3.141592

Today is Pi day. 3.14.

Pi is the ratio of a circle circumference to its diameter. A long time ago somebody was rolling logs around and figured out that one revolution of a round object went just about three times the diameter of the object.

Pi is an irrational number, meaning that it has an infinite number of non-repeating decimal places. Not to be confused with irrational legislators that have the unfortunate property of constantly repeating themselves. People have been calculating the value of Pi since antiquity. Egyptians and Babylonians got to within a percent or so over a thousand years BC. More modern attempts at refining the value have given us about a trillion digits. You can download Pi to a million digits off the internet. A really cool party trick is reciting the first hundred decimal places of Pi. At least the parties I go to, which aren’t many.

In a testimonial to legislative stupidity, the 1897 Indiana House of Representatives passed a bill to establish a different value of Pi so some Hoosier mathematician could find an easier way to compute the area of a circle. Never mind that Pi is an unchangeable physical constant, this august body of idiots preferred a different reality. I can’t say things have changed much in the Indiana legislature, or many other state legislatures for that matter. For some reason these mental midgets seem to think they can legislate reality into something they have the ability to understand. Which isn’t much. Like intelligent design. Which is why Indiana legislators, when asked to compute the area of a circle, are likely to say, “But Pi r square is wrong. Pi r round, cake r square.”

We got in a tiny bit of birding this week. A red-necked grebe was reported at the power plant on the Grand River in downtown Lansing. We scurried down there at sunrise on Monday and saw it as it was swimming downstream out of sight. Others chased it right after us with no luck, but it did show up again last night. We also got a ring-necked duck there and a house wren has showed up in the neighborhood. Singing its little heart out. Despite the snow on Wednesday and the zero degree temperatures Thursday morning, spring is coming. And I for one am really ready for it.

So get out there and enjoy a piece of Pi.