Yesterday's self-congratulatory pat on the back to anyone reciting Pi to ten digits might feel a bit inadequate compared to Santa Clara University's Ed Karrels. The researcher has broken the record for calculating Darren Aronofsky's favorite number, taking the ratio to eight quadrillion places right of the decimal. Given the location of the University, you'll be unsurprised to learn which hardware maker's gear was used to break the record. Karrels will be showing off the new digits at the GPU technology conference in San Jose, demonstrating the CUDA-voodoo necessary to harness all of that Kepler-based computing power.
[Image Credit: Ed Karrels]
Filed under: Desktops, Alt, NVIDIA
Via: NVIDIA
Source: Ed Karrels
Ladies and gentlemen (and nerds), today is Pi Day. You know what that means: tons of math and pie/pi puns flooding your newly spartan News Feed. Not too mention, a few more creative celebrations of the date that so closely mirrors the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Lets not kid ourselves though, after several years of internet-fueled and fruit-filled fun Pi Day is starting to lose its luster. So, the question is, are you doing your best to restore the original meaning of the holiday and take it back from those who have turned it into a crass meme-athon? Oh, and don't worry if you forgot to send us a card, you can always make up for it on June 28th.
Mathematics geeks will often use the number of digits of Pi they can remember as a measure of pride. While I might be able to get as far as 3.141592653589793, that’s about where I lose it. But with these special drinking glasses, I bet I’d be able to recite 100 digits in no time.
TheUncommonGreen’s Pi series is printed several hundred digits of the mathematical constant – which for those of you who flunked math class is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Duh.
There’s a Pi pint glass ($36/pair), a Pi rocks glass ($36/pair) and a Pi shot glass ($20/each), so you can even memorize digits while you get drunk. I’m not sure how much those Pi coasters go for, though. And if you want to keep working on your math while you cook dinner, there’s a matching Pi kitchen towel.
And when your guests arrive, you can help them learn Pi too, while they cut the cheese on this Pi plate ($55).
But my favorite of the Pi series won’t help me memorize its digits at all – but it will help me drink more beer – and that’s the Pi bottle opener ($45).
[via bltd]
If you’ve got a Kindle you’re planning on upgrading, and you’re wondering what to do with your old eReader, then check out what Gef Tremblay did with his old Kindle. He hacked it into something he calls a Kindleberry. With the mod, his Kindle serves as a display for his Raspberry Pi computer.
On recent European trip, whilst traveling light, Gef only took a Kindle, a camera, an Android smartphone and a Raspberrry Pi. His goal was to actually get some work done with this pared down workstation. He planned to use the Kindle as a screen, connect it to the Raspberry Pi while using an external keyboard to work comfortably. He used the Raspberry Pi as a hub to get this done.
The Kindleberry served as his main computer for a couple of weeks, and it’s definitely a low-cost as well as light computing solution, if you’re on the go. I wonder if he would be able to use a Kindle 3G to tap into some cellular goodness.
[via Hacker News via Make:]