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Pi Day and an Interview With a Pi Researcher
JoshuaInNippon writes "In honor of Pi Day, March 14 (or 3.14 for those who may need a hint), readers may be interested in reading an interview with Professor Daisuke Takahashi, the Japanese researcher who found 2.5 trillion digits of Pi back in August, before being apparently being edged out in December by a French computer programmer looking to prove his efficient coding abilities. Professor Takahashi's interview gives some unique insight into one man who truly marvels at the number that has driven people to ever greater lengths to find more digits for centuries."
Plant Kingdom adds "There have been a number of proposals for alternatives to March 14 (see the Wikipedia page for Pi Day). Here's mine: when the Earth has gone through 1/pi-th of its orbit, as measured from Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice. I've put together a web site to make the case."
Huh? Pi isn't 14.3 or 14/3.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Judging by the big hunk of meat in my 'fridge, today is Steak and BJ Day. Pi day just isn't nearly as fun.
Don't forget it's also mother's day. And nobody makes better pi than mom. /duck
In the UK, we have to wait until the 31st April to have pi day. We'll be waiting a while...
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
This is stupid, who thought MONTH - DAY - YEAR is a reasonable date format? Do you frequently find yourself asking "Hmm, I wonder what month it is?" And always make people look in the center to find out the date? WTF
It's like throwing away metric and using some crazy-ass divisible by 12 unit.
Regarding 2.7182's statement: I'm surprised you're not advocating e day (Feb 7? July 2?) instead. The combination would be good, though. Celebrate pi and e, and we get pie! How about pi + e day? At ~5.9, that would make May 9 or Sept 5 into Pie Day.
Calling Fabrice Bellard "a French computer programmer"? Is it a joke?
Pi is relevant to the circumference of circles. The earth has an elliptical orbit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumference
Um...pi is relevant to a lot of things, including ellipses. And besides, the orbit of the Earth has very low eccentricity, meaning it is very close to a circle. Who modded the parent "informative"?
1/pi is not pi. It's like celebrating the third time something happened by doing something one third of the way through and then stopping!
"When a circle's diameter is one unit, then the cirmcumference is pi units." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi]
So if a year is "one unit", we should celebrate pi every 3.14 years or something.
Oh Jesus. Really?
Okay, I'm about to troll, but...
First, do we really need a holiday for every fucking thing out there? Where the hell is dung beetle day? Aardwolf week? Permian Extinction Day?
Secondly, you invested enough energy into worrying about WHICH day should be Pi day that you created a website over it?
Finally, if Pi gets its own day, I think its entirely fair that 1.618 get its own celebration. Phi is easily as fascinating a number as Pi, so why didn't you get your panties in a twist over not having Phi day?
Sometimes, you CAN be too much of a geek.
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End of Troll.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I understand that in the book "Contact" by Carl Sagan, when the scientists meets the aliens he asks them a question:
Scientist: Do you believe in God?
Aliens: Yes.
(Astonished) Scientist: Really?! Why?
Aliens: We have proof.
Scientist: Proof?!!!
Alien: Yes, when we decoded Pi to (a very large number) we found a Message...
Of course this idea was exploited in a different way by the movie "Pi". (Sorry didn't see it either.). In any case, if Pi is truly Random (it is isn't it?) won't every possible message occur? Just like those monkeys with their typewriters (if you don't know what a typewriter is look it up).
Clearly it was a case of circular logic.
Don't you know "e" is illegal in most countries?
This is Slashdot, in case you hadn't noticed. Only on Slashdot is pointing out the trivially obvious considered "Informative."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Yes and No.
.. It is thus scheduled to complete computation on March 14th, 2016.
If the doubling time of computational power is N hours (a bastardization of Moore's law, approximately 17500 hours.. or two years), then it never makes sense to start a calculation that will take more than 2N hours.
For easy visualization of this concept, lets suppose you have a program that will take 6 years to complete if run on todays fastest hardware, and you begin it March 14th, 2010
But you have an adversary who wants to beat you to the punch and announce the programs output before you do. He can wait until March 14th, 2012, exactly two years later than your start date, and at that time buy the fastest hardware of that time period. On March 14th, 2014 his program will overtake yours, and it will finish on March 14th, 2015.
He beat you by 1 year even though he started 2 years later than you did. As you see, it is a futile waste to perform such very long calculations as long as moore's law holds.
A similar concept was introduced to me in a space-ship through experiment. Humanity builds its first set of inter-galactic space ships which can achieve 50% the speed of light, and these ships set off to explore the universe. Surprisingly those first explorers all arive at stars populated by human beings, humans who themselves set off exploring AFTER they did, because inter-galactic drives improved to 98% the speed of light after only a few more years of development.
"His name was James Damore."
I've got 0 through 9 here on my keyboard, I'd have thought with a trivial bit of rearrangement they'd just about do it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."