Category: Fun

On why today isn’t a day for pi

Many around the world spent today celebrating the widest known mathematical constant, that share’s it’s name with a tasty treat:

?

The celebrate today because as March 14, or 3.14, it is a representation of ?.

However this is wrong.

? in decimal (base-10) is 3.14159…, however, the calendar is not based on a base-10 system. So when is the real “pi day?”

We could consider a year to be like a circle, in that at the end (December) it connects right back to the start (January). In this representation we could represent the total number of days in a year (365.25) equal to the total angle of a circle (360 degrees, or 2? radians). This system would make “pi-day” to be approximately June 1st (or 2nd on a leap year, which also helps deal with rounding errors). This would also give us a 2? day on New Year’s Eve.

Or perhaps we should use the year’s total number of days as a base of counting, in which case ? would have to be converted to that base and that would be the date. (Check my math perhaps) I think this date works out to April 24th or 25th (depending on leap years again).

However, explaining to people why you’re calling April 25th, or June 1st pi day and eating pie (which I did indulge in today), might take longer than the brief amusement provided by the idea.

Funny search terms

So WordPress gives a “useful” tool in its Dashboard that lets you know what search terms have been used to find your blog.  I often find really random things on there, currently the list includes:

  •  God gives some people unsual smells
  • dog eats homework
  • physics porn
  • Astrological houses and ten commandments
  • free website templates for chiropractors

and yes, that is a misspelling of “unusual,” I guess God doesn’t give everyone the perfect gift for spelling (if I believed in a God then you could argue that I’m being a hypocrite).

If anymore amuse me I’ll post them again.

Predicting People

There are many trends that you can track with people and how they respond to different situations.  Anyone who’s planned an event has probably realized that the majority of people RSVP in the last time frame, which can make predicting expected numbers of registrants difficult.

A recent paper in Nature Physics examines data from several recent physics conferences and determines the rate at which people register.  The data initially begins linear, but spikes logarithmically near the deadline.  They summarize that you can predict the total number of registrants by extrapolating the linear registration data to the deadline and tripling that number.

Citation:

Conference registration: how people react to a deadline

Valentina Alfi, Giorgio Parisi & Luciano Pietronero

Nature Physics 3, 746 (2007)

If you don’t have access to this journal you can still view the graph (the article is only a page so you get most of the info from the graph).

Things to consider

I saw this on Facebook and decided it warranted passing along:

In Pharmacology, all drugs have two names, a trade name and generic name. For example, the trade name of Tylenol also has a generic name of Acetaminophen. Aleve is also called Naproxen. Amoxil is also call Amoxicillin and Advil is also called Ibuprofen.

The FDA has been looking for a generic name for Viagra. After careful consideration by a team of government experts, it recently announced that it has settled on the generic name of Mycoxafloppin. Also considered were Mycoxafailin, Mydixadrupin, Mydixarizin, Dixafix, and of course, Ibepokin.

Pfizer Corp. announced today that Viagra will soon be available in liquid form, and will be marketed by Pepsi Cola as a power beverage suitable for use as a mixer. It will now be possible for a man to literally pour himself a stiff one. Obviously we can no longer call this a soft drink, and it gives new meaning to the names of “cocktails”, “highballs” and just a good old-fashioned “stiff drink”. Pepsi will market the new concoction by the name of: MOUNT & DO.

Thought for the day: There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra today than on Alzheimer’s research. This means that by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.