It’s Monday and back to work. It’s early morning, and I haven’t had my morning latte, so excuse any infelicities of prose. Remember, after Tuesday posting will be spotty until the beginning of April.
Now, what happened on March 14, the day before the Ides of March? Wikipedia says that, in 1592, it was Ultimate Pi Day: the largest correspondence between calendar dates and significant digits of pi since the introduction of the Julian calendar (3.141592). There will be another ultimate Pi Day in 99 years and 3 hours. But today is also a lesser Pi Day (3.14, and at 1:59 p.m. you can add another three digits.) Be sure to eat some pie in celebration. Readers who send me a photo of themselves eating pie today will have their photo posted tomorrow.
On this day in 1794, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin. In 1943, the Kraków Ghetto in Poland was destroyed by Germans and, in 1967, the body of John F. Kennedy was permanently interred at Arlington National Cemetery—not too far from my father’s grave.
Notable births on this day include Johann Strauss I (1804; he died at only 45 of scarlet fever), the German biologist and Nobel Laureate Paul Ehrlich (1854), the heroic American train driver Casey Jones (1863, yes, he was a real person), Albert Einstein in 1879 (born on Pi Day!), Diane Arbus (1923), Frank Borman (1928), Quincy Jones (1933), and Billy Crystal (1948; where is he?) Here’s one of my favorite photos by Diane Arbus, which, with the expression and grenade, reminds me of a certain rageblogger:
Hili: I’m not sure…A: What are you not sure about?Hili: Whether to show interest in this dry food or to try to catch that creature out there.(Photo: Sarah Lawson).
Hili: Nie jestem pewna…
Ja: Czego nie jesteś pewna?
Hili: Czy interesować się tą suchą karmą, czy raczej spróbować to złapać?
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)
Here’s the box from yesterday. He’s turned it on its side so the front door is now a skylight and cardboard is flying again…
And from reader jsp, and Off The Mark comic by Mark Parisi (someone should collect all these “fish evolving onto land” strips; there are many!):
One wonders, is there some chemical (preservative-?) in Gus’s cardboard akin to catnip? Would he attack, say, Campbell Soup boxes with the same enthusiasm? Or the box my new Apple Mac Desktop will be shipped in?
I don’t know what it is about this particular box. Gus has not been interested in any boxes or bags until this one. I think IKEA could offer it as ‘free lamp with cat toy’, I’ve certainly got good value for my money! 🙂
At 1.59pm and 26 seconds you can add another 5 digits!
If you don’t mind a few gaps here and there, you could pick any string of integers (of any length) and find a place in PI where they just fit in perfectly….
Every day is PI day with me…
I’m asking for a nanosecond of silence today at 1:59.265358979 PM
The background of that Arbus photo is amazingly over exposed. Not quite sure how she did that — probably a long burn in on the boy when printing. It emphasizes the main subject very effectively. He is also in deep shadow so the difference in illumination pushes that direction as well.
At 1:59 I’m going to add 5 digits to 3.14, not just three. I guess this might called a lesser Pi moment.
I don’t understand – pi day would have been the 3rd of January 415 AD! 🙂
Hili is SO booootiful!
Gus will have a difficult time getting a job at the Alton Box Board Company.
I query Ultimate Pi Day in 1592.
Did people write dates the ‘American Way’ in those times? (The ‘British Way’ would be 14.3.1592).
So possibly it would be a retrospective ‘Ultimate Pi Day’. That is leaving aside any confusion between the Gregorian and Julian calendars which mean that Ultimate Pi Day would occur ten days earlier in Catholic countries than Protestant ones…
cr
I just find putting the month first weird, either go for big endian or little endian none of this middle endian stuff!
I agree!
No. In the spirit of post-Modernist Snowflakes everywhere, you cannot be bound by the phallocentric dominance of “big-ENDian-ness” in either it’s hetronormative, homonormative or anormativly normative interpretations. You’ll have to randomly cycle between the possible sequences to ensure that everyone gets an even hearing.
To which I say “ISO-8601, like it or lump it”.
Thank you Jerry. The times I’ve sung and listened to the various Casey Jones songs and never knew he was a real person.
“when you hear, the tootin’ of the whistle
it’s Casey at the throttle of the cannon ball express!”
🙂
I was always kind of partial to Oscar Brand myself….
The kid with the grenade looks like a young Jeremy Irons
Saw a message from the Audubon Society today that on this day in 1903, Teddy Roosevelt created the first wildlife refuge in the US, at Florida’s Pelican Island.
Guaranteed to turn PCC himself into a rageblogger is the title of a new FTB blog:
“Death To Squirrels”
Seriously.
Just after mid-day every December 30th (29th in leap years) we have the pi-th * 10^7 second of each year.
When would the 10^7*e-th second be? Late August? Tau (golden mean) *10^7 would be in late Feb and near the June solstice.
There’s a vein of numerology that might be worth mining, by the fairly weak grounds of numerology.
Phi abbreviates the golden mean, not tau. Tau is the attempted replacement for pi as the “circle constant” because in so many places we use even multiples of pi, so …
Am I misunderstanding, but what is a very young Billy Crystal doing with a hand grenade?