Gosh, I’m posting a pi day post just FOUR DAYS before pi day.  Heavens.  Well, any teachers reading this aren’t going to be preparing until the night before, right?  Besides, pi day is, sadly, on a Saturday this year, so you can always cheat and do it on Monday if you need to!

So, yes, pi day is 3/14 at 1:59 pm (and I just found out that square root day was 3/3/09 and I missed it!).  This is a wonderful chance for geekery in your classroom.  And it was invented by a fellow Explorite (the Exploratorium’s cheerfully eccentric Larry Shaw).  It also happens to be Einstein’s birthday.

The Exploratorium website has a nice page devoted to Pi Day, lots of history and limericks and some pi poetry (pi-ku).

The Year of Science has a nice resource website with a bunch of activities related to pi day, such as information about Einstein, Pi songs, and trivia.

The Exploratorium will be having a celebration (which I’ll miss, waah) in Second Life.  Visit this SURL to teleport to that location in Second Life.

Here’s a nice little story from the Exploratorium about how Larry started Pi Day:

The original Pi guy is Larry Shaw, a physicist with streaming white hair, a white beard and a transcendent glow. It was 1987, and a cacophony of cultural references and relationships of the time intersected in San Francisco at the Exploratorium, to this day an internationally acclaimed museum of science, art and human perception. Shaw was thinking a lot about the concept of rotation into another dimension — the sorts of things he was actually paid to do. To recapture the time and the place, imagine Shaw mulling over the metaphor of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, specifically the infinite improbability drive of the Heart of Gold Space Ship that is a major factor in the book. Turns out that the concept of rotation into another dimension is exactly what Pi describes. Pi represents the relationship between one dimension to another in the sense of the linear dimension and the plane; or the relation of the linear dimension and the sphere. Pi is key to these relationships. So for Shaw, Pi was in the air and definitely on his mind. He and his colleagues were talking about a Pi Shrine or a Pi Day, something to make the concept of rotation noteworthy. And so it all came together. For the first Pi Day, they installed a Pi Shrine (a small brass plate engraved with pi to a hundred digits) at the exact center of a circular Exploratorium classroom, a spot that also corresponds to the center-line of the museum’s building. And they walked around the shrine because as Shaw notes, “People go around things to show respect to them in many cultures and religions.” And they ate pie.

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As usual, Randall Munroe says it all

http://xkcd.com/552/

And while we’re on the subject of causality, a reader just reminded me of this wonderful graph from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster showing how the lack of pirates are responsible for global warming  (If the FSM doesn’t ring a bell, you need to work on your geek merit badge.  Check out the link.  It’s about intelligent design taken to its (il)logical extreme).

vengaza.org

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…for anyone who hasn’t seen this one yet…

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I love this… from GraphJam.

Pie I Have Eaten: http://graphjam.com

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If you’re one of the three people (like me) who hadn’t seen the Large Hadron Rap yet — absolutely divine. A worthwhile 5 minutes of your time.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM]

In the spirit of science raps you can also check out the Exploratorium Explainer’s fabu rap for Einstein’s birthday (which also happens to be Pi Day… March 14).

And while we’re on the theme, Cocktail Party Physics let us all know about this video that I haven’t been able to get out of my head, “I Will Derive”.

At first I was afraid, what could the answer be?

It said given this position find velocity.

So I tried to work it out, but I knew that I was wrong.

I struggled; I cried, “A problem shouldn’t take this long!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9dpTTpjymE]

I admit, I just love geeky humor like this. And it’s not just science geek humor that’s funny. ANY kind of geek humor is funny. I’m using geek in one of it’s original senses, “A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest” (from Wikipedia). I contra dance, and I find stupid contra dance jokes (about certain dance figures, for example), hilarious. My mom’s a retired librarian. Librarian jokes are de rigeur in our household (Anyone see the movie Party Girl? A real stitch for librarians). These kind of in-jokes are just so terribly funny. I’ve always wondered why that is. “In jokes” have a certain brand of funny, you know what I mean? In part, I imagine it’s making fun of ourselves. In large part, too, I imagine it’s seeing something familiar in a new way — a pun on a word that we use in all seriousness quite often, for example, or (as in the YouTubes posted above) a song about something that we’re used to taking seriously. It turns something familiar on its head, and our brains seem to love that.

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I might get flamed for posting this after the lively discussion on women, science, stereotypes, and smart vs pretty.  But I’m never one to skirt around an issue.  Ahem.  Last week A Blog Around the Clock posted an article about Science vs. Britney Spears, about how the public is more likely to be surfing the internet looking for information about Britney+Spears+naked than about the Large Hadron Collider (hmm, maybe my blog stats will go up when I post this!)

So I’m taking this as an opportunity to point people to a place where the twain SHALL meet — the wonderful Britney Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor Physics. No, really. It has nothing to do with Britney Spears, except for the delightfully tongue-in-cheek photographs sprinkled throughout the rather good primer on semiconductor physics. I used the attached photo as an illustration in a presentation I gave in a graduate physics class while getting my PhD. I was the only woman in a room of 5 men. The professor shook his head and said, “You’re the only one in this room who could get away with that.”

I guess that’s sort of like how it’s OK for Jewish people to make jokes about Jewish people.

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