Today is Pi day – in American nomenclature March 14th is 3.14. The official Pi day website is com-π-ling a list of people’s favourite Pi day activities, most seem to revolve around the remarkably obvious eating of pies.

Also celebrating pi day:

A remarkably indepth article from the BBC

Freep.com is running a Pi-themed haiku contest. Somehow they have missed the opportunity to call it a pi-ku contest. Fools!

The NY Times is also running a poetry of Pi competition, and offering a pi-rize

Rush-Henrietta Central School students smashed their maths teachers in the face with pies, which seems quite harsh (Democrat and Chronicle).

Nature article from 2007 on Pi day

Today is also international ‘Talk Like A Physicist Day’ – March 14th is Einstein’s birthday…

As the website explains:

It is a perfect occasion for non-physicists to laugh at the Physicists and for physicists to find out how silly they really are. … We could go on and say that there is an educational value to “talking like a physicist” and that people are losing the art of being a physicist, but we are going to save those arguments when we apply for a $2B grant from the NSF.

But how do you talk like a physicist? The website explains this too:

Never say “I didn’t sleep enough” – correct way to say it is “It was observed that my sleep duration was less than average.”

or

(In Plank units), “I have a sleep deficiency of about ten to the power 47. which is about half an hour.

[Hat tip: Song Pi song embedded here came via Huffington Post]