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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."
Call me back when you have a list with 3.14 ways to do it.
You got something? Next time use a condom. Kids these days!
If would have the benefit of doubling as an "e-/i-(something)" pun in addition to its numerical quality. And no, don't say it. I'm aware that my suggestions tend to be irrational.
Ezekiel 23:20
Rather than one single page which you can read in one go?
Gonna go home tonight, and grill up a few steaks. And then hopefully the wife will give me a hummer... screw pie day, it is Steak & BJ Day!
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
I'm on the east coast of the USA. This story was posted two minutes before it should have been.
Posted by samzenpus on 01:57 PM March 14th, 2012
The pain was excruciating and the scarring is likely permanent, but that just means it's working.
...walking in circles all day.
That was an incredibly dumb, ad-laden slideshow. How much does Network World pay to get adclicks for these stupid stories? Seriously did they spend anything more than 5 minutes chunking that turd out?
Support unicode in Slashdot tags and comments?
It's my birthday. When all of your friends are nerds, they totally forget about it.
I think this is what having a birthday on Christmas like.
I live in Alabama. Pi day is the whole month of March!
'3'
Ok
I'm joking.
Here's the Snopes article on it
Nah, I'd rather have cake. But I will have 3.14 slices of it.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
"Based on the mathematical constant number that represents the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of a circle"
In case you're reading slashdot and don't know what pi is.
Sensible to you maybe. The American way reads the way the date is normally spoken. We usually say "March 14th 2012", not "the 14th of March 2012. Sometimes other people do things differently. We also drive on the wrong side of the road! Get over it.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We're having a bevy of Pi Pies in my office today. Yum!
Celebrate with 3.14 slices of apple pie. I refuse to slice it any thinner, as it tends to crumble.
Which means? Hmm....metric Pi?
Gimme my Pi in Yards any day!
It's my 9th anniversary. It's awesome that it's on Pi Day, I never once came close to forgetting it. I always get reminders, like emails from Think Geek!
So celebrate on June 28th and leave the rest of us alone . . . but I'm taking a copy of the Tau Manifesto to the Pi party tonight. Mostly so that people will be prepared for the Tau party.
That's not the way it's normally spoken here.
The American way reads the way the date is normally spoken
Only in America though- most people elsewhere say 14th of March. That said- just about all countries have thier idiosyncracies... ... admittedly America has more than most.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Personally I like Pir by Autechre, it appeals to the math/electronics geek in me I think.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
First I taught my kids (age 5 and 6) about Pi with a circle drawing and a ruler and some string.
Then I taught them about the greek alphabet so they would understand what the "Pi" symbol came from
Then I taught them about homophones
Then I taught them about puns based on homophones
Then we made a pie, they learned about measuring and cooking.
Then we ate pie while they snickered about the fact that they don't have to do school work during spring break.
In English, you read it "March 14th 2012 in Spanish you read "14 de Marzo de 2012". I agree with you about doing things differently, but for some things it is better to have worldwide standards (like the metric system), to avoid expensive mistakes (like the Mars rover).
Like it matters at this point...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Here's the real top ten list. (to get the real networkworld.com just click reload ten times while reading this)
1) Sing "Shes my Cherry Pie" by ... Winger I think, as loud as possible in your cube at work. Bonus points for interpretive dance and/or dressing up like the girl on the promotional poster. Extra bonus points for posting the video of your performance to youtube. Extra Extra bonus points for getting the video pulled for (c) violation. /. holiday. To celebrate, if your significant other is female, buy her a new PC video card, install it for her in your PC, and use it for her to play skyrim all night. Thanks Honey!
2) Buy a raspberry pi linux board. Ha ha, you can't. Maybe by tau day?
3) Wasn't there some dumb movie a decade ago with some line about warm apple pie is like sex or something? Well you figure it out, then watch the dumb movie, and/or bake a warm apple pie, then...
4) This isn't a hallmark holiday, this is a
5) File a bug because I only provided 4 ways to celebrate and promised 10. Idiocracy quote: Carls Jr, F you, I'm eating (lunch in my case)
See you on Tau day when I present another fun filled click fest of meaningless things to do about nonsense (although that sounds like a modern political platform).
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I am a little happy that Pi day is noticed, and perhaps gives an excuse to think deeply about something rather than just bake pies - but it's a pretty lame list. I propose my own:
1) Read about Tau vs. Pi. The arguments for what we can choose in mathematics vs. what is given, require one to think quite a bit about what is useful in math vs. what is convention and makes one, frankly, appreciate pi far more than any of the activities in the article.
2) Actually try to measure pi. Note I didn't say, 'calculate'. It is revealing how hard it is to actually measure things in the real world beyond three or four significant figures, and it makes one appreciate the beauty of abstract calculations.
3) Read about e. e is actually much cooler in many ways, but because there is no ridiculuously simple, visualizable definition of it, it doesn't get the limelight (such as it is.) A great historical book on e: "e": The Story of a Number
But if you insist on knowing what the slideshow list of ten things is:
1) Make a pi-themed pie
2) Rock a Pi Day T-shirt
3) Write Pi-kus or Pi-ems
4) Go on a pi scavenger hunt (this, at least, has some vague mathematical attraction, although you could accomplish the same with a random sequence)
5) See how many digits of pi you can recite
6) Watch "Pi" the movie (gibberish math, but a cool movie that gets a little bit of the obsessional nature that can capture those who dive into abstract mathematics)
7) Listen to Pi music
8) Tell Pi Day jokes
9) Celebrate Albert Einstein's birthday (same day)
10) Read a book about pi (they don't even suggest the classic historical work on pi, by Beckman: A History of Pi
Like I said - mostly silly, not very mathematical. I would prefer pi day be a day of observance rather than a secular holiday :-)
...but April only has 30 days?!
(for those with a logical "day -> month" progression)
Since all of last year's paperwork is in storage boxes at Iron Mountain, month/day sorts just fine.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Has it occurred to you that the date is spoken in that order in America because that's how it's always written here?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The real pi day is pi approximation day is 22/7. Death to the unbelievers!
3.14159265358979323846 26433832795028841971 69399375105820974944 59230781640628620899 8628034825342..70679
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
1337% of pi is 42
The American convention puts them in order of importance to a listener, and is WAY more logical than the typical European standard.
Month > Day > Hour > Minute (With the year, only as needed)
When someone asks you when an event takes place, the logical response is to give them the general time frame, and then refine it. For example, "When is your party?" is met by "The seventeenth, at 9 PM". It's understood that it's this month and this year. Another example, "When are you starting classes?" is met by "August 26th". Again, it's understood that it's this year, so you start with the most general time (month) and refine from there.
The year is rarely needed in speech, and when it is needed (such as in discussing history), it is usually on it's own. "When did Constantinople fall?" "1453".
In the European method, you give the day first, without giving the month. This is akin to giving the hour before the day... "When is your party?" "9 PM. On the seventeenth. Of June." It's totally backwards -- no actual information is conveyed to the listener until you finish the statement. The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end" grammar, about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire language, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which the audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be baffled, are told, is a perfect analogue.
How about celebrating Two's Day... two being the ratio of a circle's diameter to its radius. Make it the second working day of every week...
I was having a really hard time understanding why it's pi day, thanks for this details.
I find the US date format extremely confusing, being that ISO date format is used day to day, and, ocassionally, the DD/MM/YY format. Standards are not really something the US seems to like.
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
When I write in my lab book, I write the way you said it. But when I need a computer to store data, yyyy-mm-dd makes the most sense.
We actually had this issue come up at a company I worked at. It's a multi-national, but the Americans insisted we switch all the computer program to use their date format. Eventually it took the CIO saying "too bad, this is corporate data standard" to resolve the issue. Mostly because it absolutely broke everything if you had to do data interchange (or share the system).
It may be closer to how we say dates, and match up with how many of us write dates, but once it's being stored in a computer, it's kind of a dumb format.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
*The* European format? Which one? Just 1 of 3 globally? Try dozens. You've obviously never done any i18n.
Um the American convention is Month/Day/Year. So "in order of significance to the listener, leaving out the parts that are implied/unimportant" doesn't work. If the year is important then it's in the wrong place. Assuming that if the year matters nothing else does is not a safe assumption. "When you were born?" First you should tell me roughly how old you are, then when I should send you the birthday card. "When was V-J Day?" again the year is most important, but the month and date are as well.
The best convention is Year/Month/Day. It matches the idea of ordering them in terms of importance (decreasing significance) and is the best for sorting.
The enemies of Democracy are
When I got home yesterday my daughter asked me "Will you help me make pumpkin pie if I go get the stuff for it?" I said "sure" because opportunities to hang out with my daughter are rare to be sure. So we're making pumpkin pie, well she is, I'm just there for moral support I guess.
I ask "So what is the pie for?"
She says "Tomorrow is pi day so I'm bringing pie to school"
I say "Oh, cool"
Inside I'm thinking "How the fuck did I get shit this right?"
signed,
stumbling into success
I wonder if I had to celebrate PI day in 3rd of January or what ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country ).
What the are you talking about?
This post missed some of the the most important things to do on Pi Day in my opinion. You should learn something about math on Pi Day, like something about Euler's Identity. You should teach your kids the wonder of math, there are simple things like teaching them about the area of a circle or you could show them Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land. You should not just bake a Pie but decorate it or some sugar cookies with circles, ellipses and cylinders. Make the day into an event. Celebrate being different, we are Geeks after all. Lastly of course you can't forget the Mathematical Pi song. Play it LOUD!!
Jeff | MemVance - Memory Advanced | View my blog on memory and study techniques
Most of the kids in my town will be celebrating April 20th.
Have gnu, will travel.
12 x 5280. Wouldn't you be more interested in how many cm fit in a km? Both are trivial.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I find it more important what date it's on than what month.
"When is your party?"
"On the 9th".
It's understood that it's the upcoming 9th. Just like it's understood that it's this year. Unless we need to specify.
"9th of May"
or even
"9th of May, 2013"
The American equivalent would be:
"In April", which basically a useless bit of information for an event taking place on one night. Sure it's covers longer events "The roadworks will be done in May" or when you're not bothered to give specifics. "Eh, in April?"
All in all this all depends on how much detail is needed. "When does your flight arrive?"
For some, the answer "around midnight" will suffice, but some need to know "Twenty past midnight".
And as such, the point that the spoken language should control the order of the date/month/year setup is ridiculous.
Logic > Language
But if Americans can't pay enough attention to grasp the information in the sentence "9th of May" because of the word order, who am I to judge?
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
1. Move out of Mom's basement. LOL. Nerds.
If it's understood that it's in April, then you don't need to specify the month, so "9th of April" doesn't add anything.
If it's not understood that it's in April, then you should establish that first, since "the 9th" is meaningless until then.
In the American standard, "My wedding is April [listener starts thinking about what he's doing next April] 9th [listener now refines his thoughts to focus on that date]."
In the European standard, "My wedding is the 9th [absolutely meaningless so far] of April [listener now can start thinking]."
If you can't see that the former is more efficient, then I can't help you. Try putting aside your constant feeling of smug superiority, and evaluate the systems on their merits. I have no problem acknowledging that the metric system is infinitely better than the imperial one. Why do you have such trouble accepting that perhaps your date ordering scheme doesn't make any sense?
If someone asks when your birthday is, you tell them month/day. If they ask you when you were born you give them year/month/day in accordance with the idea that you are going from the general time frame to the more specific, bearing in mind that *just* the year doesn't give them your current age. Same with V-J day. If treated like a holiday (like your birthday), month/day is sufficient. If treated like an event (like your birth) then year/month/day is the way.
Basically in any case year/month/day omitting the unnecessary conveys information in a better order than month/day/year.
Also, Celsius is better than Fahrenheit because aside from at least being related to physical properties (if you're standing on an ocean beach, you could calibrate your Celsius thermometer right there), it also is translatable into Kelvin through simple subtraction. "Standard outdoor temperatures fall in the range 0-100" doesn't hold any weight with me -- even if I hadn't I've spent my entire life in places where that was not true. I mean, so what? Negative Fahrenheit doesn't mean anything other than "fucking cold". Negative Celcius means "There will be ice."
The enemies of Democracy are
Not that you couldn't conceivably calibrate any other kind of thermometer, the point is that the two values you are using for your calibration are separated by a power of 10 divisions for maximum easy of drawing the lines.
The enemies of Democracy are
That said- just about all countries have thier idiosyncracies... ... admittedly America has more than most.
Not more idiosyncracies; just less "syncracies"...
At least for everyone in the world that prefers the "day/month/year" system over the dumb "month/day/year" one.
Also, 22/7 is a better approximation to the actual pi value than 3.14.
And... on that day I will, if all goes well, on vacation, so I'll be able to actually celebrate the day.
There.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
If the decision of how to store it is being influenced by how it should be displayed (or vice versa) you're doing something very, very, wrong.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll buy Popeye pi pies.
Just remember, kids...
Pie R Round
Cobbler R Square(ish...usually)
This space unintentionally left blank.
And don't forget, here months 9-12 are named after numbers 7-10.
The rovers weren't a mistake. It was another expedition that crashed.
He's confused about in America and here for the same reason a fish doesn't understand what "wet" means.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thanks Mr. Johnson for giving us the entire month of March as the month we celebrate The New Pie!
Congrats to everyone who gets the reference.
That said- just about all countries have thier idiosyncracies... ... admittedly America has more than most.
Not more idiosyncracies; just less "syncracies"...
We certainly have a lot of other things that start with "idio-" though...
Mathematically equivalent values are equivalent mathematically.
This is even sillier than getting upset over the current convention.
The enemies of Democracy are
Someone please mod this one up for me.
And don't forget, here months 9-12 are named after numbers 7-10.
You have the Caesars to blame for this phenomenon.
In case you haven't seen it yet, the Tau manifesto proposes we should use Tau (2xPi) instead.
But officer... Tau is not very funny!
I found my DOB within the sequence. MMDDYY http://www.eveandersson.com/pi/digits/1000000
Shouldn't it have been at 9:16:33.600 on the 4th?
So send me pie! I'm not picky, but chocolate cream is my favorite...
That's still wrong. We live in a three-dimensional world, and the full solid angle is 4*pi. Let's call it psi. It is obvious that psi is the right number to use. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Sensible to you maybe. The American way reads the way the date is normally spoken. We usually say "March 14th 2012", not "the 14th of March 2012. Sometimes other people do things differently. We also drive on the wrong side of the road! Get over it.
I'm American, and I say "14 March 2012." So do millions and millions of my fellow American veterans, because that is the way you say it in the US military. No need for extraneous noises like "th" or "rd" on your numbers, a fact early radio operators noted and approved of. That's my oral convention; I wish the American written convention was like the EU's: Decreasing significance makes sorting things by date *so* much easier. Btw, since you brought it up -- driving on the right hand side of the road means most people are actually steering with their non-dominant hand while they are working the gears. That was an asinine design flaw that could have been fixed but wasn't, and not just some benign example of an American idiosyncrasy.
But then, Fahrenheit is translatable into Rankine in that way.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I mean, it's still some time 'till July 22nd, why the fuss now?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Chicken Pot Pie or Shepherd's Pie
Salad
Slice of Pie (Your Choice)
$11 in the bay area.
Went there for lunch today :-)
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." --Groucho Marx
You got me there.
The enemies of Democracy are
That's retarded. If it's on paper the format is largely irrelevant, since you have to read it and do it manually.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I did. Circles ended up being kind of squashed and flat, except they were that way all the way around.
(paraphrased from an ancient website about pi approximation day)
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
Agreed, and as far as "fields" goes for days/months/whatever, that way madness lies. For storage/sorting you use whatever time types your DB/programming languages use internally, alternatively ISO 8601 for text storage (as you mention, sort of). For validation/period calculation you use/abuse the Julian date functions (astronomical, not the ordinal day). For presentation and input you use internationalisation. If you're treating dates and times as strings at any point, you're very likely Doing It Wrong (TM).
This should be beaten into every programmer's head in all programming intro courses.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
I usually use yyyy-mm-dd, but when speaking of an annual event (like a holiday), I'd likely say "It's on March 14th", ommitting the year. "March 14th"->"3-14"->"3.14"->"pi". It makes sense to me *shrug*
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
There is no April 31! The rest of the world gets no pie.
Buy a Raspberry Pi - what better way? ! :-)
So I get twice as much Pie? Sign me up!
Shouldn't it be "3.14159... things to do on Pi day"?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I would concur that to most of us, the method of displaying or vocalising dates that you put forward does appear more efficient.
How much of this, however, is because the bulk of us here are card-carrying geeks and think in terms of recursive refinement? I know that after all the database work I've done over the years, I have certainly developed my thought processes along those lines. I also found that as I started to understand RDBMS structures and concepts, my memory improved significantly. How much of this development in my cognitive processes is unique to those of us who carry our cards with pride, and how much is normal for the populace as a whole? I'll leave that question open to the masses (who, let's face it, probably couldn't give a damn, or wouldn't know what I'm on about to be able to draw such analogies).
Certainly, among the non-geeks I know here in Europe, they simply couldn't give a toss which is more efficient, they're more interested in what's more familiar to them. Most of them get very confused when they see dates in "american format", or blindly assume that the date is in "UK format", leading to confusion, exasperation and quite often comments about the "arrogance of Americans forcing their formats on the rest of us". The fact that, in most cases, it is trivial to set the preferences of electronic systems to display in your preferred format is, to most of them, something that shouldn't be the user's responsibility. The feeling appears to be that the world should harmonise on a single format "and ours is the right one, so that's what we should all be using". Convention breeds comfort, sometimes (often?) at the expense of efficiency.
I would imagine that the same is probably true of non-geeks in those parts of the world where dd/mm/yyyy is not the prevalent format. Whether the setting of the convention in the first place was geek-influenced, random chance, or just bloody-minded opposition to former colonial powers for the sheer sake of things, I don't know. Possibly a combination of all three. That being said, I'm unsure of which actually came first, anyway (and can't be bothered to look it up right now, but if someone wants to enlighten us all, please feel free)!
At the end of the day, as stated above, best practice for programming / database design purposes, is to stick to whichever format your RDBMS / language defines as the standard. Best practice for visual output to the userbase? Roll a die to pick which format you are going to use, because no matter which format you implement, someone's going to dislike it. Even if you implement multiple and let the user decide, they'll feel it's not their job to choose a setting like that, it's your job as a programmer to code specifically for their pet preferences and screw everyone else.
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
GP is taking us off-topic, but to continue in this vein and explain the reference:
Major coach crash in Swizerland on Wednesday night. Many children killed, many more injured.
for details, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17362643
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
When someone asks you how far it is to your house, do you tell them the least significant digit first?
In that case month/day is in fact wrong.
The enemies of Democracy are