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10 Ways To Celebrate Pi Day
alphadogg writes "There are holidays, and then there are holidays for nerds, and March 14 (3.14) is one of those. Based on the mathematical constant number that represents the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle, Pi Day has grown to become somewhat of a day to celebrate for mathematicians and techies. Here are 10 things to do on the big day."
To take your examples, "When were you born?" You need to know the context of the question. If I think the asker wants to know my age, then I only give the year -- they probably don't care about the exact date. If I think the asker wants to plan a birthday party for me, then I tell them the month and day, and maybe add the year as an afterthought. The same logic applies to V-J day. Are they asking because they want to know the year, or because they want to celebrate the date?
That being said, Year/Month/Day is a good convention. I don't quite agree that it's better than M/D/Y, but it's at least as good, and there is a strong argument in favor of it. My real point is that the European standard, D/M/Y, is stupid and inefficient. I suspect Europeans get so used to bragging about the clearly superior metric system, that they figure that everything else about Europe must also be better. Hence their insistence that soccer be called football (despite the fact that they invented the word soccer) and that Celsius is better than Fahrenheit (despite one having standard outdoor temperatures generally fall in the 0-100 range, while the other awkwardly crams them into -15 to 40).