[time-nuts] pi Day

Rex rexa at sonic.net
Wed Mar 4 05:30:16 UTC 2009


I don't recall this discussion here before, but it should be a good time 
sink.

I was reminded tonight that "pi Day" is coming on 3/14. That's fine, but 
a little inaccurate for our kind.

Suppose I want to gather with friends and buy a "round" or have a sector 
of pie to celebrate.  What's the appropriate time to honor?

Since 3/14 is not based on the value of pie but on its representational 
decimal numbers (I have no problem with that), then it seems the right 
time would be (to the tenth of a second) March 14 at 1:59:26.5 . Waddya 
think? Does that appropriately honor the irrational spirit of the number?

I'm in California and 1:59 AM might be pushing closing time, but 1:59 
UTC would be 18:59 PDT and 21:59 EDT is workable too. I suggest that 
since it is just playing with the numbers everyone might try local time, 
UTC, and AM or PM to find a celebration point that works for you. If 
necessary, even go with 15:9:26.5 and the other options.

I checked out www.piday.org tonight and found that they have a rather 
broken countdown timer on the page. It seems to want to tell me to begin 
celebrating at 00:00:00 of piday but it seems to only work for US EST 
which will be wrong after daylight time kicks in. I think it also works 
off of an inaccurately set server timer. Bad form. Obviously these 
math-heads are not timenuts. If they are only going to show one time for 
the world it really should be 00:00:00 UTC shouldn't it? And why 
disregard all the other fine digits of pi (hence my 1:59:26.5). I'm not 
a facebook kind of guy, but maybe some of us should go there and set 
them more precisely into this game.

It also occurred to me that the actual value of pi vs. a year might give 
us other celebration options. I propose radian day (year duration / 2pi) 
or diameter day (year duration / pi). I calculate:
Radian = Feb 27 at 2:11:50.285 (dang, we missed it)
Diameter = Apr 26 at 4:23:40.57
(Different on leap years or slightly for leap seconds. Check my math -- 
I'm not a rocket scientist.)

Let me know if I messed up any of this important stuff and hopefully 
someone will bug the piday.org people into more timenutassity.





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