Happy Pi Day!

3.141592653

It has been calculated

out to several trillion places

but that’s all you’re going to get from me

mmmmm, Pi

Today, the 14th or March, or 3/14 as they’d write it in the U.S. of A., is Pi day, for the obvious reason, and somebody on facebook pointed out the really cool coincidence which will occur next year at almost half past 9 in the morning on this date, when it will be 3/14/15 9:26.53.

Pi Pie

Another of my friends, who I know in real life even as well, knows pi out to 50 places, which I think is pretty damned awesome.  I can only remember it out to 9 places, and that only by the expedient of that little rhyme above.  Rhymes are mnemonic, you’ve got to give them that.

Pi is just an amazing concept, though.  To calculate the are of a circle, you have to use a number which is totally inexact.  Perhaps that’s why human being like straight property lines, why we live in straight walled houses instead of domes and teacups, and I think it’s all a little bit of a shame that we’re rigid that way.  But, I can understand.  If we tried to draw all the property lines and national borders in circles, there would always be a little bit left over, the lines wouldn’t match up, and there would be room in world politics for a character like Richard Pryor in “The Toy” or at any rate I think it was “The Toy,” who figured out that nobody was claiming that quarter of a penny that everybody’s salary was rounded down, and he could just transfer that over to his own account.

Pi is a reminder that Base 10 is a human concept, totally arbitrary, based on the number of fingers we have, and the laws of nature are not the laws of man.