RoR: Forum

Post 0

Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 7:23am

Bookmark

Link

Edit

March 14: 3-14 is "Pi Day."

You can find Pi to 1 million and 4 million places online.

You can find pi jokes and pi videos.

I have not written my Pi Day blog yet, but I wrote one last year about the runs of numbers such as 12345, 13579, 999999, and more in Pi. We misperceive order in randomness.

Post 1

Thursday, March 14, 2013 - 10:09am

Bookmark

Link

Edit

Happy Pi-Day Michael! How un-engineerish of me to forget.

It is interesting what you mention about the number patterns. I imagine that is just the way the brain is "programmed". I'm about 1/3 of the way through Ray Kurzweil's new book. He talks about how the main purpose of the brain is to be one big pattern recognizer. When we start to recognize a pattern in something, it begins to trigger the neocortex and we become more alert. An example he gives where this is not beneficial is the familiar case when we read a word differently than it is actually printed, because we were expecting a certain pattern of words. I'm sure there is some parallel here to people ascribing significance to random events, such as "signs from God" or ghost-related light-flickering.

Happy Pi Day