Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 51.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
Everyone in the US is jet lagged, even though nobody got to go anywhere. The sky in Beijing is orange. Spain is testing out a four-day work week. If your lizard brain needs a tickle, read this article about invasive hog hunting in Florida, with an eye towards the overlap between colonization by species introduction and suburbanization.
Yo-Yo Ma, who has been performing on social media throughout the pandemic, celebrated getting his second vaccine dose with an impromptu concert.
Here’s a questionable lion. Happy adjusting, friends.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
Yesterday felt like an unexpectedly significant day. So many things converged, daylight savings happened in the US as well as the Grammys (congrats to Thundercat, Fiona Apple, and of course the Stallion and the Bee). It was Mother's Day here in Ireland, AND it was Pi Day, the holiday normally celebrated by stressed out elementary school math teachers looking for something to keep their students entertained. With the pandemic anniversary last week and St. Patrick's Day coming up on Wednesday it feels like this March is laden with all kinds of significance and emotion.
ViHart, the fantastic "mathemusician" I've mentioned before in this column put out a video yesterday commemorating Pi Day. In the past ViHart has commemorated Pi Day with anti-pi rant videos discussing how 3.14... isn't really the best circle constant to be using and that tau (𝜏 = 2π = 6.28...) makes math much easier to learn and more beautiful. If you want to know more here's the Tau Day website. Unfortunately June 28th isn't during the regular school year so it won't give teachers a curriculum break, but the efforts of the anti-pi brigade are commendable nonetheless.
This year, Vi-Hart's Pi Day video related pi's irrationality (an irrational number never ends) and circle-ness to the pandemic and daylight savings time. She talks about how pi speaks to the wiggliness of time that daylight savings represents (relatable content), and how it feels to be stuck in the endless time loop of the pandemic for an entire year. She follows her 4 minute discussion with a 30 minute piano improvisation on the first digits of pi 3.1415 or E-C-F-C-G in the key of C. The idea is that if she gives half and hour playing the piano and you give half an hour listening, it makes a full hour reclaimed from daylight savings time and our endless repetitive pandemic lives. Two people making an hour the way 2π makes a circle. It's really gorgeous and moving and scratched exactly the itch I've needed someone to scratch recently. Take a listen and let me know what you think!
*Hot Goss*
Back on Wednesday from the superb Latifah Azlan.