No Pi day today. Need to wait another 3 months, 14 days....

Professor Kruskal pointed out to my class a few years ago that someone had written a paper about how pi is wrong:  http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.pdf

The author points out that if pi were 6.28, things might be simpler or more elegant...

For example, when you took trigonometry you learned that one full rotation of a circle is 2*pi.  Thus that cyclical graph we know as sin(x) and cos(x) would look the same but the x-axis would just be multiplied by a factor of two.  After all, humans invented pi and the value.  Maybe it's tacky to suggest that one circle should allow pi(in radians)=pie(shape).  Or maybe we gave it a number before we really understood what pi was really about.  Let's dig a little deeper and explore some other things Mr. Palais points out:

Currently:        cox(x+pi) = -cos(x)
If pi=6.28:       cos(x+pi) = cos(x)


Currently:   roots of unity e^(2*pi/n) = 0, 1, ..n-1
If pi=6.28   roots of unity e^(pi/n) = 0, 1, ..., n-1

And my all time favorite (the most beautiful equation ever written):

e^(pi * i) = -1

Now if we let pi = 6.28 we get:

e^(pi * i) = 1

Yes, we've improved the amazing.

So, while the mildly mannered geeks all celebrate today as pi day, I'll be waiting until June 28th to sit down and read "The Joy of Pi"  http://www.joyofpi.com/

Fun with Google's Latest Visualization Tool: Ngram Viewer

Late last year Google released another free tool called 'Ngram Viewer'  http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/.  It's similar to Google Trends but we're no longer limited our search to the last decade or so.  Google may not have existed in 1800, but they're now able to show how many times a particular word or phrase was in text by year.  When your spare time hobby is to scan in every book every written you can do interesting stuff.

Want to know how many times the word 'fuel' was written between 1800 and 2008?  Try it out, you'll some interesting things.

Linked are some I found interesting:


The Future is No Longer Now, it has been replaced with the Past:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=future%2Cpast&year_start=1800&year_end=2010&corpus=0&smoothing=3 


But we like to write about the years:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=1800%2C+1850%2C+1900%2C+1950%2C+2000&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Political Parties:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=republicans%2Cdemocrats%2Cwhigs&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Some of the presidents:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=Roosevelt%2CNixon%2CReagan%2CBush%2CCarter%2CKennedy%2CLincoln%2C&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Academic Subjects (stolen from Ben Shneiderman):
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=chemistry%2Cphysics%2Cbiology&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3


Burger King IS King:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=McDonalds%2CHardees%2CTaco+Bell%2C+Burger+King&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3