Happy St. Patrick's Day

For a few hours each year, millions of Irish and non-Irish commemorate the life of a 1500-year-old saint in a boisterous display of parading and revelry, festooned in the shamrock and emerald green.

There are over 34 million Irish Americans living in the U.S., making St. Patrick's Day one of the most widely celebrated holidays in America.

The obvious ways to celebrate St. Patty’s Day in Kansas City is to start with breakfast at Brown's Irish Market, head over to the St. Patrick's Day Parade, followed by lunch and more at Kelly’s Westport Inn, located in the heart of Westport, or to an Irish Pub like O'Dowds Little Dublin.

How will you celebrate Pi Day?

For most of the world, today is March 14th, or 3/14. To most, that date doesn't have any special meaning. But to math nerds, it means today is Pi Day!

There are a large variety of ways of celebrating Pi Day and most of them include eating pie and discussing the relevance of π.

Jim Stingl writes:
"Math geeks and calendar freaks collide today. Pi is 3.14, and the date is 3/14."

By the way, today is also Albert Einstein's birthday.

I'll get you started on pi: 3.141592653589793. The mathematical constant goes on without any repeating patterns right into infinity...

Read more of Stingl's article Geometry fans rejoice - it's Pi Day

Check out EducationalRap.com’s Pi Day Rap page, including quite a few Pi rap songs you can listen to. Lines like “If I’m buyin’ rims for a car – circumference – hey, yo, 2 Pi r…”

Also, TeachPi.org has a Pi music page with downloadable lyrics to several songs.

Leave a comment and tell me what is your favorite thing about Pi?

Learn more about Pi Day from Wikipedia.

Image Pi Pie at Delft University 
Public Domain

updated 3/122/17

Elephant and Dog Best Friends

CBS News' Steve Hartman visits an animal sanctuary where a dog and an elephant have formed a very lasting, and unusual, friendship.



Edited 2/27/15

Square Root Day

Exciting Day For Math Geeks

Steven Musil says "Count on Tuesday's alignment of the calendar to add some excitement to the lives of at least a few math geeks.

Square Root Day is a rare holiday that occurs when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the current year. Numerically, March 3, 2009, can be expressed as 3/3/09, or mathematically as √9 = 3, or 3² = 3 × 3 = 9."

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From Associated Press--The math-buffs' holiday, which only occurs nine times each century, falls on Tuesday — 3/3/09 (for the mathematically challenged, three is the square root of nine). The last such day was five years ago, Feb. 2, 2004, which coincided with Groundhog Day. The next is seven years away, on April 4, 2016.

"These days are like calendar comets, you wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day — and poof — they're gone," said Ron Gordon, a Redwood City teacher who started a contest meant to get people excited about the event.

The winner gets, of course, $339 for having the biggest Square Root Day event.

Gordon's daughter even set up a Facebook page — one of a half-dozen or so dedicated to the holiday — and hundreds of people had signed up with plans to celebrate in some way. Celebrations are as varied: Some cut root vegetables into squares, others make food in the shape of a square root symbol.

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More Math Celebrations

Square Root Day isn't the only humorous holiday celebrated in the math world.

Pi Day is observed each March 14 (3.14), while Pi Approximation Day falls on July 22 (roughly equal to 22/7). The first Pi Day was observed in 1988 by staff at the San Francisco Exploratorium, who walked around in circles.

How will you celebrate?

Spectacular Conjunction

Nov. 24, 2008: This story ends with the best sky show of the year--a spectacular three-way conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and the crescent Moon.

It begins tonight with a sunset stroll.

At the end of the day, when the horizon is turning red and the zenith is cobalt-blue, step outside and look southwest. You'll see Venus and Jupiter beaming side-by-side through the twilight. Glittering Venus is absolutely brilliant and Jupiter is nearly as bright as Venus. Together, they're dynamite:

Above: Venus and Jupiter converging over Hawaii on Nov. 19, 2008.
Photo credit and copyright: Stephen O'Meara. [Larger image]

Add another stick of TNT and voila!—it's tomorrow. Go outside at the same time and look again. You’ll be amazed at how much the Venus-Jupiter gap has closed. The two planets are converging, not in the slow motion typical of heavenly phenomena, but in a headlong rush—almost a full degree (two full Moon widths) per night. As the gap shrinks, the beauty increases.

Nov. 29th (sky map) the two planets will be less than 3 degrees apart and you'll think to yourself "surely it can't get any better than this." And then it will. On Nov. 30th (sky map) a slender 10% crescent Moon leaps up from the horizon to join the show. The delicate crescent...

Read the complete article and see the sky maps: click here Spectacular Conjunction