Saturday, March 14, 2009

It's Pi Day! (please sharpen your pencils)

A shout out to cube over at The Blog for reminding me that today is Pi Day, 3-14. The original Pi just so happens to be my second favorite, immediately following pizza pi. Sometimes when I am just kicking back and relaxing, my mind wanders and I find myself doodling on a napkin using Pi to solve complex algorithms and random vectors. Sometimes I just doodle by drawing rough ovals representing pepperoni pizza. It depends on my mood.

As I prepare the grill for today's picnic Pi holiday family celebration, I will remind my kids about the sacrifices of Pi and it's constituting of a 'countable' infinity. When we get tired and feel like quitting, just think of Pi hanging in there and continuing to grind the sausage with another number. There is no "I" in "Pi"... errr... OK, maybe there is, but there is no "quit" in "Pi". May we conservatives adopt Pi's tenacity in the long fight ahead. Please join me in this non-synchronized moment of silence in deference and honor to that number that just refuses to give up. [Pause] Amen.

Doodling Numbers
I wanted to play with the Pi-Search
cube pointed at, but I needed some numbers to work with. I converted "DaBlade" to "41212145" using the complex "A=1, B=2..." alpha-numeric code (that I believe was first used by the German U-Boats during WWII). I then plugged in this numeric equivalent of my cyber moniker into the Pi search engine. Here is my shocking discovery!
Searchstart: 41 The string 41212145 occurs at position 1,651,809 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.
All this time I thought it was just random chance that "1,651,809" happened to be my favorite number.

Weird!

7 comments:

  1. Your favorite number would also equate to your handicap...provided you counted all your strokes.

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  2. So you didn't bother to see how many digits the record-holder has memorized?

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  3. We're just celebrating the holiday quietly. I fear all of this commercialization has trivialized it.

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  4. I thought I heard my name ;-)

    That Pi search engine sure had your number. Amazing stuff.

    Chuck: It's shameless, but pretty soon Hallmark will start churning out Pi cards and ones for May the
    4th, too.

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  5. anon- So sorry. I forgot.
    Chuck- I'm not going whole hog this year. I just got my Christmas lights down and didn't feel like stringing the Pi lights. We should take time to remember the true meaning of Pi. :)
    cube- We talk about you over here all the time! It's usually good though.

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  6. I was hoping Obama would honor pi day by keeping his pi hole shut.

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