Writer's Block: National Pi Day

[seawasp]

[Error: unknown template qotd]Sixty, I think:
    3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

Out of all of the geeky things my friends and I did while growing up, and in my adult life... the one "standard geek thing" that I just never groked at all (and thus never took part in) was memorizing digits of pi.

How many digits of pi do I know? ... as many digits as my handy calculator represents. Or 3.14159 (but I have to think about that; on the fly: 3.14). If I need more precision than 3.14, then I'm not going to be doing it from memory nor calculating it in my head. If I'm not calculating it in my head, why on earth would I need (or want) it to be taken from my memorized information? I'll just pick up my calculator, or look it up in a book, or pull it in from a standard math library on my computer. It just always seemed to me that if there's a finite limit to my memory, then I don't want to fill it up with things that have no purpose ... and I never understood the purpose of memorizing long strings of digits of pi :-}

I guess there's two standard geeky things I never bought into. The other one was chess. Boring game :-}

[gary-jordan.livejournal.com]

Five. 3.14159. But I memorized the name of a search engine where I can get more at need... not that I see any need.

Instead, I memorized the longest word in the English language when I was in the eighth grade. Consubultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It beat the snot out of antidisestablishmentarianism, which is what many people still answer when you ask "What's the longest word in the English language?" Consubultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis isn't even the correct answer anymore, now was it by the end of that school year, having been beaten out by a longer form of itself. It's a lung disease, and the cure was longer, like adding anti- to disestablishmentarianism.

I'm so pleased, though. It's hard to work consubultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis or antidisestablishmentarianism into a conversation. This time, it was as easy as pi.