Wednesday Is Pi Day

mrbluze points us to an AP writeup on the upcoming Pi Day — 3-14 (which some will observe at 1:59 pm). The article notes: "[T]he world record [for reciting the number Pi] belongs to Chao Lu, a Chinese chemistry student, who rattled off 67,890 digits over 24 hours in 2005. It took 26 video tapes to submit to Guinness," and mentions in passing a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.

I live in Europe

So I won't get a Pi day, you insensitive clod!

Re:I live in Europe

Sure you do. On the 31st of April :-)

Re:I live in Europe

In Europe we can celebrate PI approximation day on 22 July (22/7).

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So I won't get a Pi day

Umm, why?

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Because in most places the numeric form for dates is DD/MM/YY. Not MM/DD/YY.

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Because in most places the numeric form for dates is DD/MM/YY. Not MM/DD/YY.

Oh OK. I always use YYYY-MM-DD

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In that case you'll just have to wait until 3141-5-9

Re:I live in Europe

No problem, you can celebrate pi day on 31415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751 058209749445923078164-06-28 :-)

Re:I live in Europe

I've never understood the logic behind the American way of writing dates. I'm not trying to troll here, it just seems illogical to me.

Here at my office we use both the European and International numerican dates forms, depending on the sitation:

European: DD/MM/YYYY
International: YYYY/MM/DD

As you can the units of time (days, months, years) ascend or descend in order e.g. in the European format you go from the smallest unit (days) through the midsized (months) up to the largest (years). In the International format the same descends from largest first.

But with the American format you start with the month, then go to the smallest, then to the largest. It just seems totally illogical to me, anyone know why it's done that way?

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The same reason an American gallon/pint is not the same as a British gallon and is certainly not metric. Americans just like to do things differently, there need not be any logical justification for it.

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Well, it was formed from people who came from Europe. So if you want to point fingers you need only look into a mirror.

Mmm my first rational thought of 2002... yipee!

Tom

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I think the French should have persisted with metric dates.

Re:I live in Europe

But with the American format you start with the month, then go to the smallest, then to the largest. It just seems totally illogical to me, anyone know why it's done that way?

Probably because of the way they say the dates, "I have an appointment on March 14th" rather than "I have an appointment on the 14th of March".

As opposed to, says, french "J'ai un rendez-vous le 14 mars" or spanish "tengo una cita el 14 de marzo". Might be the reason...

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it's more likely that the way it is said is a result of the way it is written, not the other way around...

Well, I beg to disagree... Speech comes before writing. And before knowing how to spell something, the word has been pronounced. With maybe the e

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The American way is original, or at least it was what was in use when the American colonies were part of the British empire. Newspapers in the colonies from the late 1700s use "January 1st, 1776" and the like. I couldn't tell you when the UK changed.

Many

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Ok, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Middle _ endian_forms.2C_starting_with_the_month [wikipedia.org]

"Britain originally used day, month, year, then for a short while used month, day, year, and finally reverted to the original form (day, m

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I'm certainly no authority on this, but I've noticed that Americans tend to say dates in the form "March 12th, 2007", not "the 12th of March, 2007". That may have something to do with it, or the written form may have influenced the spoken form.

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in a way it's as stupid as listing prices in cents.euros.

...or listing domain names as science.slashdot.org instead of the logical order org.slashdot.science.

Re:I live in Europe

Yeah but the basis is wrong. You can't compare hours, days and months to a base 10 system. Real pi day should be (3.14159..)*(365.25/10)=114 (rounding down for effect) = 11th of March. Hey that's yesterday. Happy belated real pi day!

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We can join in, we just need to redefine Pi as 1.43

Well, if you'd be willing to take King George off our hands, he's become quite good at redefining science, so I'm sure he could make that change for you.

To Celebrate....

And of course, the best way to celebrate is to eat PIE!

Re:To Celebrate....

And of course, the best way to celebrate is to eat PIE!

3.14159265*2.71828183

That would be the diet version, only 8 significant digits

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PIE? That would be approx. 3.141592654 * 2.718281828, which is 8.53973422235.
At least in a case insensitive world.

Perhaps a typo?

...a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.

Shouldn't that read "Mental health patient ?"

None the less, that is still very impressive. I wish I had a memory for that kind of thing. :)

Re:Perhaps a typo?

I wish I had a memory for that kind of thing

Me too. Then I could use it for something useful.

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I have a near photographic memory for every useless trivial fact I come across. But when it comes to actual usefull stuff like math, or anything I'd need for an exam, then I've to do real trouble to actually get it to stick. Sometime I think my brain hates

Re:Perhaps a typo?

You could try mind maps [wikipedia.org]. They are more visually oriented than traditional note-taking techniques. I often find I can photographically recall parts of my mind maps during exams.

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None the less, that is still very impressive. I wish I had a memory for that kind of thing

naah, reciting a milliopns digits of pi is easy. the trick is, not to begin at the beginning....

dave

Perhaps this kind of counselor ;)

Quoth Monty Python, "You know, there are many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane. Some of them were born sane. Some of them became sane later in their lives. It is up to people like you and me who are out of our tiny little minds to try and help these people overcome their sanity. You can start in small ways with ping-pong ball eyes and a funny voice and then you can paint half of your body red and the other half green and then you can jump up and down in a bowl of treacle going "squawk, squawk, squawk..." And then you can go "Neurhhh! Neurhhh!" and then you can roll around on the floor going "pting pting pting"..."

Well, it's one kind of counselling...

Crazyness

a Japanese mental health counselor who last fall recited 100,000 digits, but did not choose to submit proof to the record book.

That's just plain crazy!

Re:Crazyness

Seems quite irrational to me.

Re:Crazyness

You're imagining things.

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Now why did you have to go and turn this into a complex discussion?

Obligatory quote

Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes inapt the great
Immortal Syracusan rivaled nevermore
Who in his wondrous law
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate

Continuing to 100000 or so is left as an exercise to the reader.

The joke is that in writing this out I have to remind myself, as a non-American English user, that "rivaled" is spelt like that, and to do that I have to recite the numeric value of pi up to that point...go figure

Re:Obligatory quote

There is actually a word for this: piphilology [wikipedia.org], the art of coming up with mnemonics to remember pi. Like the poem in the parent post, these tend to be phrases or poems in which the number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit of pi.

One common mnemonic (which I've seen attributed to Isaac Asimov) is "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" If you want to get really fancy, the Wikipedia entry lists a full sonnet, in more-or-less iambic pentameter:
Now I defy a tenet gallantly
Of circle canon law: these integers
Importing circles' quotients are, we see,
Unwieldy long series of cockle burs
Put all together, get no clarity;
Mnemonics shan't describeth so reformed
Creating, with a grammercy plainly,
A sonnet liberated yet conformed.
Strangely, the queer'st rules I manipulate
Being followéd, do facilitate
Whimsical musings from geometric bard.
This poesy, unabashed as it's distressed,
Evolvéd coherent - a simple test,
Discov'ring poetry no numerals jarred.

Admittedly, it's not a very good sonnet, but, hey, what do you want?

To remember pi, just memorize this post!

Now I make a reply involving my clever trick for rusty memories. Mnemonics usually challenge one; my own Slashdot post offers an easier path. You can memorize, and my account retrieves karma!

monopodal Monopoly.

These people are really useful member of society, like people who can play monopoly with one foot.

Name that (probably inaccurate) quote.

100000 digits?

If I put together all the digits I know by heart about anything at all, phone numbers, dates, train schedules, computer IPs, heck even application version numbers...

I don't think the total would be more than a thousand digits :-)

How do they do it?

Re:100000 digits?

There are plenty of memory techniques. Didn't you know there is a world championship in remembering things? See for instance http://www.worldmemorychampionship.com/ [worldmemor...onship.com] or http://www.worldmemorychallenge.com/ [worldmemorychallenge.com].

If you want a tip, here's something a read in a book by a Norwegian memory world champion, Oddbjørn By:

1. Assign each 2 digit number to a person and an action related to that person. The person has two names, so the first character of each name represent one of the digits.
   
2. Now you can represent 4 digits with a person and an action. This will give you 4 with different first characters.
   
3. Imagine locations on a known path.
   
4. Assign a person doing an action at each location.
   
5. Now you have 4 digits per location on your path... Just make a very long path and you'll have 1,000,000 digits (250,000 locations*) in no time!
   
6. To recite the number, just traverse your path and look at the name of the person in each location, and the name of the person associated with the action.
   

*You probably want less locations, so you can visit the same one under different conditions. E.g. during day / night / rain / snow / heavy winds... we're down to 50,000 locations already!

Video tapes? Oooh , risky

Can you image if he gets a mail from Guinness saying "Sorry , you missed the record by 10. Or at least we think you did but tape 26 got chewed by the machine at digit 54166. Bad luck son, try again next year and next time use Memorex!"

1337

Following the discussion about the date/time format, in continental Europe we proud ourselves in experiencing 13-3-7, or 1337...

Re:1337

I've never used just 7 to denote the year 2007. However, Europeans can experience 13:37ness every day thanks to our 24-hour clock.

1:59 pm?

which some will observe at 1:59pm

It can also be observed at 3:49 a.m., which is then 0.159 of a day; it's also much easier to have a minute's respectful silence at 3:49 am ;)

on another note..

I feel it's only appropriate to add that march 14th is also international steak and blowjob day [steakandbjday.com]

This deep down?

... in the comments? I mean, seriously, who cares about Pi when you can get a steak AND a blow job (and if you're good, at the same time?)

Only on slashdot

does steak and a blowjob day get buried when talking about March 14th. Of course, that's probably because most people here won't be celebrating.

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Damn right. Some of us are vegetarians...

Ah, the evolution of math geekiness...

I recall a certain rivalry over memorizing digits of pi back in high school. Everyone was around the 2-3 hundred mark when one guy threw down the gauntlet - 500 digits. Well, I put the memorization effort into overdrive and reached about 2,500 before being "crowned" the undisputed school champ. (Yay!)

Interestingly, that fall in my frosh year at university, reciting pi turned up as a big contest among the first year math students. 2,500 was enough to take the crown at university also.

There is actually a very efficient way of memorizing strings of random digits one you get the hang of it - the key is groups of 5. The technique works well enough that 25 years later I still remember 500 digits. And the workout I gave my memory skills serves me well today still. Strings of digits are simple - tell me your phone number just once, etc.

100,000 - now that's impressive. I can tell you from experience, that memory will serve him well in chemistry, especially organic. More power to him!

Einstein's birthday...

Why oh why does everyone ignore the fact that 3.14 is Einstein's birthday too? :'(

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Why oh why does everyone ignore the fact that 3.14 is Einstein's birthday too? :'(

Because we can?
Because he never remembers my birthday?
Because we would have had to know it in the first place to be able to remeber it?