Blog / Ramblings

The hanging mobiles of the solar system bother me. While they show a representation of the planets, they don't respect relative size or distance. For instance the Earths diameter is approx 8000 miles, the Sun's diameter is about 865,000 miles and the distance between them is 93,000,000 miles. That means if the Earth were the size of a 'BB' (.175" diameter), the Sun would still have a diameter of almost 19" and be 170 feet away! That would be a Sun, the diameter of a basketball hoop, sitting almost 2 basketball courts away!

I think we should rename the letter "W". It's the only letter that has more than 1 syllable in it's name and the only one that gets it's name from another letter! I mean if the Canadian's can call a "Z" "Zed", then why can't we call the "W" "Woo" or something.

No it's not a misspelling of 'PIE'. PI Day is March 14th at 1:59pm. It could actually be 1:59am, but who wants to get up at that time and celebrate, so we do it in the afternoon. This is a day for the geeks among us to honor this irrational number that is so useful.

PI goes out forever in it's precision, but most people stop at 3.14 or 3.14159 (hence the date and time of the celebration). Some people have even written poems or stories to help remember the digits. In the poems the length of the word represents the digit, if a word is 10 or more characters long, then it's used for 2 digits. Punctuation doesn't count. My favorite one can be found here: http://www.cadaeic.net/naraven.htm it has 740 digits of PI.