anyone know of any good open-source implementations on Linux? Apparently Sage's arbitrary-precision arithmetic is much more efficient than GMP. For example, (2**123456789-1)%(2**12345678-1) in Python, which uses GMP, takes longer to run than I was willing to wait, but (2^123456789-1)%(2^12345678-1) finishes in about 10 seconds in Sage.
Find free books.
The more they occupy their time with frivolous stuff like this, the less time they have to plan their next rape of our rights and pocketbooks.
They took no time at all to pass the "Rape and Pillage the Taxpayer", er, "Stimulus Package".
Hell, they couldn't even read it because Pelosi had the vote because her broom was all ready to fly her to Europe for her vacation.
So much for "Change". I guess the "hope" part is what we get to abandon.
And of course, Nancy Pelosi claims she's "not partisan"
Believe that? If you do, I've got a couple of nice bridges in New York you can buy. Cheap.
...which is ideal e.g. for a Daily_2009-03-14_23-59.log
There, it's the girls who give the boys they like chocolates on Valentine's day. A month later, on March 14, the boys respond with chocolates to the girls they like. If this becomes Pi day, well, maybe they'll be giving the girls round pies instead of chocolates... ;)
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The *real* holiday was way back in 1592. The next one will occur in the year 15,926.
Better luck next time, house of representatives.
This might be rellevant http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqpWETqoD5Q
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
15=3 oclock; 92=55 minutes; 65=39 seconds so official pi is 3:55:39 today. Not accounting for rounding errors. Or is it at 1:59:26. The problem with that is late night or afternoon. I think that only works if is 01 not 1.
We can get an official day for something as pointless and nerdy as this, but I still can't get a day dedicated to straight white guys? We have National Black History Month, Latino something, womens something, but god forbid you want to recognize that the vast majority of significant accomplishments in this country were done by plain ole generic white guys. How about the national black prisoners day, celebrating violent crimes (oh wait, that's a minority group but they represent the majority of violent offenders in prison).
Would our elected representatives please stop masturbating on useless crap like this and get some real work done?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
Real time video of Pi Day's Eve celebration 2009! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1QcnhShq2A As part of the first Official National Pi Day, we've filmed this historic event in real time, starting on Pi Day's Eve and continuing into Pi Day with the traditional Calculation Celebration. After viewing, many can recall Pi to eleven digits!
Obey the Pi's including me. I except some butt kissings, nice gifts, etc. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
PI IS EXACTLY THREE!
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
This is just a holiday designed by "Big Bakery" to drum up sales. Yeah sure, Marie Calendars and Coco's really care about science and math. When will the politicians learn not to cave into Big Bakery's lobbyists.
And it's still the most useful thing congress has done all year, amirite?
...Over Simon & Simon
My wife and I celebrated our Pi anniversary a couple of years back. 2pi is coming up soon--my time how flies.
MMMMM! Pi(e)
We've already had 1234567890 Day, Pi day, what next?
3/14 1:59:26 pm PT
After reading the other replies to you, I'm humbled. You, Sir, has served at least 5 whooshes. I take my hat off to you.
(To the other 3 who understood, my admirations.)
Beware the ides of March I say! Beware!
LOL.
Posting anonymously as I've already moderated in this thread.
In continued fractions, the 2nd approximation to pi is [3;7] = 22/7. If we compare the relative error of 22/7 to pi versus 3.14 to pi we get:
|22/7-pi|/|pi| = 4.025x10^-4
|3.14-pi|/|pi| = 5.0696x10^-4
The relative error of 22/7 to pi is less, so 22/7 is a better approximation to pi than 3.14. Hence 22 July makes the better date than 14 March (the totally objective fact that DD/MM/YY is superior to MM/DD/YY, both of which are inferior to YYYY/MM/DD, notwithstanding ;D ).
Born on the 17th. :D
I must learn what time exactly!
It'd be cool if I were born pi days after Pi day.
You'd think that they would choose March 3(.14) as National Pi Day.
For me, everyday is Pi(e) Day.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
considering that 22/7 is closer to pi than 3.14, I think it's definitely rather more than less.
Actually, it's not.
pi = 3.14159265358979... (yes, that is from memory)
22/7 = 3.142857142857... (that is from my calculator)
Just ONE DIGIT past 3.14 and 22/7 is already less accurate. (pi = 3.142... while 22/7 = 3.143...). Furthermore, if you're dealing with measured numbers at all and need to keep track of significant figures (not like you'd be using memorized approximations of pi in such an instance anyway), 3.14 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/100 (that is, 3.14 is somewhere between 3.13 and 3.15), where 22/7 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/7 (that is, 22/7 is somewhere between 21/7 [or 3], and 23/7 [or 3.29]). So not only is 3.14 more accurate at it's precision than 22/7 at the same precision, but 3.14 is more precise than 22/7 as well.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I call bullshit. Pi totally pwns e, and anyone who says otherwise must work in marketing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Still, i don't rate pi in the same regard as e or the fsh (137.0359996), since pi is a matter of how it is defined, whereas e and fsh come as a single value.
The current thinking of the circle constant, usually taken at pi, from high dimensions, is that pi/2 serves better, and for physics, 2pi might be better. pi/4 and pi/6 have also been mooted, as the content of a unit circle and sphere. (of diameter of unity).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Yeah .. if I wasn't a nerd I would call it a little gay, but...
If you have to write your date with slashes instead of periods, make 10/3 your pi-day, then you're getting at least one figure right. Too bad you put the month first, or else you could make July, 22nd (22/7) your pi-day, and get three figures right.
2009-02-01 would be the first day of february of year 2009 AD.
That's because
When using ISO-8601 you should RTFM (no sense in talking about something you don't know about)
Assuming you didn't RTFM, the particular ambiguity we're talking about is not present, as the date format used does not match the "little endian" or "middle endian" structure.
There's nothing to make you assume something different that "big endian" since it's very logical to do so, and the major languages that use that syntax (japanese and chinese) for the date all use YYYY-MM-DD format.
GPG 0x1B479C78
A company called Reflection T-shirt company has a t-shirt named Key Lime Pi. The perfect accessory for your calculator! http://www.ReflectionShirts.com
Too true.
Pi as C/D of a circle is only the calculated value in a place that does not exist as far as is known -- a perfectly "flat" space. In other words, a place containing no matter or energy to warp space. Can such a place even be said to exist, even in theory -- and in what sense could such a space be said to exist? Leaving aside dubious considerations of dark matter and dark energy even.
Can a truly flat space even be said to exist at all? How could you even tell if it did? Lack of quantum fluctuations or zero point energy? If you got there to measure this -- you'd warp the space by the presence of your measuring equipment, eh? Not the same as the uncertainty principle, this is worse.
Therefore, Pi as such simply does not exist in any real space we are aware of -- all spaces are curved one way or the other, so the theoretical Pi only exists at the zero-crossings, if any, between positive and negative curvatures. IF you want to teach the kids something -- use that fact to open their eyes to the universe we actually seem to live in.
Now, get off my lawn.
The real pi day will happen on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589793..., but I guess I'm just splitting hairs here.
Should clearly be on 22nd June so that generations of US graduates will have tiny circumferences and even smaller areas :-)
here 3/14 is the 3rd of....er...never.
...
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
In 1897, a physician and amateur mathematician from Indiana named Edwin J. Goodwin believed that he had discovered a correct way of squaring the circle. He proposed a bill to Indiana Representative Taylor I. Record, ...
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