10 Ways To Celebrate Pi Day 196
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."
10? (Score:5, Funny)
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0. Don't observe it but say you did.
1. Observe Pi Day by calling in sick, then running the most Pi-utilising software you have all day long (games).
2. Troll your favourite fora with ludicrous suggestions of how to observe Pi Day.
3. Derive the constant via measuring the circumference of a peni--
There, happy now?
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Observe Pi Day by calling in sick, then running the most Pi-utilising software you have all day long...
So the circumference of goatse divided by the diameter of goatse equals...
Oh you'll be calling in sick the next day too.
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The editors should kill commenting on this story after 314 posts.
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Or only let people with /. user ids below 314159 post.
Re:10? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn it.
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Save it for tau day, you'll be OK then.
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We're all screwed, come i Day.
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They're only letting people with UIDs below 3141593 post. Is that good enough?
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C'mon, you know you should simply celebrate it in one irrational way.
11? (Score:2)
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I choose to procrastinate, so don't expect a phone call.
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Maybe he found pi^2 ways to do it, and rounded up.
That should gave been "e Ways..." (Score:2)
Re:That should gave been "e Ways..." (Score:4, Funny)
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.
It isn't the irrationality of your suggestion that is the problem, it's that it is too complex.
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Unless you multiply it by its complex conjugate - then shit gets real**.
** sorry xkcd.
Why is this article 10+ pages (Score:3)
Rather than one single page which you can read in one go?
Re:Why is this article 10+ pages (Score:5, Insightful)
Less ads on one page rather than 10.
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Thanks, Safari Reader!
2 ways... (Score:3, Informative)
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!
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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!
Ah, you must celebrate the "American Pi" day.
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Ah, you must celebrate the "American Pi" day.
14th March is American Pi day...unless you live on some strange space-time metric where pi is 14.3.
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You just missed it -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Posted by samzenpus on 01:57 PM March 14th, 2012
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He was shooting for pi/2
This calls for... (Score:5, Funny)
...walking in circles all day.
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I'm going to spin in circles on the ground like Curly where my hips are the axis and my body the diameter of the circle. As the Ancients would.
Lame (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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After I eat at a celebration, I know I do.
Eleventh way? (Score:2)
Support unicode in Slashdot tags and comments?
Birthday (Score:3)
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.
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Happy birthday to you Mederbil, 'tis mine too. It is also Einstein's birthday- and my cat's birthday (approx- exact day unknown- celebrated today)
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Happy birthday to you Mederbil, 'tis mine too. It is also Einstein's birthday- and my cat's birthday (approx- exact day unknown- celebrated today)
Happy birthday to you both, and to Schrödinger's cat as well.
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Happy birthday to you Mederbil, 'tis mine too. It is also Einstein's birthday- and my cat's birthday (approx- exact day unknown- celebrated today)
Happy birthday to you both, and to Schrödinger's cat as well.
"Happy"? I dunno... observing those birthdays could be deadly.
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Are you kidding? You have the one birthday nerd friends should be able to remember!
Pi? (Score:3)
Nah, I'd rather have cake. But I will have 3.14 slices of it.
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You should stand OVER the pie and ask for 7/22nd of it. That would be a large serving, but conceivable to eat, unlike more than 3 pies.
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I could eat three pies.
Depending on how big they were, of course, which somewhat renders both our statements meaningless.
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Nah, I'd rather have cake.
But the cake is a lie
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But the cake is a lie
But I thought Pi is Wrong.
Dammit, make up your mind people
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I have actually done that. It was pretty cool. And tasty!
Explanation (Score:4, Funny)
"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.
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I think you are both over-complicating the matter. It is the ratio between PI and 1.
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"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.
Of course. Being of sound mind, we Slashdotters use tau [youtube.com].
In the spirit of Pi (Score:2)
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We're having Pi pie at the office in 3 minutes. (posted at 1:56)
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Pi Music (Score:2)
Personally I like Pir [youtube.com] by Autechre, it appeals to the math/electronics geek in me I think.
Our Pi Day (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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By homophones, you mean iPhones, right?
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No, if you look up the Latin word for "human" and Greek for "man shaped", you'll know that he obviously means an android phone.
Real top ten list (Score:2)
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.
2) Buy a raspberry pi linux board. Ha ha, you can't. Maybe b
Good day, lame list - instead, consider Tau. (Score:4, Informative)
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. [tauday.com] 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 [amazon.com]
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 [amazon.com]
Like I said - mostly silly, not very mathematical. I would prefer pi day be a day of observance rather than a secular holiday :-)
Outside the States (Score:3)
...but April only has 30 days?!
(for those with a logical "day -> month" progression)
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it all makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
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And a century has about pi gigaseconds.
Two's Day (Score:2)
Pi (Score:2)
How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Pie of course (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Way to go (Score:2)
Most of the kids in my town will be celebrating April 20th.
Pi Day, 14 March? 22 July (22/7) is better. (Score:3)
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.
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22/7 rounds to 3.14. If you go one more digit out, it rounds wrong. How is it a better approximation? Because it's irrational?
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Pi = 3.14159265358979.......
3.14 = 3.14
22/7 = 3.14285714...
|Pi-3.14| = 0.00159265358979...
|Pi-22/7| = 0.00126448926735...
So, yeah, 22/7 is a better approximation.
For that matter, 355/113 is much better, but we don't have that many months or months that long in our calendar.
The All Important Formula (Score:2)
Just remember, kids...
Pie R Round
Cobbler R Square(ish...usually)
Marie Callender's (Score:2)
Chicken Pot Pie or Shepherd's Pie
Salad
Slice of Pie (Your Choice)
$11 in the bay area.
Went there for lunch today :-)
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Re:If you are American (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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...
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Has it occurred to you that the date is spoken in that order in America because that's how it's always written here?
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He's confused about in America and here for the same reason a fish doesn't understand what "wet" means.
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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 insis
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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.
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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 mea
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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 m
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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 bes
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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 omittin
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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And don't forget, here months 9-12 are named after numbers 7-10.
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And don't forget, here months 9-12 are named after numbers 7-10.
You have the Caesars to blame for this phenomenon.
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12 x 5280. Wouldn't you be more interested in how many cm fit in a km? Both are trivial.
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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.
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Mathematically equivalent values are equivalent mathematically.
This is even sillier than getting upset over the current convention.
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In case you haven't seen it yet, the Tau manifesto [tauday.com] proposes we should use Tau (2xPi) instead.
But officer... Tau is not very funny!
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That'd be a year early, methinks.
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Celebrate with 3.14 slices of apple pie. I refuse to slice it any thinner, as it tends to crumble.
Seems like a rational amount.
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What the are you talking about?