Pi Day and an Interview With a Pi Researcher 188
JoshuaInNippon writes "In honor of Pi Day, March 14 (or 3.14 for those who may need a hint), readers may be interested in reading an interview with Professor Daisuke Takahashi, the Japanese researcher who found 2.5 trillion digits of Pi back in August, before being apparently being edged out in December by a French computer programmer looking to prove his efficient coding abilities. Professor Takahashi's interview gives some unique insight into one man who truly marvels at the number that has driven people to ever greater lengths to find more digits for centuries."
Plant Kingdom adds "There have been a number of proposals for alternatives to March 14 (see the Wikipedia page for Pi Day). Here's mine: when the Earth has gone through 1/pi-th of its orbit, as measured from Winter Solstice to Winter Solstice. I've put together a web site to make the case."
Pi day? (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by the big hunk of meat in my 'fridge, today is Steak and BJ Day [steakandbjday.com]. Pi day just isn't nearly as fun.
Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
This is stupid, who thought MONTH - DAY - YEAR is a reasonable date format? Do you frequently find yourself asking "Hmm, I wonder what month it is?" And always make people look in the center to find out the date? WTF
It's like throwing away metric and using some crazy-ass divisible by 12 unit.
RE: yeah, okay (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'm about to troll, but...
First, do we really need a holiday for every fucking thing out there? Where the hell is dung beetle day? Aardwolf week? Permian Extinction Day?
Secondly, you invested enough energy into worrying about WHICH day should be Pi day that you created a website over it?
Finally, if Pi gets its own day, I think its entirely fair that 1.618 [wikipedia.org] get its own celebration. Phi is easily as fascinating a number as Pi, so why didn't you get your panties in a twist over not having Phi day?
Sometimes, you CAN be too much [gocomics.com] of a geek.
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End of Troll.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
No, day-month-year is more sensible since the size of the unit is increasing monotonically. The sanest way to do it would be year-month-day, because then you could increase the precision of the time string to whatever you needed just by adding units to the right. The month-day-year system is probably the lease sensible method of the lot.
Re:Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
This is stupid, who thought MONTH - DAY - YEAR is a reasonable date format?
The person that noticed that we generally say "March 14th, 2010", so it's more intuitive.
It's like throwing away metric and using some crazy-ass divisible by 12 unit.
Oh please, it isn't done right where you are, either. It should be 2010-03-14 so it sorts chronologically and intuitively can't get the month or day mixed up. Your preference is simply different, not less stupid. This isn't one of those topics you can use to pose as one of the smarter people.