PUZZLERIA! SLICES: OVER 122 SERVED
Welcome to Joseph Young’s Puzzleria!
Today is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow is Pi Day the 14th.
The next day is “Ides-day” the 15th. 
Indeed it is a week chock-full of celebrations, with St. Paddy’s Day on March 17 and, best of all, the Feast of St. Joseph on March 19!
A year ago Pi Day fell on Friday, March
14th. Friday only sometimes falls on the 13th but Pi Day
always falls only on the 14th, and always only in March. (And “Ides-day”
always falls on the 15th of March… and May, July and October, and on
the 13th of other months.)
Pi Day is celebrated each March 14
because that date is written as 3/14 in numerical notation (third
month/fourteenth day), and the number pi is often rounded off to 3.14. But Pi Day in this present year of 2015 is extra special because its date in
month/day/year notation is written 3/14/15, and the first five digits of pi are
3.1415.
Such month/day/year numerical notion of
dates sometimes includes all four digits of a year. So, because the first twelve
digits of pi are 3.14159265358, an even more special Pi Day occurred in the
centennial year of Christopher Columbus’ voyage, March 14, 1592 at 6:53:58 a.m.
or p.m. (3/14/1592, 6:53:58). The Pi-planets must have all aligned on that Pi Day!
The irrational number pi, symbolized by the Greek
letter pi, is paradoxically defined as the ratio (!) of any circle’s circumference to its diameter. Its value
is 3.14159265358979… 
Those digits to the right of the decimal
point continue on forever in random fashion. Such numbers are called
irrational because they cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers. Rational
numbers such as ½ (0.5), 1/3 (0.333…), 1/11 (0.090909…) and 2 (2/1 or 2.0) can
all be expressed as an integer divided by a non-zero integer. Most numbers with which we
are familiar are rational.
But not pi. A reasonably close
approximation of the irrational number pi, however, is the rational number
22/7, or three-and-one-seventh which, expressed as a decimal, is 3.142857142857…
Poison Pi
Because pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter, in any given circle either the diameter must
be irrational or the circumference must be irrational. Both diameter and
circumference cannot be rational. This is because multiplying (or
dividing) a rational number by an irrational number “poisons” the rational
number, making it irrational also. (Such poisoning also occurs with addition or
subtraction.)
It is as if irrational numbers are all contagious with some kind
of boundless transcendental flu bug transmitted via mathematical contact. The formula for a Circumference, given a
Diameter, is [C = (pi) (D)] and the formula for a Diameter, given a
Circumference, is [D = C/pi]. Contagion ensues!
But now, for something you are not going
to catch… especially if he is running ahead of you in a marathon. Blogger
David, who has contributed greatly to Puzzleria! (including his posting of
creative puzzles), tipped us off (on the AESAP blog) to the added special
once-in-a-century significance of this year’s Pi Day that occurs but once every
century.
David, who is also an avid distance
runner, is participating tomorrow in a 3.14-mile running event which begins in
the morning at 9:26:53 (53 seconds after 9:26 a.m.). The next five digits in pi
after 3.1415... are ...92653.
Hope you can go the distance this week
with this menu of “puzzle pi” slices. Take as much time as you like. But try not to repeat yourself.
But first, a poem about Pi:
But first, a poem about Pi:
Three-Point-One-Four-And-Twenty-Blackboards Pi
Zero blackbirds are baked in my pie,
Only blackboards from class, math and sci:
Constants, signs, an ellipse
Decimal points, superscripts
Shall Pi lovers’ taste buds satisfy.
Reads my recipe: “Add one sweet P
To an mc2 Equivalency,
Fold around one hot current
(sIc)
With a whisk or a stir-in
stick…
Bake, let cool, and then serve P-I-E!”
Serve up one 2.7 ounce segment
Then a slice with a sweet P-green pigment…
What remains in the pan
Is not pumpkin, pecan
But of i magination a figment.
Bonus Appetizer Slice:
Literary
Link
There is a literary connection between
two of the five puzzle slices on this week’s menu. What are the slices and
their link?
MENU
Easy As Pi Slice:
Scrambled egguations
Make sense of the following three equations:
(A mixed-up mighty tree) + (3.14...) = (A giraffe’s cousin)
(Musical paces) - (3.14...) = (A discombobulated Ed Kranepool)
(Scrambled big burgers) + (3.14...) = (Garlicky
shrimp)
Title Search Slice:
The Pi Songbook
Consider the short palindromic title of
the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Ada,” one word in the The Bird and the Bee song title
“You’re a Cad” and one word in the Slade song title “Cum on Feel the Noize.”
What do all three have to do with pi?
Crib Note Slice:
Speak, Mnemosyne
Recalling the following self-referential
mnemonic device might help a student navigate or regurgitate the first several (actually, thirty-two) digits of pi on a misguided geometry exam:
“Via a crib, a pupil remembers pi.
Pupils count all words’ quantity regarding letters. Sentences put in the
mnemonic give pupils pi digits, they who are examined. Why? To discern
geometric skill!”
But it does not exactly trip off the
tongue. You can do better. Do you want to take the time to do so and share it with the rest of us?
And now, a musical interlude, brought to you courtesy of blogger ecoarchitect, who commented about it at Blainesville.
And now, a musical interlude, brought to you courtesy of blogger ecoarchitect, who commented about it at Blainesville.
Century Slice:
A fitting first…Can you dig it?
At some point late within the first 50
digits of pi something very fitting occurs, something that will occur often
later on in the endless skein of digits, perhaps even an infinite number of
times.
What is it? Where exactly does it occur?
Where does it occur next?
Piebald’s Ill Slice:
Seven-letter heaven
Each of the six paragraphs below has at
two words that share something in common related to this week’s pi theme. Name
what it is and, if possible, give another word sharing the same property for
each paragraph.
1. Each March 14 Picasso and Pizzaro throw
Pi Day picnics at Pimlico Park. They serve a pitcher of pilsner, pierogi with
picante sauce, pickled pig-feet and pimento-stuffed pickles. But this year,
after overstuffing his piehole, Piebald Pinhead, one of the piggier, more
pitiful guests, reached for his pillbox…
2. With spinach dip spilled still on his
lapel, Pinhead -- After spicily muttering his opinion about Pi Day in the form
of a “ratio epithet” -- drooled spittle as he apishly sought gastronomic relief.
Piebald was a picnicker in seek of a cure. Pi Day was a picnic in seek of an
epicure. ‘Twas a sad episode…
3. In his typical dopiest Pinhead fashion,
Piebald stirred copious amounts of expired aspirin tablets into a bowl of tapioca
pudding…
4. After gulping his pills as if they were
potpies, Piebald started napping. After waking, despite his earlier overindulgence, he craved a
second helping of party food so began supping on snacks, happily dipping chips into dampish room-temp dip, nipping them with his cuspids like a vampire, then dumping Piebald cowpies looward with flushed face. He could not have been
happier…
5. …Unless, of course, he were fishing in a boat equipped with plushy seat cushions. “Whoopie!” shouted still-peckish Piebald as he spotted a fishin’ hole a-jumpin’ with crappie and tilapia…
5. …Unless, of course, he were fishing in a boat equipped with plushy seat cushions. “Whoopie!” shouted still-peckish Piebald as he spotted a fishin’ hole a-jumpin’ with crappie and tilapia…
Every Friday at Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! we publish a new menu of fresh word puzzles, number puzzles, logic puzzles, puzzles of all varieties and flavors. We cater to cravers of scrumptious puzzles!
Our master chef, Grecian gourmet puzzle-creator Lego Lambda, blends and bakes up mysterious (and sometimes questionable) toppings and spices (such as alphabet soup, Mobius bacon strips, diced snake eyes, cubed radishes, “hominym” grits, anagraham crackers, rhyme thyme and sage sprinklings.)
Please post
your comments below. Feel free also to post clever and subtle hints that do not
give the puzzle answers away. Please wait until after 3 p.m. Eastern Time on
Tuesdays to post your answers and explain your hints about the puzzles. We
serve up at least one fresh puzzle every Friday.
We invite you to make it a habit to “Meet at Joe’s!” If you enjoy our weekly puzzle party, please tell your friends about Joseph Young’s Puzzle -ria! Thank you.
Over on PEOTS, Word Woman has posted a great link to a NYT story about Pi Day, with copious links. See her March 12, 7:36 PM comment.
ReplyDeleteI just posted a Pi Day limerick, just above this week's menu.
Lego...
An engineer friend got married yesterday and proclaimed "infinite love" for his bride.
DeleteWord Woman,
DeleteNo kidding?
If I were a carpenter… I mean, an engineer who was wedding my beloved, I would proclaim to her not “infinite” but “eternal,” “boundless” or “endless” love. It sounds so much more poetic.
But then, alas, I would add, “My love for you is non-repeating, random and uniformly distributed”… which might dampen the poetic mood a tad.
LegoDarinToBeGeeky
No kidding, Lego. They are in their fifties and finally found THE day ;-).
DeleteWhatever makes your world go 'round!
Oh, and, of course instead of a wedding CAKE they had a wedding PIE!
DeleteAll this talk of pi and its infinite digits has me pondering infinity… and failing utterly to truly grasp the notion. In our dead-end (literally) existence and world where everything ends, “endless” and “limitless” make no sense (except in the mathematical sense). And we do not live in the realm of numbers.
ReplyDeleteOur imaginations and thoughts may give us a glimpse of what infinite or infinitesimal may mean but, at least for me, it is a very blurry glimpse.
For example, read the first few paragraphs of this article, ending with the paragraph that ends “… base-26 digits of pi!”
In base-26 (using A through Z as digits), the digits of pi are like you are eternally rolling a 26-sided die (sides A through Z). The results are randon and “uniformly distributed.” (The provervial “monkey-with-typewriters” analogy is also somewhat apt.) You will find English words cropping up sporadically in the first million or so digits of base-26 pi
But, as the writer states, and I agree, “…any text, no matter how long, should eventually appear in the base-26 digits of pi!"
Okay, the text I will search for is Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” 561,093 words long. I ignore the spaces between words, just look at the letters.
After about a googolplex or two of letters, I finally come across W&P’s first sentence: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.” Alas what follows is sheer gobbledygook! After about a quadrillion googolplexes, I finally get the entire first chapter. But then more random nonsense letters.
On the plus side, by this time we have already spelled out Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Dickens’s “The Old Curiousity Shop,” and Heller’s “Catch-22” (with 22 spelled out as “Twenty-two,” of course), along with a whole mess of poetry.
At long last, after 18 or 19 googolplexes of googolplexes of letters, we finally start stringing together the letters of “War and Peace”: “Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now…” Amazingly, every letter falls into place all the way through the novel’s 15 books, each with multiple chapters, until we get to the final sentence:
“In the first case it was necessary to renounce
the consciousness of an unreal immobility in
space and to recognize a motion we did not
feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary
to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and
to recognize a dependence of which we are
not conscioub.”
Alleluia! Let’s celebrate! Wait. What? The last word should be “consciouS,” not “consciouB”? Well, okay. I guess we ought not give up now. We did come pretty close this time though.
Now THAT’S what I call infinity.
I have heard that God’s love is infinite. I don’t understand what that means. Someday maybe I will. It seems it might have something to do with the patience of Job.
LegoConscioubOfMyLimitations
This week’s puzzle answers, for the record, Part 1:
ReplyDeleteEasy As Pi Slice:
Scrambled egguations
Make sense of the following three equations:
(A mixed-up mighty tree) + (3.14…) = (A giraffe’s cousin)
(Musical paces) - (3.14…) = (A discombobulated Ed Kranepool)
(Scrambled big burgers) + (3.14…) = (Garlicky shrimp)
Answer:
OAK + PI = OKA + PI = OKAPI
TEMPI – PI = TEM = MET
MACS + PI = SCAM + PI = SCAMPI
Title Search Slice:
The Pi Songbook
Consider the short palindromic title of the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Ada,” one word in the The Bird and the Bee song title “You’re a Cad” and one word in the Slade song title “Cum on Feel the Noize.”
What do all three have to do with pi?
Answer:
If the counting numbers are converted to letters of the alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, … Z = 26) the three words appear in the first nine digits of pi (3.14159265)
ADA = 1 + 4 + 1
CAD = 3 + 1 + 4
NOIZE = 14 + 15 + 9 + 26 + 5
Crib Note Slice:
Speak, Mnemosyne
Recalling the following self-referential mnemonic device might help a student navigate or regurgitate the first several (actually, thirty-two) digits of pi on a misguided geometry exam:
“Via a crib, a pupil remembers pi. Pupils count all words’ quantity regarding letters. Sentences put in the mnemonic give pupils pi digits, they who are examined. Why? To discern geometric skill!”
But it does not exactly trip off the tongue. You can do better. Do you want to take the time to do so and share it with the rest of us?
Answer: The number of letters in each word, in order, correspond to the digits of pi. (Via = 3; a = 1; crib = 4; a =1; pupil = 5…)
Creating such mnemonic sentence is a rather trivial exercise. Gauging by their lack of response, Puzzlerians! apparently agree with that sentiment! Here are a few sites that show we probably have more than enough pi mnemonic aids.
Lego...
This week’s puzzle answers, for the record, Part 2:
ReplyDeleteCentury Slice:
A fitting first…Can you dig it?
At some point late within the first 50 digits of pi something very fitting occurs, something that will occur often later on in the endless skein of digits, perhaps even an infinite number of times.
What is it? Where exactly does it occur? Where does it occur next?
Answer:
The 41st, 42nd and 43rd digits of pi are 169, which, if the counting numbers are converted to letters of the alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, … Z = 26), spell out the word pi (16 + 9 = P + I). The next time “…169…” appears in pi is at its 2,143rd, 2,144th and 2,145th digits.
Piebald’s Ill Slice:
Seven-letter heaven
Each of the six paragraphs below has at two words that share something in common related to this week’s pi theme. Name what it is and, if possible, give another word sharing the same property for each paragraph.
Answer:
In the first paragraph, 17 seven-letter words begin with “pi.” (Other words with that property include “pizzazz and pinocle.”)
In the second paragraph, 9 seven-letter words have “pi” as their second and third letters. (Other words with that property include “epistle” and “spindle.”)
In the third paragraph, 6 seven-letter words have “pi” as their third and fourth letters. (Other words with that property include “copilot” and “capital.”)
In the fourth paragraph, 15 seven-letter words have “pi” as their fourth and fifth letters. (Other words with that property include “foppish” and “armpits.”)
In the fifth paragraph, 4 seven-letter words have “pi” as their fifth and sixth letters. (Other words with that property include “cockpit” and “hairpin.”)
In the sixth paragraph, 2 seven-letter words have “pi” as their sixth and seventh letters. (We are not aware of other words besides “platypi” and “rhizopi,” with that property.)
Bonus Appetizer Slice:
Literary Link
There is a literary connection between two of the five puzzle slices on this week’s menu. What are the slices and their link?
Answer:
Our Title Search Slice, titled “The Pi Songbook,” asks you to consider the Vladimir Nabokov novel “Ada.” The title of our Crib Note Slice, “Speak, Mnemosyne” was the first choice for the title of his autobiography/book of recollections titled “Speak, Memory.”
Lego…
Here's a logic problem for everyone:
ReplyDeleteStarting in Delaware, you must tour the 48 contiguous United States, visiting each state exactly once.
Where will you finish?
Click on END STATE to view the answer.
I assume i'm not travelling by airplane.
DeleteThat is correct. You are traveling by a landed vehicle.
Deleteron,
DeleteThanks for posting this logic puzzle. I hope to savor it sometime after I upload this week's Puzzleria!, which I am now in the process of doing.
I would like to copy it onto the new March 20 P! blog, if that is okay with you.
LegoContiguous