Bad Astronomy

Pi are squared

Oops! I almost forgot! Today is pi day: 3/14.

For you mathematically challenged, pi (3.14159265358979323… and yes, I did that from memory) is a very important number. You may remember it’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter, but in fact it pops up everywhere in physics, which has always struck me as weird. Why is it embedded in the very fabric of reality? Read Carl Sagan’s Contact and see what he thought about it.

Anyway, this is purely an American idea, since in every other country in the world they write the date as day/month/year and not our scrambled month/day/year, so today is really 14/3 which is not anything special as far as I can tell.

Pi time was at 1:59:26, but in my local time zone I was asleep.