This New Year’s Eve short story was originally posted in 2007. Enjoy!
She held out her wineglass, and I filled it four-fifths of the way up with chardonnay. Her eyes widened.
“Trying to get me drunk?”
I leaned back against the kitchen counter, taking the time to survey her. I smiled what I hoped was my cockiest smile.
“Lady, I don’t even know you.” Continue reading
Honestly, if Bo Burnham was a girl, I think I would propose marriage, or commitment, or domestic partnership, or at very least a co-joined household. He’s smart, funny, and completely shameless:
Do you need more Pi? Or a sexy short story about Pi?
Happy Pi Day! Have a slice for me, I’m gluten-intolerant.
… and then I promise I’ll cut this out until next year!
Last year in the New York Times blog, John Tierney wrote about International Pi Day. (Which is, by the way, originally an invention of The Exploratorium in San Francisco.) He said:
The Exploratorium has gathered a few genres on its Pi Day site, including this limerick:
If inside a circle a line
Hits the center and goes spine to spine
And the line’s length is d
The circumference will be
d times 3.14159
These are his suggestions for writing your own odes to Pi:
You can write a traditional haiku about pi like this one:
Unending digits . . .
Why not keep it simple, like
Twenty-two sevenths?Or, for the ambitious, you can try a pi-ku that’s both a haiku and a mnemonic device in which the number of characters in each word equals the value of the corresponding digit of pi. Here’s an example that enables you to derive 11 digits of pi (3.1415926535) by counting the number of characters in each of the 11 words:
Let C over D
(Wheel perimeter on height)
Equal its value.Then, for the real purist, there’s a new form of pi-ku proposed by Ian Chillag of NPR: Instead of the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of haiku, honor pi with lines of 3, 1 and 4 syllables. Like:
Why is pi
Square
As pie is round?
Here is my own attempt at pi-ku, being silly and trying to make it erotic, of course — like my haiku.
Reciting
Pi,
math gets me hot.
I’m quitting now. Really.
Posted in Sci/Tech, Uncategorized
Tagged exploratorium, fun, haiku, limericks, math, mathematics, pi, pi day, pi-ku, poetry, San Francisco, science
This year Pi Day sort of snuck up on me. I think that next year I’ll have to create a blog carnival or something. There’s just infinite potential!
I love this cartoon about Pi Approximation Day (July 22). 
Call me obsessed. I’ve always had a thing for certain numbers, especially what are called the “master numbers” in numerology. I love 11, 22, 33, and 44. My birthday is in master numbers (11/22) and I frequently see them on clocks. For example, I’ll wake up during the night and it will be 3:33, or I’ll check the time at work and it will be 11:22. This has driven some of the people in my life crazy (or at least they thought I was crazy), but other friends say they now see it too, and frequently report my emails arriving with the time 11:22 on them. One friend called last year on my birthday to say she had just bought lunch and the tab was $11.22 and she knew she should call me!
I thought we were on to a great thing when an ex-girlfriend and I had our first date on 9/9/2007, which, of course, is all nines (2007 adds up to nine), and nines have their own special kind of magic. For starters, if you add up the integers in any multiple of nine (what’s called the digital root), you’ll get nine. Try it with the date 9/9/2007, which is really 3×9 or 27, which is again, (2+7), 9. I love it! Here’s some more fun information on nine.
As for Pi. I think I’m a little obsessed. I’m using memorization as a daily meditation exercise, as part of my other yoga practices. I’m up to about 50 decimal points. Who knows where I’ll be next year at 3/14?
P.S. Here’s a link to one of my short stories about Pi.
P.P.S. I just discovered there’s a world ranking list for memorizing Pi. Chao Lu of China tops the list with a world record memorization of 67,890 digits. It took him 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite it! Hell, I’ll be happy if I can get to 100!
Posted in Humor, Sci/Tech, Uncategorized
Tagged dinosaurs, geek, geeky, math, mathematics, nerd, nerdy, numbers, numerology, pi, pi approximation day, pi day, science, success, world ranking
Today, 3/14, is International Pi Day and just to prove my geeky worthiness, I’ll write it as far as I can from memory: 3.1415926535897932384626433.
I think that’s correct, but I’m not usually in this good form. However, I helped my son study for a Pi reciting contest his school held yesterday and some of it seemed to stick!
Now we’re cooking with gas! This groovy short film by Nick Douglas features San Franciscans counting out Pi to 57 decimal places… Check it out. You might even see someone you know! I’ve included the words so those of you who haven’t memorized it can count along: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974…
And, in a segue slicker than Astroglide, this is a previously published GPG story about Pi.
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