Recounting Pi Day

Yesterday was Pi Day. Yay! However, I think that Pi gets a little too much credit. There are plenty of other great irrational numbers that almost never get celebrated. Fortunately for pi, it sounds exactly the same in English as the word "pie," so people use it as an excuse to buy a fancy giant circular jam sandwich.

I also had health class yesterday. A bit of info for all readers: I despise health class. It's not that I hate the teacher or anything, I actually like the teacher. It's just that I'm too dang smart and health classes are too dang repetitive. Every year I have to take health, it's all the same stuff. Additionally, we go off of an older textbook, so all of the information we get is outdated and sometimes wrong.

Anyways, we started our tobacco unit yesterday. There wasn't any textbook mention of e-cigarettes. Instead we were told to create a list: "What You Think You Know About E-Cigarettes." I may have gone to town with my ideas. I started with all the basic facts like "e-cigarettes contain nicotine" and boring stuff, then I got creative and added that they don't work underwater, they don't help with calculus, and elephants don't use them. At least, I've never heard of an elephant that smokes e-cigarettes. Somebody please let me know if I'm wrong on this one.

Then I got to thinking about how when people are asked to create abstract list like this, they usually don't come up with silly ideas. There's some point in our school careers where we just kind of give up being creative in class. We just kind of give up on doing more than is required in general. When compared to elementary school children, high school teens are much less likely to ask questions in class or raise their hand to answer questions. They loose their spark. It's kind of disappointing to think about.

Geography and its Parallel Lines

Something that has always annoyed me whenever I have to do geography work for a class is how teachers try to explain latitude and longitude. Mainly, I have issues when they say that latitude lines are parallel and longitude lines.
In fact, longitude lines are parallel. And not parallel. At the same time. They are parallel at the equator. They continue to go straight, but because they are on a spherical plane (aka Earth), they eventually intersect at a point.
Now that I think about it more, I'm realizing that obviously none of these lines are actually straight. Additionally, what's up with maps? I found a great image on google that highlights the fact that projecting a three-dimensional surface onto a two-dimensional one is very, very difficult. Especially when that three-dimensional object is spherical.

My takeaway from all this is that circles are weird.