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Tuesday, March 14, 2023

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.



10 comments:

  1. Newton was born the same month that Galileo checked out. Interesting, isn't it?

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  2. All humans are engineers.

    Some few are formally trained and employed as such.

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    Replies
    1. BTW, you were way late: post should have gone up on 3.14 at 1:59, right?

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    2. Yeah, rather late. I debated either that, or 3.14 at 1:59 AM or at 0.159 day, which would have been 3:48 AM (and 57.6 seconds). I'm not joking about really having thought about that.

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    3. Yep - you have the sickness. It can be tedious at times but beats being part of the rest of humanity.

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    4. Are you familiar with Dilbert's "The Knack"? (video link) The punch line is much like this cartoon.
      Mother: "Can he lead a normal life?"
      Doctor: "No. He'll be an engineer."
      Mother: "Oh, no!" (sobs)

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    5. Of course! That’s what I referenced when I shared this cartoon with all my coworkers.

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    6. "The Knack" has been a favorite of mine for years. Wife thinks it's a fantastic stereotype. Reality bites...

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  3. PI day in Yurp is 22/7

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  4. An engineer should have both a wife and a girlfriend.
    Because then the wife and girlfriend can go out shopping together,
    and the engineer can go to the lab and get some work done.

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