Pi Day

As usual, I pretty much missed it.  Most people will see this on 3.15 and not 3.14.  It's a slow news day in Space, and while the news made me want to do a piece on central bank insanity, the problem is that there's nothing new there.  I have lots of old articles I could repost, with the built in problem that they all have things in them younger readers won't understand.  Simple example: if they don't know who Ben Bernanke was, how will they understand references to Helicopter Ben or The Bernank?  What about Alan Greenspan?  What about when Janet Yellen was the "head of the Fed?"

Of the few pi day posts I've done, this one appeals to my warped sense of humor the most. 

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 

Being an engineer, which one never really retires from, I'm required to be pedantic enough to point out there can only be a pi day in countries that use month/day format rather than day/month.  According to the Wikipedia, it's not strictly an American thing.  It's the US, Philippines, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.  The last two were US territories until the 1980s while the Philippines became independent from the US in 1946 after WWII. The rest of the world will never know Pi day.

In addition to being pi day, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday and the day that Steven Hawking shuffled off this mortal coil. I think nobody in the current generation of scientists has been compared to Einstein as much as Hawking was.  It's interesting they have the same day as major bookmarks in their lives.  One checking in, one checking out.