what we talk about when we don't talk about science...

[postitnotejunky]

postdoc 1: You know what, I just realized: the number of days in a year is pretty close to the number of degrees in a circle...
postdoc 2: Coincidence? I think not!

As it turns out, he's probably right.

By the way, this exchange came out of a Very Serious Discussion about whether March 14th should actually be considered π Day or whether the

Comments

365.25/12

[anonymous]

Although, personally, I think the question you should be asking is "What flavor should the 0.14 be?" (I assume that cherry, pumpkin and apple are obvious.)

Robert

Re: 365.25/12

[postitnotejunky]

Man, that is a truly awful pun. You should be ashamed of yourself. :P

Also, (un)interesting factoid: In the Gregorian calendar, leap years occur on years that are multiples of 4, excepting years that are multiples of 100, excepting years that are multiples of 400. So really the number of days in a year is 365 + (1/4) - (1/100) + (1/400) = 365.2425. Compare this to the mean tropical year, which is actually 365.242199 days. The seventh significant digit is obviously incredibly important. Otherwise, how will we know the exact moment to celebrate π?

Re: 365.25/12

[anonymous]

Nobody knows the exact value of pi so any choice is doomed to be an approximation. You could approximate it as 3 except that 3.14 is clearly better because it means there is one more flavor to be sampled. Of course, instead of pi day you could have (pi)e day which produces about 8.5 instances of yum.

Robert

P.S. I will revel in my awful pun and then eat it.

Re: 365.25/12

[postitnotejunky]

Well, but π has been calculated to 5 trillion digits, so I'd say the limiting factor is how precisely we know the length of a month. (By the way, the fact that we have a whole comment thread on this clearly makes us the most awesome people on the planet.)

Also, you know what started this whole discussion at lab was that there's some pie shop in Cambridge (I think it's Petsi Pies?) that, on π Day, will give you 10% off of a pie for every 10 digits of π you can recite. I dunno about you, but I've got 17 off the top of my head. I can probably get it up to 40 by next π day; that would totally be a good use of my lifetime limit of neural connections, yes?