Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day, everyone (and condolences to our non-American cousins who have to wait until July for 22/7 day). I'm a single dad this weekend -- Alice is at SXSW -- so the baby and I are going to go down to Hackney City Farm and order a huge slice of pie, then go and celebrate with the chickens, ducks, piggies and bunny-rabbits.

Pi Day

Pi on Wikipedia

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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ScruffyNerfHerder

Is it worth mentioning this is an anti-holiday for Pythagoreans? Though I’m sure they take comfort in the date being 3.14 as opposed March 14th, 1:59 etc…
Lauren O

It is imperative that you watch this immediately if you would like to celebrate Pi Day and also feel like you are tripping goddamn balls.
akicif

Ah, but 22/7 is closer to pi than 3.14 is….
Branfeast

Watch out for the Hackney pigs! They scared me. I tried to look tough and outdoorsy in front of my GF but I was secretly scared of them. They’re a bit grumpy.
Donal

I live in the middle of nowhere in rural Ireland. My job though (until unemployment) used to take me to London at least 10 times a year, for years. I generally hate London, the crowds, the transport etc but some days, especially on a nice spring day, it can be fantastic. Somehow, mentioning Hackney Farm, and with the sun shining through my window at the same time, Cory managed to remind me of the good things about London; walking on the Embankment, visiting the Sir John Soames Museum (& the V&A, the Hayward, the National, Portrait, Tate Modern etc), getting coffee in the Algerian Coffee House, visiting the weekend street markets, walking Soho, eating the best Indian food in the world, early Sunday mornings in the city, hanging out with family there. All good. Thanks Cory.
Squiggle

I have yet to fathom the reasons for the American date format mm/dd/yyyy.
nosehat

I try to celebrate Pi day by doing at least one irrational thing.
arkizzle

Wait, I thought America didn’t have a 22/7.. (7/22) – so how can it be their Pi day?
arkizzle

Oh! NON,… sorry, misread.
Uncle_Max

@ APOXIA: That’s quite handy to know, I’ve only spent about a month outside of North America, so I just assumed people said “17th of April” rather than “April 17th”. But then if that’s how you say it, wouldn’t it get written down that way?

But overall I agree, most of us in the US don’t really do anything according to logic.
kevin143

Donal, London is great, but I strongly suspect that better Indian food can be had in India… possibly Pakistan?
arkizzle

Takuan.. compression?

Pah! I’m a raw data man :)
bwcbwc

I’m a decimal guy. I’m waiting for Nov 10 (Day 314 of 365).
Uncle_Max

SQUIGGLE @11: I personally like the month first, because then it starts narrowing it down. If somebody asks “Hey what are you doing on April 12th?” I start thinking about April, and then narrow down to the 12th. The other way “The 12th of April” makes me start thinking about the 12th with no frame of reference for what part of the year it will be. That may be completely idiotic, but after spending quite a bit of time training myself to understand dates the both ways (for when reading non-US websites, mostly), I still prefer it the US way. But that could be because I was raised with that method.

And the year is at the end, because until it’s November, I usually don’t plan things beyond the rest of the year.
Antinous / Moderator

Hillbilly: What did you learn in school today, Junior?
Junior: I learned Ï€rÂ².
Hillbilly: No, no, son. Pie are round; cornbread are square.
Bloo

@squiggle – like everything date- and time- related, it’s a convention and once adopted hard to change.

I believe that we put the month first because we _say_ the month first: “January 19th, 2009″ naturally changes to 01/19/2009. The European convention, I’m guessing, is probably because in Latin-inspired languages like French and Spanish you say the day of the month first.

Google translates “January nineteenth, 2009″ to “Decimonoveno enero, 2009″ and “January 19th, 2009″ to “19 enero, 2009″.

The natural tendency then would be to shorten that with the day first, as 19/01/2009.
fatuousplatitudes

@Kevin143
Actually, British Indian or British Pakistani food is quite different from that obtained back home.
And the best ‘Indian’ food (actually Pakistani and Mirpuri) can be only be obtained in Birmingham, specially Sparkhill, most-specifically Stoney Lane.
But try asking for Pi Balti and you would get some angled eyebrows… that’s the sine of the times, I guess.
Super Nate

Pi day is happy birthday to me!!! I taught my 2 year old to recognize Ï€ a couple weeks ago for the fun of it (it’s way fun, trust me). Also, I’m a jerk and like writing the date yyyy, month-dd, like 2009, March 14th. Most significant digits FIRST!
twopoint718

@SUPER NATE, yeah right on! Use most-significant-digits-first (big-endian) for dates. Besides, if you’re on the internet, use network byte-order; when in Rome and all that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_byte_order#Endianness_in_networking

Besides, then Pi Day makes sense, YYYY-3-14.

And, to plug my own holiday, it also makes sense for The Square Root of Christmas (3-5) and the decimal week of Nerdigras: http://twopoint718.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-5-is-square-root-of-christmas.html
arkizzle

For me, the date arrangement thing is another US’ism that favours convention (and all its baroque complexity) over logic.. like denying the metric system.

UncleMax, I don’t really agree with your assessment of it being easier or more useful (beyond your personal preference). The split second of extra heads-up time just doesn’t seem to negate the ‘backwards’ness of it.

I’m not saying there is an innate usefulness to the European way, it just seems more logical to increment divisions small to big.. (funnily enough, neither the standard US or Euro version complies with the time standard. Which is the Euro date system reversed.

My personal way of dealing with this is to setup a custom time standard for my menubar clock, that combines all the date-time info into one right-to-left incremental string, thusly:

[Year][Month][Day][Hours][Minutes][Seconds]

The current time is: 20090314225626

Insert gaps if you like, I like the long string :)

Which means that the time increments the WHOLE string correctly, eg. as a cascade from right-to-left (including internally, for each block: eg. the hundreds/tens/units of each block increments r-t-l), so it works as a single number, independent of the block separators too.

The only objection to it being a real string, is the variable roll-over points of the different blocks (60 minutes, 12 hours, 31 days, 12 months). But since the string is a result of discrete time-values, and only turns into the string when it is assembled, It’s a non issue (eg. the time is not calculated by incrementing the string, but by assembling the components).

Now, I’m not saying anyone should use this system, it is only my personal preference, but I like to use it.
GoldMatenes

The anthem of Pi Day:

http://tinyurl.com/y92gnh
apoxia

@ Uncle_Max

I live in New Zealand with the dd/mm/yy convention, but we definitely do not say 17 April.. instead of April 17. The idea that people would say the day of the month first because it is how we write the date in shorthand is the strangest thing I have heard in a while – after all we are all talking English here.

I just assumed American’s did it the other way around because they do everything the other way (c.f. wrong way) around such as driving on the right side of the road and not using the metric system.
ScruffyNerfHerder

Happy Pi Day CD!
TroofSeeker

The best Indian food is the Gila and Armadillo Platter at Geronimo’s in Santa Fe.
Stefan Jones

“chickens, ducks, piggies and bunny-rabbits”

Baked in a pi?
Takuan

and what ingenious compression algorithm have you devised for it?
anechoic

over on the microsound list we celebrate Pi Day each year by making glitchy, failure ridden electronic music…stop by and enjoy our sonic renditions of Pi!

http://projects.interdisciplina.org/microsound/project.php?name=pi_day_2009
TroofSeeker

I date a lot of drawings [I wish that was as weird as it sounds] …anyway, I do it like this:
14MAR09. Putting the letters between the numbers makes it clear what’s month and what’s day.
minTphresh

but…..i like cake!
zuzu

The cake is a pi?
zikman

yeah, pi day! I’m gonna buy a big ass pie and take it into work and recite pi up to hundreds of digits for all to hear!
jackie31337

Completely by coincidence, I happened to bake a pie today. I was planning to make one anyway even before I realized the date, but now I can claim to have celebrated pi day. :)

Oh, and the pie was yummy.