6 ms·
For most of us in the world, No Day is Pi Day. http://imgur.com/1r5QpQu http://imgur.com/1r5QpQu
by Jaruzel 10y ago
For most of us in the world, No Day is Pi Day.
http://imgur.com/1r5QpQu http://imgur.com/1r5QpQu
- trcollinson 10y agoIt seems this Show HN proves you rather wrong. I understand the point, you use a different format for your dates than the US. But the point of this Show HN is that all number sequences can be found within the digits of pi quite easily. Very neat demonstration!
- Jaruzel 10y agoyou use a different format for your dates than the US 'I' use? I think you'll find everyone uses a different format than the US. ...the point of this Show HN is that all number sequences can be found within the digits of pi... Everyone already knows this. I'm just struggling with the wall-to-wall 'Pi Day' articles all over the tech web and Facebook right now. I make no apology.
- justusthane 10y agoeveryone uses a different format than the US. 'Everyone uses'? What about all the people in the U.S.?
- tossaway1 10y ago> 'I' use? I think you'll find everyone uses a different format than the US. The plural of "you" in English is"you"...
- atonse 10y agoIt's always fashionable to make fun of the US doing things its own way, when that's just seldom true. You're mostly right that nobody else uses MMDDYYYY (although many countries use it as a secondary format). But it's not like there's a consistent format that _everyone else_ uses. There are 2-3 different formats spread around the world, with no real consistency in why some pick a particular format.
- ska 10y agoEveryone already knows this. That's funny, because we have not proven it to be true.
- lutusp 10y agoIt's also an argumentum ad populum.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago> all number sequences can be found within the digits of pi quite easily I dispute that, although I guess the general brute-force solution is 'easy' given infinite time.
- geofft 10y agoYeah, this isn't known to be true. pi has not been proven to be a disjunctive number (a real number whose expansion contains all possible finite strings), let alone a normal number (where all finite strings occur with the probability you'd expect if the digits were random). Both of these, however, are generally conjectured to be true, but it's just a conjecture. https://oeis.org/wiki/Disjunctive_numbers#Is_pi_a_disjunctive_number.3F https://oeis.org/wiki/Disjunctive_numbers#Is_pi_a_disjunctiv... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
- lutusp 10y ago>> all number sequences can be found within the digits of pi quite easily > I dispute that, although I guess the general brute-force solution is 'easy' given infinite time. Look at it this way -- if it were not true, then the digits of Pi would not be normally distributed (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number), and that would be a rather extraordinary mathematical finding. If Pi's digits are normally distributed, then one can reliably predict the time required for finding any particular digit sequence using probability theory. And given the presumption of normalcy, that probability is the same for any digit sequence of a given length. The probability for finding a given test digit sequence in the first 100 million digits of Pi is given here: https://www.angio.net/pi/whynotpi.html https://www.angio.net/pi/whynotpi.html But it has to be emphasized that, given a finite test sequence and an infinite sequence of Pi's digits as a search space, the probability is 1.0.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoYou're both giving me too much credit. I was merely making the less sophisticated point that it's not 'easy' to find an arbitrary-length sequence in pi because that might take longer than the lifespan of the universe when the needle gets long enough. Your response was much more interesting, though, thanks :)
- GlennS 10y agoAlso works with YYYY-MM-DD... Although admittedly I too find the US date system's wrong-endianness pretty annoying.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoI've always been surprised that Pi Day is primarily evangelized by so many math / science / CS folks, when I would think it would be precisely these folks who hate the MM/DD/YYYY format. ISO format soothes my soul like a warm slice of apple pie with ice cream.
- clarkcox3 10y agoAnd, in the ISO format, when omitting the year, it's still 3-14.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y agoPi Day is the same in Drunk Endian (US) and Big Endian (ISO Standard) formats (March 14th). It's different in Little Endian (Traditional European) format.
- TallGuyShort 10y agoYeah this thought mainly occurred to me when a big hubbub was made about 3.1415 day (3/14/15, or MM/DD/YYYY).
- teekert 10y agoI once found myself confused as to how to date a US patent application, I was happy though to find that it was August 8th at the time.
- athenot 10y agoI have been dating all official documents in ISO-8601 format and never had an issue with that in over 15 years. This includes bank forms, checks, contracts, and many other informal docs. Same for when my birthdate is requested of me. Even if the form has specific spaces for MM/DD/YYYY, I just write over it with the pen.
- fao_ 10y agoActually ISO 8601 states that the datecode format that should be used is YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+<OFFSET> in this format, Pi day is: 2017-03-14 (The rest of the complete format omitted since it is not strictly relevant)
- Jaruzel 10y agoExcept that's not what people mean when the say 'Pi Day' - they mean the US date format of 3-14.
- fao_ 10y agoIf both work, and the one interpretation overlaps and is an international standard, who cares?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- athenot 10y agoMaybe that day can be written 2017-π to preserve both the pun and (if not the letter) the spirit of ISO notation. In that sense, it's Pi day for a given year.
- nkantar 10y agoAs one of the comments says: > jyssys3: The rest of the world celebrates it at 22/7. I'd expect it's really 22.7., but this is more fun.
- teekert 10y ago22/7 = 3.14285714285714285714 ;)