Memorial Set For 'Pi Day' Creator (sfgate.com) 56
"Three-point-one-four was more than a number to museum curator Larry Shaw," writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Long-time Slashdot reader linuxwrangler writes: In 1988 at a retreat for San Francisco Exploratorium staff, Larry Shaw proposed linking the digits of pi, which begins 3.14, with the date March 14. Initially the "holiday" was only celebrated by museum staff but it didn't take long for the idea to spread and Pi Day was born.
For 38 years, Mr. Shaw donned a red cap emblazoned with the magic digits and led a parade of museum goers, each of them holding a sign bearing one of the digits of pi. Shaw died August 19 at age 78 and a memorial is planned for Sunday September 24.
The memorial will be held in Mill Valley, California, the Chronicle reports, adding that "pie will be served."
For 38 years, Mr. Shaw donned a red cap emblazoned with the magic digits and led a parade of museum goers, each of them holding a sign bearing one of the digits of pi. Shaw died August 19 at age 78 and a memorial is planned for Sunday September 24.
The memorial will be held in Mill Valley, California, the Chronicle reports, adding that "pie will be served."
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There's also the fact that "3.14" equals nothing as a date, because most of the planet does not use the MM-DD-YYYY format.
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DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD make sense. MM-DD might make sense as a shortened version of YYYY-MM-DD. For filing documents I use YYYY-MM-DD as sorting lexically makes more sense.
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That's why I'm waiting until May 9th of the year 3141 before celebrating.
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Makes sense that 3, the more significant figure, correlates to month instead of day.
I thought there should also be a special moment of celebration:
Month 3
Day 14
Hour 15
Minute 92 - toughie, do we go for 92.6539% of the hour at 3:55:35.54 ?
so, what do we do at that moment? Something that relates the radius squared to the area of a circle would be appropriate. As the tau punks point out, circumference to diameter is kind of clunky.
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You're treating base 28 to 31, 24 and several cases of 60 as if they're decimals.
More Accurate Pi Day (Score:5, Insightful)
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If from Alabama, you insensitive clod! We can't have pi day since there's no zeroeth of March, amen!
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> 22/7 is a slightly better approximation to pi than 3.14.
VERY slightly.
22 / 7 = approx. 3.14285714285714
3.14285714285714 - 3.14159265358979 = 0.00126...
3.14159265358979 - 3.14 = 0.00159...
The difference in the differences is about 0.000328 in favor of 22 / 7.
In other words, either will do for casual work. Even NASA only uses Pi out to 15 decimal places. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/n... [nasa.gov]
By cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point... our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches.
Which means I could work at NASA because one of my classrooms had a big PI banner in the front of the room and I memo
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There's also the fact that pi can change values based on the underlying metric with which you use to measure space. If you use the taxi cab metric (shortest straight lines), pi becomes 4. This, of course, applies to tau as well.
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Even those that believe in Tau are sad (Score:2)
As someone who believes in Tau (see the Tau Manifesto here: https://tauday.com/tau-manifes... [tauday.com] ), I still want to thank Larry Shaw. I've eaten many good American pies because of him.
Tau day has never quite gotten the commercial backing that Pi day has. I blame Hallmark https://www.hallmarkecards.com... [hallmarkecards.com] . Damn Pagans!
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You could almost say that celebrating pi day is... irrational.
Re: Even those that believe in Tau are sad (Score:1)
Although, I never noticed before, but pi + e = pie! So pie = 5.85987...
Pi Day Creator Day? (Score:4, Funny)
Tau Day (Score:1, Informative)
Perhaps now we can start teaching students about Tau [youtube.com] (2Pi) and replacing Pi in our math texts.
Help, I'm trapped in a Universe Factory... (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory slashdot xkcd post. I'm sure Larry had it on his wall.
https://xkcd.com/10/ [xkcd.com]
Americans got it wrong, as usual. (Score:2)
Should have been 22/7.
It's this specific to the U.S.? (Score:1)
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YYYY-MM-DD [wikipedia.org] is the only thing that makes any sense to me. Sorting alphanumerically also means sorting chronologically, and by time of day if you include the THH:MM:SSZ part.
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Or you could wait for the 3rd day if the 14th month. I’ll provide the pie for everyone who cares to show up.
I’m sure you’re the hit of your Fouth of May party, too, young padowan.
Sheesh, can’t you allow a little unpedantic joy in the world without getting all International Sustem of Units on everyone (oddly abbreviated SI and not IS, so you can tail about how that and UTC are both a huge mistake because it’s all about you).
I celebrate 14th March (by any spelling) by baking an A
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You could celebrate Pi day around the rest of the world on the 22nd of July.
September 24th? (Score:2)
Farewell to an inspiering man (Score:2)
I did not know Larry Shaw personally, and yet I am saddened by his passing. Is this irrational?
Deprecate MM-DD-YYYY (Score:1)
It is half the circle constant - 6.28 (Score:2)
Learn something new and then tell your friends that Pi is the wrong circle constant. https://tauday.com/tau-manifes... [tauday.com]
Still it is cool when anyone does something to promote math.