Saint Patrick's Day

Saint Patrick's Day starts on the Nature Boy 3.0

This is as green as it gets.

PI Day

How to start PI Day?

I had forgotten all about PI Day. When I woke up, my friend Barbara sent a text message wishing me a Happy PI Day. I wanted to send a reply with the value of PI, at least to some respectable length. However, I was having a little trouble remembering PI. It was quite early. This is sort of a thing for me, to know PI to a good many digits, usually in the 35 to 50 places these days.

My math geekiness goes way back to my youth. I was pretty good in math as a kid. My oldest brother, seven years older than I, used to give me hints and spoiler alerts on my math classes, before I took them. I remember when he told me the square root of -1 equaled "i", the imaginary number. I felt privileged to have the knowledge before my time.  I took geometry as a freshman in high school, and was so bored by the slow pace, that I memorized PI to 200 decimal places. There was a poster on the bulletin board with PI to thousands of digits. I daydreamt in class staring at the poster of PI, and started memorizing the digits.

Remembering PI has been a gauge on my memory over the years. I am afraid it has dwindled from the 200 digits I once knew, rather rapidly to 100 digits, and over the years down to 50 digits. I try to keep my memory refreshed, but it was hard this morning.

Sure, I could have looked up PI, but I didn't let myself do that. I thought about it, but NO. I started to recite PI to myself. I have to keep starting over and running through the digits. Each time I start over, I get a little further. So, with a few refresh cycles, I remembered my self imposed minimal accepted value of PI to 35 digits. It took one parity correction, when I noticed the 35th digit was not correct.

That was good, because now I could start my day. I sent Barbara my PI text reply, and got ready for my morning bike ride of 21 miles. Unfortunately, I didn't eat anything round today, but my bike did give me an acceptable nod to PI.

Happy PI Day Everyone! I hope you experienced something round today, especially if it was eating some pie!