Three Geeky Ways People Celebrated Pi Day 2015

The Pi Day of the century – 3/14/15 9:26:53 having passed, I decided to scrape around the net to find some unusual ways people celebrated the occasion.

Pi Day is an unofficial celebration that comes around on March 14th each year. That’s because when written month first, the date becomes 3/14, the first few digits of pi.

As you can see, it’s a pretty geeky occasion to begin with.

People celebrate by eating pie, or reciting pi, or other math-related activities. This year was a super-special pi day, because if you write the two-digit year as well, you get 3/14/15. And pi is 3.1415926535…

So, chomping down at 9:26 am and 53 seconds gives you a date and time with the first 10 digits of pi!

Here are some of the geekiest ways I found that people celebrated Pi Day:

The Raspberry Pi Sale

First, the Maker Shed had a Pi Day sale. That may not sound too geeky, but consider what they were selling: The Raspberry Pi. Not Pie, but Pi. The Raspberry Pi is super cool, because it’s a full-featured computer that costs only about $30. And it’s small – I mean tiny, small enough to be carried by, say, a Lego Mindstorms robot or a drone.

I remember talking with a friend last year about all the cool ideas for Halloween decorations they could do with a Raspberry Pi – spooky laughter that cackled when people walked by, of self-opening coffins driven by relays, motion sensors and a Raspberry Pi. I think I’d had one beer too much, because I spent the whole conversation thinking “how will he accomplish all that with a raspberry-flavored dessert?” Fortunately, beer also makes me keep my mouth shut.

The sale closed at 11:59pm on Pi Day, so it’s too late to get 15% off, but not too late to get a Raspberry Pi.

Ingress Link Art

Ingress is a super-geeky game – imagine a cross between roegaining, geocaching and capture-the-flag. Then make it global, and add a science-fictiony alien invasion storyline.

Two teams, green and blue, battle it out for control of “portals” – normally monuments, public artwork or places of national significance. Once portals are captured, they can be linked together, and three linked portals create a “control field,” freeing the minds of the people living under it (or enslaving them, if the triangle was made by the other team!)

The blue team in New York decided that for Pi Day, they’d do something special for their city – a pattern of control fields in the shape of a pie!

In Albuquerque, the green and blue teams put aside their in-game differences, and joined forces to create a great big pi covering their city:

You can probably imagine that would have taken weeks of planning and a lot traveling by dozens of players on the day itself!

3D Printing

You may have heard of 3D printing. If you haven’t, you soon will – they are set to completely disrupt manufacturing and prototyping over the next 10 years. If you had a 3D printer in your home, you wouldn’t buy a phone case, you’d download and print one. Yes, you’d print – not a picture of a case – but a full-on three-dimensional phone case you then clip on your phone.

And it doesn’t stop there – pretty much anything you can imagine made out of plastic, you can print to a 3D printer. Want customized plates for a party? Print some. Broken your toothbrush holder? Print one. Missing Lego piece? Print one.

The website 3dprint.com has a blog post listing a half-dozen cute pi-themed 3D printable items, including a cookie cutter, pencil holder, earrings and more.