Friday, March 5, 2010

14 hours

Today, while we were eating dinner Keith and I told Elizabeth that it would be time for her to get ready for bed after we finished eating. She then looks at us and asks "Can I stay up for 14 more hours?" All night party here we come!

Monday, March 1, 2010

Get your Geek on and Find a cheap Birthday Present

Keith here. Marcie told me that she had started a blog but hadn't figured out a good name and for that reason had not yet posting anything. She asked me to think of a cute name. After thinking about it for a few days I came up with "in a previous conversation" whose origin you can read about in the previous post.

Anyway...on to the topic at hand. For those that don't know, I am a high school math teacher. I enjoy teaching high schoolers and also enjoy interesting math "stuff." I like reading strange math related articles in the news about crazy Russian recluses who have figured out this or that or whatever. I recently heard a new one and thought I would share it.

So here I go, gonna get my geek on.

One of the student teachers where I work recenlty had a birthday. One of my co-workers is friends with this student teacher and was aware that she, the student teacher, has a strange facisnation with the number pi. Just in case you don't know, 3.14.

Well as it turns out this new teacher, Kim, goes searching on the internet for strange pi related information to see what kind of "weirdness" she can pull out and put on a shirt as a birthday present. Kim came acrosss a website that, I think, is pretty freaking amazing.

What the website does is this. You enter in the digits of your birthday. For example, mine is 4141980, having been born on April 4, 1980. The website then takes that set of digits and scans pi until it finds that set of digits in that order and tells you how many places after the decimal that set of digits appear.

So my birthday 4141980 occurs at position 5,848,072 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

Isn't that weird? I thought so.

So that's all. Need a quick birthday present? Tell them that you started dividing out pi until you found their birthday. They will be amazed at your brilliance...or geekiness.

Here is the site. Enjoy!

http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi