Pi Day and Pi Approximation Day are two holidays held to celebrate the mathematical constant Ï€ (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14 in American date format), due to Ï€ being equal to roughly 3.14. Sometimes it is celebrated on March 14 at 1:59 p.m. (commonly known as Pi Minute). If Ï€ is truncated to seven decimal places, it becomes 3.1415926, making March 14 at 1:59:26 p.m., Pi Second (or sometimes March 14, 1592 at 6:53:58 a.m.). Pi Approximation Day may be observed on any of several dates, most often July 22 (22/7 (European date format) is a popular approximation of Ï€). March 14 also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.

The first Pi Day celebration was held at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, and then consuming fruit pies; the museum has since added pizza pies to its Pi Day menu. The founder of Pi Day, the “Prince of Pi”, is Larry Shaw, now retired from the Exploratorium, but still helping out with the celebrations. They have also recently added the first Pi Day celebrations in Second Life.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology often mails out its acceptance letters to be delivered to prospective students on Pi Day.

Source: Wikipedia

Hollywood mega-director Steven Spielberg is reportedly setting up a social network for people interested in paranormal and extra-terrestrial activity, inspired by his own personal experiences with the unknown.

The focus of the network will be on people who have an interest in, or have experienced paranormal phenomena, and the network may feature multimedia content of UFO sightings, paranormal activity and user-based content.

Stories of Speilberg’s own personal experiences with ghosts are widely known; his stay in the Excelsior House led him to become so frightened by alleged ghosts that he fled the room and moved 20 miles away, forming the inspiration for the movie ‘Poltergiest’.

The network may have been originally in development with Yahoo, but the project was abandoned before it was launched. But reports suggest that the idea lives on, and a team of developers are aiming for a mid-year launch.

Courtesy: AU Live News

A “doomsday” seed vault built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters opened Tuesday deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.”The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is our insurance policy,” Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told delegates at the opening ceremony. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations.”

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya were among the dozens of guests who had bundled up for the ceremony inside the vault, about 425 feet deep inside a frozen mountain.

“This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” Barroso said.

Source:AP

It took Iain Gillott 47 hours to activate his iPhone after waiting in the Texas heat Friday afternoon to buy one.

He has been an AT&T Inc./Cingular Wireless customer for 12 years, so he never dreamed there would be any trouble setting up service. But after a day of trying, he learned that his family rate plan wouldn’t accommodate an additional line, and once that problem was solved, he learned AT&T sent Apple Inc. a message to activate, but the Apple servers had timed out.

An online poll at Engadget.com started on Sunday morning recorded by midday today more than 5,300 users who said they were “still dead in the water” and upset about activation delays, while another 1,600 said they were indeed activated after facing problems.

Source: Computer World

After waiting in line for hours at an AT&T store in New York City, Allison Alexy became one of the first consumers to purchase an iPhone. But when she tried to activate her cellular account — without which an iPhone cannot be used — she also became one of the first to run into problems with the device: She couldn’t transfer her Sprint Nextel Corp. cellphone number to AT&T Inc., which has an exclusive multi year contract with Apple Inc. to provide cellphone service for the iPhone.

Apple’s activation software for the iPhone indicated that the phone number wasn’t eligible for transferring but didn’t explain why.

Source: Moneyweb

Last week, an MIT research team announced that it had juiced up a 60W light bulb using ‘WiTricity’, the name it has given a wireless electricity source it is developing.

The team generated the WiTricity using two copper coils, one attached to a power source. The power coil emitted a field of magnetism to the unpowered coil, stimulating it to generate a current that powered the light bulb from seven feet away, said Andre Kurs, a graduate student in MIT’s physics department who worked on the project.

Do you own a cat? Do you ever wonder what it’s up to when you are not around? Well German-American Jürgen Perthold, an inventor, has created the “cat cam.”

“I wanted to find out what he gets up to, where he spends his days. He goes out the whole day, sometimes he returns hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he also stays out all night. It gave me the idea to equip the cat with a camera,” said Perthold.

The camera, which is operated by batteries and weighs 70 grams (including the batteries), is hooked onto the cat’s collar and records their journeys. Operating for a maximum of two days, the camera takes a picture every minute. Perthold used his cat as a test subject and discovered his cat was visiting the neighbor’s female cat on a regular basis. Perthold even wrote his own program to operate and control the camera.
Source: Wikinews