A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Every now and then you come across an article that just, while it seems so short, answers a lot of questions. For example this one, Sperm Travels Faster Toward Attractive Females in Discover Channel article by Jennifer Veigas. Of course the research was done on red junglefowl, a sort of chicken.

While women may be picky when choosing a mate, it seem that the male is most likely to produce more sperm with a great desire to make it to the egg if the male finds the female attractive and the more attractive the faster the sperm swim to their destination.

While this is interesting research especially for those who are trying to learn more about fertility, it does seem to be making a lot of assumptions when the chickens can’t exactly tell you that that chicken on over by the watering can is the most beautiful he’s ever seen. The researcher said:

“Female attractiveness is determined by the expression of a sexual ornament — the comb — which is phenotypically and genetically correlated to the number and mass of eggs females lay,” according to study co-authors Charlie Cornwallis of the University of Oxford and the Royal Veterinary College’s Emily O’Connor.

I don’t think that this research can really be expected to map on human behavior because I don’t think it actually maps on chicken behavior — flushed comb or not — some hens are better layers than others no matter what the rooster thinks of them. Ask any farmer? So, while interesting, I think the assumptions are flawed but then again the original papers are not available and the reported methodology just doesn’t make me think they got anything going with this line of research — but it does make you wonder….

Up early again. Hyperion had to be in the Dealer’s Room by 9:30 and I wanted to get to the Green Room for coffee before my 10 o’clock panel. We made it.

10:00 Upbeat Downbeat in YA Fiction. Panelists: Ellen Klages, Gayle Surrette (Moderator), Leah Bobet, Tui Sutherland, Paolo Bacigalupi. Dark and downbeat endings have become fashionable in YA fiction, even to the point where they have been questioned as a fad gone too far. The trend raises a host of questions about the psychology of young readers that need to be asked and answered. Is the tone and resolution of a work of YA fiction actually more important than in adult fiction, e.g., because the readers are still at the age where their worldview is being shaped? Do young readers have a different tolerance for or reaction to downbeat endings than adults? Do they need to be forcibly exposed to the cruel realities of the world, shielded form them, or gently inoculated?

Since I was the moderator for this panel, it’s hard to evaluate how I think it went. I believe it went well and we gave some interesting ideas and feedback to the audience, but then I’m biased. So, if you were there let me know your opinion and what you got out of this panel.

I read several quotes and asked the panelists to give their thoughts in reaction to the quotes.

From Brooklyn Arden (a blog by Cheryl Klein) I got a quote by Richard Peck:

YA novels “end not with happily ever after, but with a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived”; and the events in the book have left the character better prepared for that.

From the ASJA Monthly, a quote from YA author Nora Baskin:

…YA books today are addressing some of the most controversial and authentic topics in our culture, from eating disorders to drug use, death, suicide, transgender issues, incest: the books reflect the issues that young adults are dealing with in their lives, in more honest and contemporary ways than ever before.

From Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, in “The Critics, The Monsters, and the Fantasists”

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore hope.

We also discussed Meg Cabot’s June 10th post on her blog where she said:

Why read these books? (trauma porn) If worse than your life they make you feel better. … But if your life is worse what then? What do you read.

Meg read books to escape and now she chooses to write books similar to the ones that offered her escape when she was younger.

"Invention of Fantasy" Panel

1:00 The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival. Panelists: Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Kathryn Morrow (Moderator), Erin Kissane, Faye Ringel. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions form ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and literature of the Fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to teh average reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that underpins much of our field–an older world beneath this one which still seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs and their framwork, starting with our own Guest of Honor (Greer Gilman’s Cloud derives its physics form The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love not only draws on the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the ficiton of all three). Is this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must, but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.

Greer has about 8,000 variants of Child ballads.Child was interested in the survival of the text but not in the music or the performance. Sharp (sp?) saved the music too and what he could of the performance of the songs.

There was a lot of talk of the strong impulse that seems to insist that a rite or ballad or ritual must be historic and unchanged and the belief that those doing it are following in the footsteps of their ancestors. When, in truth many of these rites/rituals/songs have been transformed or invented or melded with other traditions and none of them can be traced unbroken to the neolithic past.

One point I enjoyed was that nostalgia was really fast. TV today has nostalgia for the 1990s. History begins when you are born and everyone wishes for that “better” past.

There was much discussion of the research of Jane Ellen Harrison and how she was dismissed by her male counterparts but that they then used her research as the basis for their own.

"I Spy" Panel

2:00 I Spy, I Fear, I wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Panelists: Chris Nakashima-Brown, C.C. Finlay (Moderator), Ernest Lilley, James D. Macdonald, Don D’Ammassa. In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because “all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation”) while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their “obsessive collection of secret information”). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the “uncontrollable universe” in horror fiction “verges on the overwhelming,” while spy fiction “allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over” it. This is only one example of the confluences of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic: the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers’ Declare, William Gibson’s Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We’ll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationships.

Spy novels have a specific atmosphere to them. Usually a person working for a heartless agency and the mission are imposed onto the agent or innocents are pulled in assist.

SF has movement into different space –middle class world to the underworld — while spies seem to go between governments.

Agents are always alien because a spy always is alienated from those around them. Their mission and purpose is imposed and they aren’t themselves. They don’t have true feelings. In SF the character’s feelings are their own.

Spies seldom have personal connections because they aren’t themselves — they play a part and if they have feelings they are based on false premises.

There was a long discussion of sexism because spy novels seem to be an area for men. However, the audience mentioned La Femme Nikita, Alias, and others. But it was considered that the pronoun on most of these female characters could change and no one would notice. There was also the mention of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Polifax novels where the pronoun couldn’t be shifted and still have the book work.

Other books mentioned:
Time Power’s — Declare, Three Days to Never
Dresden Files
The Wolf’s Hour by Robert R. McCammon
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers

3:00 Is Darwinism Too Good for SF? Panelists: Steven Popkes, Anil Menon, Jeff Hecht (Leader), Robert J. Sawyer, Caitlin R. Kiernan, James Morrow. This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great SF inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?

The problem is that with science and physics you can look at the rules and the equations and they work just about anywhere and you know what would happen if you changed any one bit. But for biology we don’t have a handle on things. We’ve only got Earth to see how things work. One sample just isn’t enough. We need another planet to have some comparisons. If we found life on another planet and the DNA matched bits of ours that would tell us a lot. But we don’t, and things aren’t solid.

We’re really still resistant to Darwin’s thesis of Natural Selection because it means we’re not special or fallen angels, we’ve simply evolved along with all the other animals on this planet.

Discussion continued on what would have happened if Darwin hadn’t published. Would Wallace have published? Would the theory just come from one of the other researchers who was working along the same lines.

In our instant world, could you develop a theory based on historical perspective when our current history is only about 17 hours old.

We need to get the supernatural out of the way. Would a Buddhist have similar arguments for/against Natural Selection as Europeans and Americans do? If the theory came from another culture would it be more acceptable?

The panelists seemed to agree that SF and Fantasy tended to play it safe with Darwin’s theory — some books mentioned:
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century by Robert Charles Wilson
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
Teranesia by Greg Egan
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer

The Dealer’s Room closed at 6 PM and then a group of us went out for Chinese. But, by the time we got back to our room the lack of sleep was catching up to us so we’re going to make it an early night since we start driving home late tomorrow afternoon with a stop in Providence to visit our son. So, we need a bit more shut eye than the six hours we’ve been getting.

Okay, I admit it. I’m overweight. I’m working on adding a lot more exercise into my daily life, well as much as I can with chronic pain and fibromyalgia. I do between 15-45 minutes on the Wii Fit each day. Lately, I’ve been also walking down to the mailbox (1/4 miles from the house) and a few times a week, depending on the temperature, Hyperion and I have been taking about a 1.5 to 2 mile walk in the early evening. So, I’m not a slouch with the exercise and I eat healthy and lite — mostly.

But I’m fairly comfortable with myself though if I lose some weight my knees would probably throw a big party with carrots and celery. But then I get the confusing messages from the “world”. Airlines want to charge extra for heavy people to fly because it bothers people to sit next to a fat person. You know what bothers me — people who douse themselves with perfume and fly, people who put their seats all the way back without even thinking about the person behind them who just lost 1/3 of their space and most likely can’t read unless they rest the book on the reclining person’s head, people who feel they must tell you their life story even when you get your book our and open it. Heck, I’ve sat next to skinny people who spread themselves all out over half my seat and their own and half the one next to them as they take off their shoes and pull their legs up into their seat with their knees on my seat arm and in my lap. No, I don’t think overweight people are the problem — I think seats designed for a 1920’s butt that hasn’t been updated since is the problem, but then there would be fewer seats per plane, flying would be more relaxing, and flight attendants would have an easier time dealing with passengers — hmmm….

But mostly, people in the news and in advertising seem to think heavy people are lazy and don’t do anything. Most of the people I know are overweight. Of course they also work 12-14 hours per day and are on call the rest of the day doing IT work of one sort or another. Add the long days to long commutes and there’s not a lot of time to eat responsibly — you grab meals when you can and take what you can get. Most run on caffeine and sugar — that’s the problem for most Americans. We work long hours with long commutes and very little free time. Of course, I work at home but I still work long hours and have health issues so ….

But, I found this gem of an article in the New York Times, Excess Pounds, but Not Too Many, May Lead to Longer Life.  Evidently, skinny people and very heavy people may have health problems from weight issues but moderately heavy and normal (whatever that means) people live longer. There was a similar article about the study, Can A Little Extra Weight Protect People From Early Death? Underweight, Extremely Obese Die Earlier Than People Of Normal Weight in Science Daily. Yeah, for this new study.

I’ve known some skinny people with really bad health problems and some normal people and some heavy people. I may agree that carrying added weight can put some strain on the organs, but then so can a lot of other factors. You just can’t generalize about people on simply one factor and expect it to be taken seriously. I doubt if there is a single factor you could use that starts with “All whatever people are ____” and have it be true for every case. It isn’t true when you use race as that whatever and it certainly isn’t true when you use eye color, hair color, weight, or religion. People are too diverse and unique to use sweeping statements like that.

But I like this study because it found evidence that goes totally against what people have been saying for ages and seems to have some numbers to back it up. We need more studies to see just what being overweight does effect and these studies will hopefully be devoid of blame and accusations.

Everyone likes a view from their windows. Some of us get a view of brick walls and others have lovely views of hillsides, mountains, rivers, or ocean waves. Those intrepid space explorers often talk about gathering round tiny viewports trying to get a glimpse of Earth or other space features. Now in the new space station, there will be a room with a view.

Designed to be an observation area for overseeing outside work, there will be instrumentation so that they can also operate arms and other equipment from the viewing area. But best of all it will be a place where the astronauts can go to just enjoy the scenery, relax, and contemplate their place in the universe.

Hopefully, this means that more observatory research can be done. Astronauts would be able to report back what things look like for them when areas having severe weather conditions on Earth swing by. They can also take measurements and do other research.

Now that I know they have a view, I really, really, wish I could go up and take a look. I bet this big blue marble looks really lonely when you look out at it. All the photos and images I’ve seen taken by NASA and the astronauts most likely can’t do justice to the view any more than all those holiday photos of our last vacation can really give the feel of being there yourself.

I read the reports about how awful piracy is for the the artists who create the intellectual properties that are downloaded or copied.  Then there’s the “Don’t steal our property” commercials and the lawsuits by RIAA and MPAA and similar or related international agencies.  However, I’ve long suspected the numbers that these groups float around regarding the loss of monies due to downloading.  This article in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre (Friday 5 June 2009), actually tracked down the genesis of one of those sets of numbers. He found that the numbers referred to were actually from a one page press release and not from a scientific study as was implied in their presentation.

I’m not surprised. I’m sure piracy goes on and that movies and music are being ripped off, but this is usually by big businesses who stamp out thousands of copies and sell them very cheaply. In fact, we don’t go after them or actually prosecute — or at least not to the degree that the various governments go after college students and individuals. I suspect the reason is because money changes hands and monies are paid into coffers somewhere that make it worth while to look the other way.

Okay, I’ll admit to being a cynic with regards to this topic. I’ve read enough of the online copies of testimony and trials to believe that lawyers and judges seldom know what they’re talking about. Expert witness (usually on the side of the victim in the suit — the college student or individual being sued by the corporation) are indeed experts and put forth their finding clearly, succinctly and with examples and statistical analysis backing them up. On the other hand the expert witness put forth by the corporation bringing the suit are almost exclusively NOT experts. By their own testimony they don’t do the research themselves, can’t explain the results, and bluster when pressed for details. What this country (USA) needs is expert witnesses who work for the judges to explain to them the merits of the testimony of expert1 vs expert2 vs known research in the field. Sometimes the cases, from reading transcripts, are truly cut and dried and the judgment is — surprise — totally opposite of what one would expect.

The point is that people have an inherent concept  of intellectual property and actual most respect it, and have no intention of stealing an electronic version of a work. The problems arise when common sense and law doesn’t agree. People (and I’m using this generic term because it’s a collective term) believe that when they buy a music CD, video tape, or DVD, that they own it. Thus they feel that they can watch it on any machine they want to. They also feel that since they own, say a music CD, that they should be able to rip the songs off it and play them on their MP3 player while they’re away from their CD player since they own it and they can’t listen to both at the same time — so that it’s okay to do this.

MPAA and RIAA, for example, believe that you don’t own the CD, DVD, or whatever.  They claim that you just bought a license to use it in the manner that they deem appropriate. As you can see this is the basis of the problem. If what a person buys doesn’t belong to them and they can’t use it as they see fit why bother to buy it; or sell it for that matter.

If I rent a movie, I expect to return it without making any copy because I didn’t buy it and I don’t own it. I believe from conversations with many people that most, if not all, people feel the same. It’s not ours, we just borrowed it — like a library copy so we return it to the owner– the person we rented it from.   It makes sense.  But if you go to the store and buy a DVD or CD, you would expect that, the media being in many cases breakable, making a copy of the CD or DVD to put aside in case the purchased copy is destroyed or broken is okay. Unfortunately, the courts seem to say “No”, at least under the new (now old) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since you don’t own what you bought, even though you have a sales receipt — you can’t make copies or move it to another medium for ease of use. That’s counter-intuitive for many people and thus more and more people acting on common sense are actually committing crimes against intellectual property.

[Hyperion: If RIAA/MPAA didn’t act in such a counter-intuitive and heavy handed fashion, they might actually have people on their side.  Instead their flagrant violations of common sense and real world custom cause the people who understand the technology and culture to turn against them.  As someone (I forget who) said: What kind of sane business model consists of suing your best customers?]

Somehow it seems that when things go from hard copies to digital, the courts and the law don’t see them as being equivalent.  Somehow being digital makes them all nervous and scared. Then they start talking about things like digital crowbars, forgetting completely that crowbars are not illegal to own in the real world. Just because a criminal sometimes uses a crowbar to commit a crime doesn’t make everyone who owns one a criminal but the digital crowbar argument says if you own a digital crowbar you are in fact a criminal — even if you never use it to commit a crime. I have yet to hear of a lawyer bringing that point up against the digital crowbar scare tactic — though maybe I missed it somewhere.

My belief is that people are basically law abiding and that they use internalized morals to determine their behavior. I think the courts have been bamboozled into believing that piracy, intellectual property theft, and loss of revenues is far larger than it really is, because they have been lied to or mislead by agencies who cheated by not doing the research they purport to have done or who have knowingly supplied incorrect numbers and statistics to bolster their arguments.

In most documented cases, a person downloading a copy of a movie from a site, wasn’t going to buy it anyway. If you look at who is being taken to court, they’re usually low income persons who can’t fight back. I’ve yet to see them go after the big pirates — no they have money, lawyers and can fight back. (Cynicism again, yeah big time.)

In most of the cases (found and investigated by real researchers), it’s found that people who downloaded something illegally either then bought the movie or CD or got rid of it because they didn’t like it. Net result is that it wouldn’t have been a sale anyway (or there was actually a sale). I would imagine that most of the people who have a NetFlix subscription or belong to one of the movie rental places do so for the same reason. Why buy something you haven’t seen and don’t know if you’d want to see it over and over again.

In fact most reports show that RIAA’s bottom line has gone up since file sharing sites started having musical downloads. Why?  Because more people bought the music that they heard. There is a reason why music stores have those earphones and places where you can hear snippets of the music you are thinking of buying.

Instead of changing their business model to take into account the way people actually purchase and use media, these corporations are trying to use the legal route to force everyone to do things as they were done before the advent of digital media. (Of course it doesn’t help that many artists who couldn’t get the time of day from these big corporations, are now, because of the internet, able to develop a following and sell their material directly to their listeners/fans.

[Hyperion: When RIAA isn’t demanding that the music be taken down, despite having no authority to represent these artist’s interests and, in fact, acting completely in opposition to said interests.  But then it isn’t about the artists … it’s about the control.  Yeah, Gayle isn’t the only cynical one in the family.   But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.]

I still think if I buy something I own it — too bad the big corps don’t feel the same way.

I usually keep my eye on global warming related reports and spotted these articles (Google News’s “Sea Rise from Antarctic Ice Melt Overestimated“, Christian Science Monitor’s “If W. Antarctic Ice Sheet melts, how high will sea levels rise?”, and Science’s “Ocean Science: Ice Sheet Stability and Sea Level” (link takes you to the abstract, you can’t read the full paper unless you pay) on the new figures for sea rise if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) melts.

Originally, it was thought that if the WAIS melted that sea levels would rise between 5-7 meters. However, that was based on models that just don’t seem to stand up in comparison to reality. So, once they started looking at the real world and comparing with the models they found that it was more likely that the sea level rise if the WAIS melted would be closer to 3.2 to 3.3 meters (depending on which report you read). So things aren’t as dire as scientists originally thought, although 10.5+ feet is still pretty dire. That’s still going to make drastic changes to the east and west coasts of the United States as well as some other countries.

You see sea level just doesn’t rise; it also runs horizontally. Most people hear that the sea level will go up a foot and they think that won’t bother me I’m above that level. Right, it won’t bother you directly if you’re above that level and not close enough to be bother with storm surges which can be much higher than normal high tides when pushed by a storm. But those people near rivers, streams, and in areas between the current sea level and the new one — even if they are inland — might find themselves having problems with rising water tables, water levels in streams and rivers, and now they sit in a flood plain.

If you look at a map with topographic markings you can see that areas that currently don’t connect with the sea, if the level rises a foot or a yard would suddenly be underwater. That’s the part of sea level rise that most people don’t think about and don’t seem to care about.

It’s the intellectual blindness that caused people to buy houses on the Mississippi between the river and the levees and never consider that the levees were there for a reason and maybe living between a levee and the river wasn’t a good idea. When the flooding occurred a few years back, I was really upset that so many people had lost their homes. Then I saw a live broadcast where they were talking to the homeowners trying to salvage whatever they could from the wreckage of their homes. The camera pans and there are the homes with the river on one side and the high levees on the other. Really, it was a matter of when not if they would lose their homes. I still felt sympathy that they had to go through this terrible experience but couldn’t stop thinking why didn’t they think about their situation logically before buying the home in the first place. People ignore what they don’t want to face. If there’s a levee and your home is between it and the river, that should be a “duh” moment and a no sale.

People have been ignoring global warming for years and now it is not just a nice little hypothetical thought experiment but is changing the face of the world. Still people hear about scientists discussing sea level rise and the possible factors that will effect the eventual change and what the numbers might be and they shrug and go on. Well, I won’t be buying any sea front property anytime soon but if I was I’d certainly be checking out topographical maps. Just maybe that house on the hill with lots of acres will turn out to be a nice private island in a hundred years or so.

Science Daily for April 7th had an article on how Caffeine Reduces Pain During Exercise. Professor of kenesiology and community health, Robert Motl has been studying the effects of caffeine on pain during exercise. He began by noticing that he always had a cup of coffee before going out to train and felt it helped him workout longer and perform better when he was a competitive cyclist.

Early in his research, Motl noticed:

“caffeine works on the adenosine neuromodulatory system in the brain and spinal cord, and this system is heavily involved in nociception and pain processing.” Since Motl knew caffeine blocks adenosine from working, he speculated that it could reduce pain.

Even more interesting to me is that the results were pretty much the same whether the test subject was a caffeine junkie or someone who barely ate or drank anything with caffeine in it. (Remember caffeine is in more than just coffee, it’s also in chocolate, soft drinks, and many other foods and beverages.) This particular study was only interested in pain and exercise and did coffee make a difference. For other activities or pain related problems caffeine might not work.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll notice that the research about coffee/caffeine and its impact on people’s heath is very much dependent on what research you’re reading. It’s good for you. It’s bad for you. It’s okay in moderation. You should never touch the stuff. It might help reduce the pain during exercise.

What to believe?  I don’t know. I’ve never really paid attention to whether or not having coffee before I do my exercise routine helps me do more exercises or push on harder on the ones I do. I guess now I’ll have to keep that in the back of my mind.

Personally, as I’ve said before, I have a liking for a good cup of coffee but I reduce my intake for health reasons and so that when I have a migraine, drinking coffee will have more of an effect on alleviating the pain. Could it be that this pain blocking effect also works a bit with migraines or is it only the blood vessel dilation/contraction effects that are at work?  I don’t know but I will keep my eye out for more research on the effects of coffee/caffeine on health.

And I’ll also ponder whether the quality of that cup of coffee has any effect on the results of the research. After all if it’s a truly gross cup of coffee I might prefer the pain of the exercise. Would you?

My husband and I have always had a soft spot in our hearts for March 14 — Pi Day (3.14…). We also get a giggle out of 3:14 if we happen to notice it — Pi o’clock. Okay, we’re definitely a geeky couple and have some strange ways of getting pleasure out of a day.

But it seems we’re not the only ones who enjoy a good math moment in our lives. CNet news reports in Politics and Law National Pi Day? Congress makes it official. The Library of Congress: Thomas has information about the law and a list of the sponsors.

It’s not going to be a national holiday or anything. It just gives the day recognition as being a bit special. So, for you geeks out there, we’ll finally have some recognition for one of our favorite mathematical and physical constants usually represented as being: 3.14159265… You can read about PI at Wikipedia. But basically Pi is

Pi, Greek letter (π), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535…
From: The Offical Pi Day Website

Or from the Math Forum:

By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to compute it.

For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For many purposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you want a better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here’s pi to many more digits: 3.14159265358979323846.

The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or “pi r squared”: A = pi*r^2

But for me I just enjoy the silliness of having a time of day and a day per year that manages to represent a famous mathematical and physical constant. What about you?