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3.141592653

Not only is today PI day and the celebration of the ratio used to calculate a circle’s circumference or diameter, this PI Day has a special significance. Set your clocks and experience a moment that only happens every 100 years.

On 3/14/15 at 9:26:53 the country will experience a pi second where the first ten digits of pi line up perfectly with the time. A statistician in Toronto has even calculated the pi instant where all the digits of pi line up exactly with time.

So to commemorate this special event we are making a blackberry pie, and reading Blackberry Banquet!

If you would like to do the same here is a recipe from Allrecipes.com

4 cups of blackberries
½ cup of white sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
9 inch double pie crust (store bought) or recipe
2 tablespoons milk
¼ cup white sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C).
2. Combine 3 1/2 cups berries with the sugar and flour. Spoon the mixture into an unbaked pie shell. Spread the remaining 1/2 cup berries on top of the sweetened berries, and cover with the top crust. Seal and crimp the edges, and cut vents in the top crust for steam to escape.
3. Brush the top crust with milk, and sprinkle with 1/4 cup sugar.
4. Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes. Reduce the temperature of the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C), and bake for an additional 20 to 25 minutes, or until the filling is bubbly and the crust is golden brown. Cool on wire rack.

And read Blackberry Banquet with us today for FREE online!

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Ten years after the TV series was heartbreakingly axed Veronica Mars is making a comeback. First there was the much-anticipated, kickstarter funded, movie and now there is a series of novels that continue the Neptune universe.

A TV/Movie spin-off book is not usually on my radar and I don’t think I would have read this but when I found out Kristen Bell was reading the audio book I was in. (Plus the movie was sooo good!)

(SPOILER ALERT: you must see the film before reading the book and the rest of my review will talk about the movie’s ending)

At the end of the movie Veronica has returned to Neptune and is in the PI business again. The book takes off right from there with Veronica taking on her first big case. The storyline is like a good, solid double episode from the show. Now older and wiser things get a better darker and more dangerous for Veronica than her school/college PI days. It is spring break in Neptune and a teenage girl has gone missing. Fearing the negative press coverage Neptune’s Chamber of Commerce hires Veronica to look into the case which is being handled with the ineptitude and laziness we have come to expect from the Sheriff’s department. When a second girl goes missing Veronica must quickly re-find her PI shoes before it is too late.

All our favourite characters make an appearance with a surprise thrown in. My only grumble was that the story is told in the third person, which still works but I was really looking forward to being inside Veronica’s head more (like the TV show) especially with Bell narrating the audio book. Otherwise it was a really fun story and it is really great to see the story being kept alive, whatever the format and I will definitely be reading the next book in the series.

Buy the book here…

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Title: The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
Author/Illustrator: Helen Ward (from Aesop)
32 pages
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publ. Date: Sept. 11, 2012

Helen Ward's retelling of Aesop's fable is traditional in its approach. There are no surprises in the text. All ends as it always does: the town mouse still likes the town best and vice-versa. East-west, home is best, and all that jazz.

The reason I have decided to review  The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse here at Storied Cities is simply because Ward's illustrations are so lovely. The town is no "town" at all. It is New York City in the 1930s! At Christmas! What could be better? Not much, I tell you. At first the little country mouse is dazzled by "great towers of smooth stone and glass," electric elevators, sumptuous holiday feasts, and cozy Christmas trees that make great sleeping nooks. Unfortunately, the city also comes equipped with one highly menacing pug dog, who sends the country mouse scampering back to home-sweet-home. The town mouse, however, doesn't mind his canine pal and curls up for a good gorgonzola-induced nap.

There are only a few city scenes in this book but they are worth it, and country lovers will enjoy Ward's  illustrations of the more natural side of life. It's an excellent choice for some cozy holiday reading.

Want More?
Try a different variation on the country mouse-city mouse theme with Love, Mouserella, or the duo Brown Rabbit in the City/Moon Rabbit.
Read an article in The Guardian about Helen Ward.

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By Jason Rosenhouse

A recent satirical essay in the Huffington Post reports that congressional Republicans are trying to legislate the value of pi. Fearing that the complexity of modern geometry is hurting America’s performance on international measures of mathematical knowledge, they have decreed that from now on pi shall be equal to three. It is a sad commentary on American culture that you must read slowly and carefully to be certain the essay is just satire.

It has been wisely observed that reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Scientists are especially aware of this, since it is sometimes their sad duty to inform people of truths they would prefer not to accept. Evolution cannot be made to go away by folding you arms and shaking your head, and the planet is warming precipitously regardless of what certain business interests claim to believe. Likewise, the value of pi is what it is, no matter what a legislative body might think.

That value, of course, is found by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. Except that if you take an actual circular object and apply your measuring devices to it you will obtain only a crude approximation to pi. The actual value is an irrational number, meaning that it is a decimal that goes on forever without repeating itself. One of my middle school math teachers once told me that it is just crazy for a number to behave in such a fashion, and that is why it is said to be irrational. Since I rather liked that explanation, you can imagine my disappointment at learning it was not correct.

In this context, the word “irrational” really just means “not a ratio.” More specifically, it is not a ratio of two integers. You see, if you divide one integer by another there are only two things that can happen. Either the process ends or it goes on forever by repeating a pattern. For example, if you divide one by four you get .25, while if you divide one by three you get .3333… . That these are the only possibilities can be proved with some elementary number theory, but I shall spare you the details of how that is done. That aside, our conclusion is that since pi never ends and never repeats, it cannot be written as one integer divided by another.

Which might make you wonder how anyone evaluated pi in the first place. If the number is defined geometrically, but we cannot hope to measure real circles with sufficient accuracy, then why do we constantly hear about computers evaluating its first umpteen million digits? The answer is that we are not forced to define pi in terms of circles. The number arises in other contexts, notably trigonometry. By coupling certain facts about right triangles with techniques drawn from calculus, you can express pi as the sum of a certain infinite series. That is, you can find a never-ending list of numbers that gets smaller and smaller and smaller, with the property that the more of the numbers you sum the better your approximation to pi. Very cool stuff.

Of course, I’m sure we all know that pi is a little bit larger than three. This means that any circle is just over three times larger around than it is across. The failure of most people to be able to visualize this leads to a classic bar bet. Take any tall, thin, drinking glass, the kind with a long stem, and ask the person sitting nearest you if its height is greater than its circumference. When he answers that it is, bet him that he is wrong. Optically, most such glasses appear to be much taller than they are fat, but unless your specimen is very tall and very thin you will win the bet every time. The circumference is more than three times larger than the diameter at the top of the glass. A vessel so proportioned that this length is nonetheless smal

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In case you missed it, March 14th was an important international holiday. Every year, math enthusiasts worldwide celebrate the date as Pi Day. March 14th. 3/14. 3.14. Pi. Get it? If you'd like a higher degree of accuracy, you can celebrate Pi Minute at 1:59 on that date (as in 3.14159). Or why not Pi Second at 26 seconds into the Pi Minute (3.1415926)?

“It’s crazy! It’s irrational!” crows the website of the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s famously quirky hands-on science museum. The Exploratorium invented the holiday twenty-one years ago. In a delightful coincidence, Pi Day coincides with Albert Einstein's birthday. Exploratorium revelers circumambulate the "Pi Shrine" 3.14 times while singing Happy Birthday to Albert.

Pi Day celebrations have spread to schools. Just over a year ago, I visited Singapore American School to give a week's worth of presentations and I found parent volunteers serving pie to appreciative students whose math teachers were trying to sweeten their understanding of the world’s most famous irrational number. Just as pi is endless, so is the list of activities, from memory challenges and problem solving to finding how pi is connected to hat size ... and writing a new form of poetry called “pi-ku," which uses a 3-1-4 syllable pattern instead of haiku’s 5-7-5.

It is indeed the mysteriousness of pi that makes it so fascinating. For 3,500 years, according to David Blatner, author of The Joy of Pi, pi-lovers have tried to solve the "puzzle of pi" -- calculating the exact ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. But there is no such thing as "exact." No matter how successful, pi can only be estimated.

A refresher course for the pi-challenged: The 16th letter of the Greek alphabet, π or “pi,” is used to represent the number you get when you divide a circle’s circumference (the distance around) by its diameter (distance across, through the center). Try it on any circle with a ruler and string and you'll get something a little over 3 1/8 or approximately 22/7 (some have therefore proposed the 22nd of July for Pi Day). Measured with a little more precision, the ratio comes out to 3.14. But don’t stop there. Pi is an irrational number, meaning that, expressed as a decimal, its digits go on forever without a repeating pattern. Hence the obsession of some with memorizing pi to 100, even 1,000 places. As a Pi Day gift from 5th graders at a school I visited this year on March 15th, I received a sheet of paper with pi written out to 10,000 digits. In 2002, a computer scientist found 1.24 trillion digits. Never mind that astrophysicists calculating the size of galaxies don't seem to need an accuracy of pi any greater than 10 to 15 digits. Playing with pi offers endless hours of good, clean mathematical fun. So what if it's irrational.

Happy (belated) Pi Day, everybody!