Happy Pi Day!

[embe11ished]

First, I want to wish everyone a very Happy Pi Day! Go forth and celebrate mathematics wherever you find it. (I am bringing pie to my Calc class today, which will hopefully encourage them to speak up. They are a very quiet group of students.)

Also, 7veilsphaedra posted electronically generated haiku, and she got me hooked. These don't hang together like Phae's

Comments

[desertraincloud]

Happy Pi day indeed! I never knew. It should be a holiday.

[embe11ished]

I suppose it is a holiday in the sense that people celebrate it. Unfortunately, we don't get the day off. Oh well. I guess I at least have spring break to look forward to next week!

[fallenwitch]

Well, it's 11:20 pm so I can still officially wish you a Very Happy Pi Day! I never knew such a day existed. What a glorious reason for a celebration and a great rationalization for indulging in pie! Why I have to because it's... it's Pi day! My husband and I were talking a few days ago about the gentleman who's a savant and can repeat 5 non-stop hours of Pi. Incredible.

As for the haiku, I will repeat what I said to Phae earlier today. I find the idea of mechanically generated haiku disturbing. Very. Evidently, it's just me because everyone else loves it. *shrugs shoulders*

[embe11ished]

Well, thank you for the Pi Day wishes. I read an article today (posted in our department's break room), which said that the world record holder spent something like 18 hours reciting digits (I forget the details), and that there is someone else who recited digits for over 24 hours, but he didn't bother with the paperwork and other loopholes that Guinness requires. That's absolutely amazing. My memory is pretty terrible, so I feel lucky to remember 5 or so digits.

I can see how you find the mechanically generated haiku disturbing. That isn't really the best way to write poetry. On the other hand, at least one of the haiku the machine generated is probably better than anything I could write. On the other other hand, I only posted the best of several that I generated. The others didn't make sense or poetry at all.

[fallenwitch]

Perhaps my writing brain is a badly functioning machine at some level because I often find some of my best lines by mistake. I often mistype one word for another or misspell something or blah, blah, blah. When I go back and look at it, I'm like... WTF? But on occasion, the juxtaposition of unintended words or sounds will cause a light to go off and a new meaning is drawn out of the darnedest things. So I salute whatever mechanism brings that about I guess. *still eying that out of body machine warily*

[embe11ished]

I think the most interesting thing about the machine-generated haiku, or an accidental juxtaposition, is our human reaction to it. That spark that you makes you think about something differently. In some sense, it doesn't matter so much where that spark comes from, as that it happens at all. Though on the whole, I would rather read human poetry, this is certainly an interesting exercise.