Happy Pi

We just finished the 7th annual Pi Party -- today is actually March 16th, not March 14th, but the party had to wait for a Friday. I've got this weird thing with Pi; the number fascinates me. I first started thinking about it when I read Carl Sagan's Contact, the ending of which differs from the movie version. I think I've sort of misremembered this over time, but the ending of the book involves a message written deep in the digits of Pi, when represented in binary in a matrix of a certain dimension -- something about a perfect circle of ones in a field of zeros. This hidden message in Pi is the alien's real proof that he's telling the truth, because a message in the number Pi would imply an engineer of physics itself. Sagan was an athiest as I remember, but this idea that another species could somehow design and alter the primary rules like that -- that's hard to imagine. Pi is mystical to me because it is an unchanging ratio, continuous, static and yet forever undefined value. I love the fact that it shows up in so many places. Mostly it's a deep admiration for the constancy of it: in a thousand years someone will throw a stone in a pond and the wave it creates will have a circumference equal to Pi times its diameter. That and it's a cool bar trick.

The picture is of Chet, Brian and myself in a chair lift last fall, probably at the Breckenridge ski resort, I think taken last October. We've been up in the mountains tons lately too so I thought I'd post this. I love these two.