It’s Pi Day. March 14. 14th day of the third month. And if – for some reason – you insist on writing the date as “3/14”, it kind of looks like π, except that 3/14 = 0.2142857….
We might all be better off celebrating Pi Approximation Day – July 22, which some would write as 22/7, which is 3.142857… That is much closer to the true value, which is, of course
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679….
I typed that from memory. Trust me.
So anyway, math lovers will temporarily put aside their advocacy for the one true ISO8601 style of writing the date, which is
DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS
WRITE THE DATE THIS WAY
ALWAYS
2019-03-14
for one day, in the interests of the greater good of society. We will write the date wrong, just this once.
Sidebar: The 2000 version of the ISO8601 standard allowed for writing dates with “reduced accuracy”, and allowed you to use the notation “–MM-DD” for a date without a year, so you COULD write “–03-14” and be within the standard. But for reasons I don’t know, mainly because it costs money to download a copy of the standard, the 2004 version of ISO8601 apparently disallows writing the month without also writing the year.
Every –03-14 I always wind up thinking about Pi. I can’t help it. Everybody at work is sending me pi jokes and links to pi T-shirts and this is what happens when you make the mistake of standing up in a large team meeting 20 years ago and reciting Pi to 100 decimal places in order to make some point about Applescript programming; you are now “the pi guy” and every year, it never stops.
do you know a lot of random facts about pi?
yes
are they interesting to lots of other people?
no
are you going to write a blog post about them anyway?
eventually
ok just for now, why do you know π to 100 places?
well I memorized it to 200 places in grade 10, but I’m getting older.
why did you memorize it to 200 places in grade 10?
Because I thought it would impress girls
did it?
It took a while. Cathy married me several decades later. It was worth it.