Thursday, March 14, 2013

Wife of Pi : He's Irrational and He Goes On and On...





Oh, I just love math and science jokes!   I know it's IRRATIONAL but I really do.  The WHOLE lot of them are an INTEGRAL part of what lifts my spirits.  There is a whole SERIES of these jokes, entire SETS of them.  Some don't even really exist - they are IMAGINARY but most are REAL.  They are INFINITELY amusing and a PRIME source of satisfaction. 

And by the way, all you "3.14 is pi day" people, it's not exactly true.  Since pi does not exactly equal 3.14, you should not "celebrate" pi day until 3:49 am and 20.53056 seconds by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, since pi = 3.141592654... and if you work out the hours, minutes, and seconds that .141592654.. of a day equals, that's what you get.)

One more pi observation:  since our calendar system is not really mathematical ("3/14" does not have the same meaning as "314" for example, since it is mixing two numbers that don't have meaning because of adjustments to the number of days in a month (which average but never equal 30.5)).  For those attempting to make some astrological conclusion about people being born on a certain date having similar characteristics, they should at least get the astronomical premise right.  Pi is most meaningful in relation to circles, especially a unit circle which has by definition a circumference of 2*pi.  So if we graphed the number of days of the year as a circle, we would be pi radians around that circle at the exact halfway mark.  Looking at 2013 only (technically we should include and adjust for leap years but for simplicity's sake we can use 365 days), we will hit "pi day" in radian terms on July 2nd at 12 noon exactly.  This also assumes of course that there is something significant astronomically about January 1st, which there isn't.  Using instead December 22, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere as day zero, we get June 22 at noon, the longest day of the year.  That - in radian terms - is our most astronomically significant "pi day."  

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