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10 Ways To Celebrate International Pi Day

Posted by timothy on from the meteor-tail-pink dept.

We'd like to wish you a happy Pi Day. It may be just as arbitrary as some other holidays (though perhaps easier to schedule than some), but any excuse for some delicious food is one I'll take. Reader alphadogg writes with a few suggestions of ways to take part in this convenient celebration of both rationality and irrationality. (And lead your comment with the number of digits you can recite offhand ...)

19 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Party! by bidule · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Go to bed at 3:08:30 AM, not 3:14:16 as heretics would do.

    --
    ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
    1. Re:Party! by Q-Hack! · · Score: 2

      Personally, I am waiting on Tau day; June 28, 3185

      On a side note, does anybody know a good cryogenics lab?

      --
      Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
  2. Celebrate Pi by fustakrakich · · Score: 4, Funny

    Put a tiger in your tank

    --
    “He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
  3. I prefer tau day by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I prefer tau day as it gives me an excuse to get 2 pies instead of just one.

    For the record I only know pi out to 5 significant digits 3.14159

    --
    Time to offend someone
    1. Re:I prefer tau day by mike.mondy · · Score: 2

      I prefer tau day as it gives me an excuse to get 2 pies instead of just one.

      For the record I only know pi out to 5 significant digits 3.14159

      Fourteen digits are given by a mnemonic I learned in grade school:

      How I wish I could recollect of circle round the exact relation Archimede(s) unwound.

      Just count the letters in each word.

    2. Re:I prefer tau day by iapetus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I wish I could determine pi
      "Eureka!" cried the great inventor.
      Christmas pudding, Christmas pie
      To the problem's very center.

      Twenty digits (omitting the 3, which everyone can remember anyway), and I find it very memorable.

      --
      ++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
      Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
  4. I know the whooole thing by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can recite all the digits of pi - just not necessarily in the right order.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    1. Re:I know the whooole thing by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can recite all the digits of pi, but only in Indiana: 3.2.

  5. *International* Pi day? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I wasn't aware that Pi was now defined as 14.3

    1. Re:*International* Pi day? by sarysa · · Score: 2

      P.s. I prefer yyyymmdd as the standard and I'm still not poohpoohing this. I'm an atheist and I use xmas as a present day. People yearn for excuses to celebrate, so just roll with it.

      --
      Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
  6. Re:Real PI day by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    22/7

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  7. Eating pie! by Zaatxe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's the only way! ONLY WAY!

    --
    So say we all
  8. *NATIONAL* pi day by ljw1004 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This can't be an "International" pi day. It's a US-specific pi day (Month-Day-Year). It might also extend to Japan and ISO8601 (Year-Month-Day).

    Little-endian (Day-Month-Year) is common to the vast majority of the world's countries. And 3-14 doesn't exist.

    1. Re:*NATIONAL* pi day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Every coder should write the date in the yyyymmddhhnnss format (which would give you 03-14) simply because it sorts properly.

    2. Re:*NATIONAL* pi day by martica · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "International" means "national" in the US. They assume that anything that applies to them, applies to everyone else, and if it doesn't, it doesn't for a reason that doesn't concern them, being as they are clearly foreigners and are just being different for the sake of being different.

  9. Pi is wrong by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 2

    Tau Day

    --
    "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
  10. Re:Real PI day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    not exactly

  11. Why SETI Failed by camperdave · · Score: 2

    Do you recognize this famous number?: 1.3591409142295226176801437356763...

    That's right. It's e/2. Why e/2, you ask? Well, let me ask a similar question. Why celebrate Tau/2?

    A circle is the locus of all points equidistant from a single point. Circles are defined by their radius. The natural circle constant is the relationship between the length of the radius and the circumference of the circle: Tau. No alien culture is going to be beaming 3.14159... into space. They will be sending 6.28318...

    It's no wonder aliens don't want to contact us. We can't do basic math. We must be the laughing stock of the galaxy.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  12. Re:What about 22/7? by almitydave · · Score: 2

    pi - 3.14 = .00159265...
    22/7 - pi = .001264489...

    I prefer to use 355/113 for a fractional approximation (~3.14159292).
    355/113 - pi = 0.000000266764...

    I once wrote a TI-85 program to calculate fractional approximations of pi to arbitrary # of digits. You have to go quite a ways to get better than 355/113.

    I read once that 10 digits of pi was enough to approximate the diameter of the universe to within 1 atom. Not sure that's true, and I'm too lazy to do the math.

    As far as digits from memory, I once set out to memorize pi 5 digits at a time but only got as far as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399... and then I could never for the life of me remember the next five... 51973? something like that? Like my dad always said, "close enough for government work."

    Also fun: I once downloaded a text file with the first 10 million digits of pi (exactly 10 MB, how about that!), opened it with Word, shrunk the whole thing down to 1pt font, and printed page one on a high-end company printer. It took about 5 minutes to spool the job, and the result was what appeared to be a gray rectangle, but was actually the first 400,000 or so digits of pi, which were actually legible with a magnifying glass.

    --
    my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
    I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're