No no, we are staying in and let's not skip dinner. Some Indian food and a bit of pretentious wine. You know, for the special occasion.

@Zultar:lol!

Only America writes dates down as Month/Day/Year (3/14/12). We use Day/Month/Year (14/03/12) so April the 31st would be PI day over here (31/4/12). Of course we'd have to change the calender for that to happen...

P.S. I wonder who'll get closest to posting here at 9:26:53AM on March 14th 2015 (3/14/15-9:26:53)?

yeah, only americans write things upside-down ;)

.suɐıןɐɹʇsnɐ oʇ buıɹɹǝɟǝɹ ǝq ʇsnɯ noʎ

Americans write things backwards :)

Wow, no one other than PE has wished me a happy birthday yet. I am saddened. :(

الأستراليون مبتدئون

Happy birthday, zultar.

Well, I wa sjust about to wish it to you, but now it'll look like I'm A) sucking up or B) just doing it cause you reminded me... Oh well, I'll take my chances.

HAPPY WEBDIP BIRTHDAY, zultar!

But remember, in Europe, today is 14.03.2012. It doesn't work over there.

Hm, over here in Sweden it's 2012-03-14 15:15. Not very pi.

Thank you for the birthday wishes, Vaftrudner and Draugnar.

isn't pi day 22/7 (the 22nd of July?) no wait, that's pi approximation day... hmm SpTAlien's 14th of March is closer, but only happens once every hundred years...

Anyway, Down with π; ταυ-ist 4 life! http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H69YH5TnNXI&feature=youtu.be

Happy webdip birthday zultar! That's alot of points for just one year!

I think Tom just gave me a backhanded comment. A wise man once said:
"Points are for fools, GR is for bigger fools. Lets have some fun."
I'm hurt Tom. I'm hurt. And you better watch out. My friend, Sarg, will come after you because you are suck, oh, never mind. :)

@Sarg,
What time are you coming over man?
PE and YJ have the cameras set up and everything already.
Live feed to Draugnar too.
It will be a blast.

Hahaha. A blast, indeed.

You betcha. I'm bringing a bucket.

Tau is stupid. There is no "true" circle constant, there are just constants that are useful for mathematics. There is no function tau serves that pi does not, it merely "makes things easier to memorize" and makes formulae "look nicer."

We use m/d/y here in Canada.

And that's why Queen Elizabeth likes to live in our country and not your backward moose-loving cesspit.

I am an american and I'm the only person who does yyyymmdd and it drives my coworkers crazy.

Fuck them if they cant see its obvious superiority. Hope they enjoy when their PC autosorts march of last year in with this year's stuff.

Good job YJ. Tell them about the metric system while they're sorting these dates, and send them a metric ton of love from my part.

it is about time we decimalize time, 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour 10 hours in a day, and all we have to do is redefine the second in terms of the speed of light... this will not stand!!

And @ ghug, there is a more useful definition of the circle constant, and if nothing else mathematics is there to convey understanding. If there is a clearer way to convey the understanding of the relationships we're talking about then it is the one we should choose.

The 'look nicer' is not just aesthetic, it is in principle about helping understanding by making it clearer what the meaning is, and a 'nicer looking' formula is the same information presented in a clearer way.

Imagine mathematics is a toolkit - used for solving certain problems - and one of the tool is just the wrong shape, it is not obvious what it is for, but when we apply the *2 tool to it suddenly it makes a lot more sense. Hooray for unnecessary complications; or adding epicycles as the astronomers would have it.

I had never heard of this pi vs tau debate before.

Sounds silly.

Each is unneccesary given the definition of the other, and each would be more immediately useful in different circumstances (for those too lazy to multiply by 2).

Would tau be more useful in more circumstances? Maybe. Do I care? Nope.

Silly.

pi > tau

By definition, pi < tau. But yeah, you're right.

Of course it was meant as a joke ghug.

@YJ - I actually prefer YYYYMMJJhhmmss for work related stuff, but then that is the easiest way to sort a date when stored in a string format.

RE: Tau... considering pi*(r^2) is circulart area, how does using tau make it easier? You have to divide tau by 2 for that equation at some point.

@Draugnar,
Will you be watching the live feed tonight, D?
Sarg is bringing a bucket, YJ his pretentious wine for the special occasion, PE is filming, and I'm the bday boy.
Hell, we might even play a pacifist gunboat game.

Tau is pretty silly I think.

Neglecting all the other reasons why it's silly -- and there are plenty -- all the arguments for why it would be simpler to understand and easier assume that it would completely replace pi. But it wouldn't. All the old books and half the new books would still use pi, so instead of just learning one thing, everybody would have to learn two things, and there would be one more "convention choice" to screw up everybody's formulas and make life annoying. Not that it would be hard to convert, that's obvious, but it would be annoying for experts and confusing for novices.

Wednesday night is SWTOR night, so I'll have to pass.

By definition, pi < tau. But yeah, you're right.

Whoops, sorry.

@Draug "considering pi*(r^2) is circulart area"

Considering that is a quadratic form, derived by integrating over the radius from 0 -> r; would you not expect it to be lke the other quadratic forms; ie 1/2mv^2, 1/2kx^2; (go to 26 minutes in the video linked above, i'm sure you are smart enough to understand it, i'm just not smart enough to explain it...)

@Smeck: sure, that's just about a problem. But the small issue of converting will be a transitory one. Something which is gone in seconds/days/months/years. Centuries from now nobody will remember the great Pi/Tau debate, and they will all be better off! Think of the potential billions of trillions who will benefit (unless we wipe ourselves out first)

and you can just open a text book today and scribble out every occurrence of Pi; by hand, in pen, every single student at every level is capable of taking their books and on one day replacing all the 2Pis with Taus and Pis with Tau/2s.

New books will be able to cope, and wikipedia can be edited.

I don't agree, ora. The transition is actually rather huge and a major pain, whereas the benefits almost completely trivial. Moreover, there ARE places where pi appears by itself, and fractions are much more annoying to write than integer multiples. I just don't see this as a reasonable movement.

Sure, that's a great use of man hours. Moreover, unless you're planning on passing a law or something, new books will CONTINUE to be written with pi -- not all mathematicians agree about tau in the first place, and we would have no intention of moving to tau in our papers or books. It would be like changing positive and negative charges around.

unlike changing positive and negative around, which, if mistakes are made will likely kill people, Tau is unlikely to do just that.

Mathematicians are the least affected, they are used to using multiple symbols for the same concept in different areas, and are likely the most capable of handling the change.

You are falling prey to the short-sigthed-ness which humans often base their decisions. It is of evolutionary benefit if you don't know when you will die and there is a high chance that you will not live for another year then you are best off investing your resources in the short-term - governments are notoriously bad at convincing people to invest in their own retirement, and that is because humans are notoriously bad at thinking in these terms.

You would punish countless generations for the small effort now.

Not only that, the number of man-hours, when distributed over the number of individuals, will feel like nothing what-so-ever. Everyday you read over a page which happens to contain a Pi you will take a vanishingly small amount of your time out of your day.

The fact that this time adds up to a huge amount is trivial.

And in the meanwhile, if you can explain why this is the better Circle ratio, you can inform individuals both of the traditional and cultural values which propagated it to this point AND hopefully convey some understanding of the usefullness of the Circle ratio itself.

And there was no need for a law to make mathematicians start using Pi, so why would legal power be used/useful for switching to using Tau???

Is that what you call a strawman?

Just wanted to chime in and report that the birthday bash went very well!

oh yeah, happy popping out of your mummy day!

Well done on surviving your annual trip around the sun :)

"Punishing countless generations"

Oh please. This is COMPLETELY ABSURD. Nobody is going to get math, or not get math, because of pi/tau, and your change would cause JUST as much grief as not changing.

Add to that the fact that nobody is GOING to scratch equations out. WHen have you EVER seen that on an old math library book that used an older convention? This is so stupid, though, that I don't know why I'm wasting time arguing it anymore.

I'll sign off, then, with this: http://www.thepimanifesto.com/

Oh, I missed this beauty, though:

"And there was no need for a law to make mathematicians start using Pi, so why would legal power be used/useful for switching to using Tau???"

Because there's now an entrenched convention, and you're wanting to go through and make people start using a new convention. Since vast numbers prefer pi, this is wildly unlikely to happen without force.

ahahahaha, pi vs tau. next you will be arguing if the speed of gravity should have a negative sign on it.

(PS, when I say "this is so stupid I don't know why I'm wasting time arguing it anymore," I don't mean to discourage a response. I'm really just being rhetorical. I do think it's pretty absurd, but I don't like to try to win the last word in arguments, so go ahead and respond if you want. Heck, I'll probably even reply. I never can help it).