Windows

clipped from southeastmain.wordpress.com

The Ins and Outs of Windows

By june

My ventures into painting in 2010 have been pathetically few. One of these was actually begun in Nevada in February of 2009. It was the first Nevada painting I did at the Red Barn. It was colder than [fill in the blank] and even with two electric heaters and my Montana winter coat and gloves, I was shivering. Jer wasn't due for an hour and a half. The only thing that would keep me from walking the four miles to Beatty was painting (well, that and the south wind at about 25 mph).

So I painted my first Nevada painting, shivering, as if I were working in watercolor:

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From the Red Barn, oil on canvas, about 20 x 30″, 2009

I really liked the effect of the landscape reaching into the barn's concrete walls and taking over even my shivery body. Later in that residency I tried to recapitulate something of the effect. The paintings were dreadful and ultimately discarded. But I kept this one; I still have it, hanging alongside of a watercolor done in the first painting class I ever took. Both mean something to me personally.

Too much pi

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Today is Pi Day, in honor of the mathematical constant pi (π), an irrational number that begins 3.14 — like today's date, March 14th or 3/14.

π is a letter of the Greek alphabet, and it's the symbol for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. In other words, if a circle has a diameter of 10 inches, we could find out its circumference by multiplying 10 inches by π, and we'd find out that the circle with a 10-inch diameter has a circumference (or perimeter) of approximately 31.4159265. It can only ever be approximate — never exact — because π is an irrational number, meaning that it goes on forever without repeating or having patterns. Using powerful computers, π has been calculated in recent years into trillions of decimal places.

Pi Day began in 1988, started by a physicist named Larry Shaw. And just last year, in 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution designating today as National Pi Day.

Pi Day celebrations around the nation today involve eating dessert pies or pizza pies, throwing cream pies, and listening to lectures on the importance of the irrational number — sometimes all of these things occurring in unison.

There are legions of people worldwide devoted to memorizing π to as far as they can memorize it. And today around the world, there are π recitation contests. The world record, according to the Guinness Book, is currently held by Lu Chao, a grad student from China, who over the course of 24 hours and 4 minutes recited pi to the 67,890th decimal place without error.

To aid in the memorization of the never-ending, pattern-less number, people have written poetry and stories in a mnemonic called "Pilish," which is a way of constrained writing "in which the number of letters in each successive word "spells out" the digits of π." One of the earliest and best-known examples of it was a sentence by English physicist Sir James Jeans, who wrote: "How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" 'How' has three letters, 'I' has one, "need" has four — so it forms 3.14, the start of π — and each successive word's letter count represents the next digit in π.

Then, in 1996, a piphilologist (as these people are called), wrote a 3,834-digit Cadaeic Cadenza, which begins with a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven"; every single word adheres to the constraints that render letter counts into accurate successive π digits.