It's Pi Day, Pi Day, gotta get down on Pi Day

Things have been very, very quiet on the blog. I have many posts in draft which may or may not get published in the near future, but for now it's Pi Day. Several people linked me to this article in the Guardian (hint: the first one is a trick question), which led me on to this article about why we use π. I thought it was Euler, because it's always Euler, and he did popularize it, but turns out the first recorded use was in William Jones's 1706 Summary of Mathematical Achievements.

And now you know.

And, of course, Vi Hart's annual anti-pi rant. Which is a bit more subversive this time.

2016: Still waters running deep

Things have been a little... quiet... on the blog lately. As predicted, school has been kicking my butt time-wise, but I did do some things this past year. I'm going to make a concerted effort in the new year to follow my original goal of blogging on average once a week. Many posts are currently sitting in the drafts folder, but they will see the light of day. Maybe even this year.^*

On with the yearly wrap-up. It was a year. The consensus is that it sucked globally, but personally, it was pretty good. I had 8 months of vacation, followed by 4 months of making up for it in spades. The DC and I celebrated our first anniversary as married adorables and my cat Lucy celebrated her 17th birthday by finally realizing that she has massive arthritis in her hips and so therefore shouldn't be leaping from the sewing table to the ironing board and that she could, in fact, pee on this.

Why math is important: A 20s dress

I've pledged to make 2-3 things for my vintage pledge. One is this 20s dress gleaned from Loran's World's Art of the 20s dress challenge.

Update: Loran got it from The Midvale Cottage Post (specifically this post, but check out all the amazing 1920s stuff at that first link); I thought I had the original source can't believe I didn't click through. The pattern is from Ruth Wyeth Spears.


It's not a terribly useful dress, but it's oh so pretty. Chiffon. Floaty. I kept thinking this dress was familiar from somewhere...

Transit of Mercury

Image Credit: NASA.

Four years ago, I managed to see the once-in-a-lifetime (for me) Transit of Venus, and although I didn't manage to capture it photographically, it still made me squee.

Tomorrow is the slightly-more-than-once-in-a-lifetime^* Transit of Mercury and I'm going to try to capture it again. I have a somewhat better camera these days, so here's hoping.

If you have a telescope or a set of binoculars, you should check it out. Just DON'T LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN! EVER!!!1! Check the links for how to make a viewing projector.

(MMM16 week 1 wrap-up coming later this evening.)

^*It happens about a dozen times per century; the next one is in 2019.

Today's pi is round

Happy birthday, Albert Einstein! Complete coincidence.

Yes, it is that day beloved/hated by mathematicians and other number geeks, and which I celebrate because I quite like pie.

For those of you who write the date yyyy/mm/dd, happy 641.72272548*pi day. @jamesgrime

— Museum of Math (@MoMath1) March 14, 2016

Math with Bad Drawings has several (mathematical) pi recipes.

Here is a quite lovely Buffon's Needle explanation and applet from the University of Illinois.

And of course it wouldn't be Pi Day without a rant from Vi Hart. Substance over appearance all the way.

A sphere for Tau Day

Vi Hart, warrior for tau, has appropriately put together a spherical video for Tau Day. You'll need to watch it on Chrome (there are possibly other browsers that would work, but I don't know what they are).


If you try to watch it on Firefox, say, you'll get something that looks like this:


...which is actually pretty cool.

On Chrome, it looks more like this:

and you can swing the camera around to look in different directions.

Mmmm, braaaaaaanes...

Amanda Peet's talk on String Theory is available on YouTube now.


I really like the idea of explaining Newton as Gravity 1.0 and Einstein as Gravity 2.0. Definitely using those analogies the next time I teach Modern Physics!

String Theory is LEGO!

...or something. For Star Wars Day, an appropriately sciencey post.

A Twitter friend of mine, Dr. Amanda Peet, will be giving a public lecture at the Perimeter Institute on Wednesday evening. They've been tweeting about making LEGO models in preparation, so I'm really looking forward to it.



You can learn more about watching the public lecture online here (Wednesday, May 6 at 7 PM ET).

As an aside, they (@kiwinerd) are great to follow, partially because they've been very eye-opening for me about my various forms of privilege (and I think it's really important for me to be reminded on a regular basis), but also because they post lovely pictures of the frequent bike rides they take to the Island and along the waterfront. One day soon, I will be inspired enough by those photos to actually get off my duff and do the same.

In the meantime, here they are explaining how black holes "gobble" information:

Pi-endulum (updated)

Happy Pi Day!

You may have been hearing a little bit more about Pi Day this year since we can time it exactly to 3.1415926^* (although that depends, as always, on how you write your date^**). Matt Parker of Standup Maths has made a really nice video showing how a pendulum can be used to calculate pi.

I have a slight quibble with him saying a pendulum has nothing to do with a circle because they are related via sine functions, but it's not immediately obvious, so I'll let it go.

Also? PI pi smackdown!



Edited to add: And naturally Vi Hart has chimed in...


^*That last digit should really be 7 since we're rounding. Hence my posting time.

^**More pertinently, on how you've set up Blogger write your date. Let's just pretend, shall we?

I am officially tired of winter: Errandonnée #1

Another year, another Errandonnée from MG at chasing mailboxes. 12 errands, 12 days. Starting today. As usual, I'm going to try to hit all the categories. Kind of looking forward to "You carried WHAT on your bike?" You've got until the 16th to fit them all in, should you wish to play along at home.

Even though there's only one errand here, this post is a bit long. However, it has it all: biking, ranting, craftiness, and science. Yay errandonnée!

It's been solidly in the negative teens to twenties for months. Yesterday, we had a brief lift up into merely freezing, only for it to plunge back down just in time to start off this year's errandonnée with yet another bitterly cold ride to work.

Tea makes it go

One of the gifts I gave the DC^* for Christmas was a low-temperature Stirling engine kit that, much like us, runs off a cup of tea. I helped him put it together yesterday, and I have to say it's quite a bit niftier than the full model would be. All we need now is a case to keep it dust-free when not in use.

Truth in advertising: it did take much less than an hour to put together, and it works a treat. I like how they've set it up so you use the foam packing case to help assemble it. Also, you need a mug. Which you can then fill with tea to make the engine run.


Those mugs were also a gift. There's a bicycle on the front. The DC wanted to keep the engine going longer, but the problem is that it was my tea and I wanted to drink it. We need to think on this a bit more...

^*And me, but mostly the DC.

You with the stars in your Anna top

I really like the By Hand London Anna, specifically its bodice, so when the DC gave me a bunch of white linen, I automatically thought Dîner en Blanc maxi. Except... I really do not need another white dress. They're not hugely practical.

Still. I couldn't get that thought of a white linen Anna out of my head. Then I thought... separates. Maybe I could make the dress into a top and skirt? The idea grew on me as the months went on. I eventually decided to make the skirt a Sewaholic Gabriola, but the top was going to be Anna all the way. And here she is, just in time to meet the DC for mexican food before Ari's Planetarium talk Friday night.

The major construction changes are lengthening the bodice, flaring it out at the bottom, and moving the zipper to the side seam. I also turned the back darts into fisheye darts so it would fit around the hips.



I put in an invisible zipper, upside down, although it's not especially invisible right now. The hem doesn't look even, but I swear that it is.



I probably should have done a neck binding thing instead of the facings, since the linen is sheer enough to be seen through, but I don't know how much it bothers me. I do need to adjust the front pleats, as usual - one of these days I will fix that on the pattern - and make the invisible zipper... more invisible, but I'm really pleased with how this turned out.

Ari's talk was about likely locations for habitable planets in the universe. He's a very good speaker, but you don't have to take my word for it. All hail YouTube!

Various bits of geekery

Still head-down in marking and making some progress on the sewing, but I thought I'd pop in to remind everyone in the Americas, Australasia, and East Asia that there will be a total lunar eclipse Monday night (or early Tuesday morning). In Toronto, it will be from 1:58 AM until 4:24 AM. Phil Plait has a nice article about it here.

For everyone in the Toronto area, the penultimate^* Nerd Nite is this Thursday at the Transac Club. If you live elsewhere, there's probably be a Nerd Nite in your area. They're running in about 65 cities in quite a few different countries. Check this link to find out.



^*Before they break for summer, that is. Not forever. I sincerely hope.

Nerds uNite: Errandonée #7

Today is Pi Day, if you're into that kind of thing and use the US form of dating, but whatever; it's a nice day to eat pastry and think math thoughts.

Me, I ate pastry last night, because I am contrary. I finally went to Nerd Nite at the Tranzac Club, which I've been meaning to do since I heard about it last September. Community meeting of nerdy folk. It was a tonne of fun.

Gravity well

Plan:


Execution:

I mostly finished my second version of V1351 at the beginning of January and wore it (and a bunch of other things -- it was cold!) to see Musical of Musicals: the Musical! which I kept not getting to see at the Fringe last summer, so I was pleased to give tickets to the DC and me for Christmas. I hemmed the shell in time to wear for my birthday jam at Dovercourt last week. As is usual with my projects, there is still work to be done, but I've been waiting over a month to post this so whatever.

How beautiful is the moon?

Another reason to love Twitter: I discovered that yesterday was International Observe the Moon Night. It's an annual event where people, you know, look at the moon, and I was happy to finally put my not-so-newly-acquired Newtonian reflector to use.

The box had not opened since I brought it home in May, so I rushed to assemble the telescope before the clouds took over. Half an hour later, I was set up on the deck trying to find the giant half-lit object in the sky -- the viewscope may need a wee bit of adjustment. However, I found it and got the same thrill I always get when I see the craters on the Moon. Imagine what Galileo must have felt!

Taking a picture turned out a bit better than when I attempted to capture the transit of Venus, although vignetting, which term I have just learned, was an issue. The above is the best of the bunch. Craters!

Understanding the gravity of the situation

Happy Gravity Day! Or more specifically, happy "magnitude of the local Earth gravitational field" day. For your viewing enjoyment, an appropriate Rube Goldberg machine:

Bustin' makes me feel swe-e-e-t!

Some music for your reading pleasure:


When I did the LGRAB Summer Games, I had planned to go to Sugar Beach on a Bixi bike but due to time constraints, I turned that into a visit to Harbourfront instead. I also meant to use it as a location for one of my Me-Made-May photos, but didn't. It's taken me two years, but I have finally managed to hang out at Sugar Beach. How?

In which PhysicsGirl manages to hide Green's Theorem

I am happy to say that after a flurry of inactivity, I haven been slowly getting on with my 9-in-6 sewing challenge. I have missed every deadline so far. Of course I have. What was I expecting? Truth is, I have always sewed with a goal in mind: I need this item for that event, and I get it done. That's why the Bombshell swimsuit got finished, and that is how all the other ones will get done, too. But what event would necessitate a tank-top with upside-down equations on them?

We still don't have anything suitable to eat today

Happy Tau Day, all!


School is over for the summer, and I'm working through my backlog of posts-to-be-posted. I know you are all on tenterhooks.