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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
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."
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.
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
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!)
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....
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.
I hate the 22/7 approximation, because too many people don't think it's an approximation. It seems people more intuitively grasp that a decimal can "keep on going" than a fraction can be an approximation. At least, I've met more people who think "22/7==pi" than "3.14==pi". It's not a useful approximation either; you're going to grab a calculator to divide 22 by 7, that calculator will have a pi button on it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
...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.
We write 22-7 in the Netherlands, pi isn't close to 15.
Five more minutes, but noooo, my mother had to give birth on the 21st. *sigh* I would've been a Leo as well, instead of Cancer.
Oh fiddlesticks!!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
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.
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.
...Over Simon & Simon
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.)
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.
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
Too true.
The real pi day will happen on 3/14/15 at 9:26:53.589793..., but I guess I'm just splitting hairs here.
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, ...
Tag lost or not installed.
22/7 is the 2nd approximation to pi in continued fractions. It's actually an extremely good approximation, and the relative error is only 4.03x10^-4 or about 0.04%. compare this to 3.14, where the relative error is 5.07x10^-4 or about 0.05%.
Decimal expansion is not always the best way to describe an irrational number (or even a rational number). Your next best bet is probably the 4th approximation, 355/113, which has a relative error of 8.4914x10^-8, and is almost as close as 3.1415927 in decimal.
Going back to your original complaint: yes, you may have a calculator with a pi button, but not always. 22/7 is often good enough, is handy for quick calculations and is easy to remember. I'm sorry the people around you don't know enough maths to get the significance.