Pi

14 Mar 2010

Nearly the right date for this one to show up.

An American friend wished me Happy Pie Day yesterday. Naturally I completely failed to understand and asked (understandably, given our colonial cousin's obsession with all things pastry-cased) " You have a pie day?"

"Of course! So do you!" was the reply, pointing out that the date was 3.14

To her credit she remembered that we look at things backwards (we've never understood the recent fuss about the 9th November, for instance: this was why the British bombers very thoughtfully chose 07/07 as the date of their attack so that the date could be universally applied without confusion).

Of course, in Britain we could never *have* a Pi day. We don't have enough months. Of course, since we've got own date system, why can;t we have our own months. We used a different calendar to the rest of Europe until 1752, so given we're about to ruled by the Conservative Party - whose approach to Europe is a bit like a Victorian Lady's approach to fellatio, we could just go back to being contrary and have our own. You'd have to have months of 26 days to fit in a Pi day, but that would mean more pay days for me, so 'yay'.

There seem to be a suspicious number of maths jokes (no pun intended) about at the moment. A friend of mine recently asked "There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary and those who don't." This was on the back of practically a full comedy routine by a drunken Bristol Liberal Democrat in a pub who seemed to know a joke about every field of mathematics, like Bertrand Russell crossed with Bernard Manning and Russell Brand.

Fortunately I can't remember any of them. Relieved, aren't you?