The True Meaning of Pi Day

We’re just a few days away from Pi Day, the unofficial holiday celebrating the mathematical constant π, representing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi is irrational. It goes on forever without repeating. And it begins with 3.14, which is why it’s celebrated on March 14th.

It’s a fun nerdy thing to celebrate. But for me, Pi Day has a much deeper meaning that changed the way I approach being creative on the internet. I think about it every year.

Let me take you back to February of 2006, when I started Ironic Sans as a blog, and the month leading up to Pi Day.

Before I even published my first post, I had begun keeping a journal of short ideas and observations I might write about, so I had plenty of material ready to flesh out. I figured I needed ten good posts up before I could share the blog with people, so they could see some history and get a sense of what Ironic Sans was all about.

The very first post was an idea for a new font I called “Ironic Sans” (it was a serif font, which makes it ironic). I posted it as an “Idea” post, which would eventually become a popular category for my blog. I also thought “Ironic Sans” made a good blog name.

Over the next few weeks, I wrote the rest of my first ten posts, and I’m kind of astonished that most of them I still think are pretty good.

For example, I kicked off a series of 60-second videos, long before short-form video was a popular thing on the internet. YouTube was only a year old at the time and I chose to post them on a competing platform (Revver) that later shut down, so the links are all dead now. But I also posted some of them on YouTube, like this 60 second video of landing gear that somehow has around 480,000 views:

In another post, I observed that a statue of George Bush at the Houston airport resembled Michelangelo’s David. If I were writing it today, I’d include more information about this type of pose, known as contrapposto, described in Wikipedia as “a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane.”

Elsewhere among my first 10 posts are a couple entries in what would become another ongoing series on the blog: a look at how New York City has been depicted in animation, which began with an entry about Fritz The Cat and eventually included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Critic, The Simpsons, MTV’s Downtown, and even Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I wrote the first ten posts over a month, and eventually February turned into March. By the time I sat down to write my 11th post, the date was March 14. Pi Day.

Being a nerdy sort of fellow, I thought celebrating Pi Day on March 14 was a pretty clever idea. I had first heard about Pi Day a couple years earlier, and this seemed like exactly the sort of topic I might write about. So I wrote this:

I posted two other things that day, too — another 60 second video, and my reaction to the news that the original Wallace and Gromit figures had been lost in a fire and had a shockingly low insurance value — but I couldn’t stop thinking about my Pi Day post.

There was nothing even remotely offensive about it, but I felt bad about posting it. I had poster’s remorse, that feeling when you’ve put something online and then you wonder if you really should have.

And here’s why I had this lousy feeling about such an innocuous post: I added no value.

I had no unique take. I offered no interesting perspective. I didn’t create anything new or further an existing idea. I suppose I posted it to signal that I was the sort of person who found such things interesting, but surely I could have come up with a better way to do it than just tell you the holiday exists and quote a paragraph from Wikipedia.

I considered deleting it, but decided against it. Nobody was really reading my blog yet, and it was good to have some content. I decided it was fine as filler material and left it up.

One week later, I wrote the post that blew up and put my blog on the map. It was a silly “Idea” post about making pre-pixelated clothes for people who go on reality TV, to save a poor editor the trouble of having to pixelate your clothes in post.

I had shared the post with a few people who shared it with people, and suddenly my blog was flooded with traffic from all over the place. For whatever reason, it was the right post at the right time and people liked it. People were subscribing to my RSS feed. I was really glad that I had taken the time to populate my blog with content before I shared it with anyone so there was something people could actually look at to get a better understanding of what kind of blog it was.

But that damn Pi Day post was still there, bothering me. It was embarrassing. What if all these people see it? Of course there was nothing really wrong with it, but it just wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to be known for. I didn’t want to be someone who just repeats things other people say. I didn’t want to just be an aggregator or curator. I wanted to be someone who makes things that other people aggregate and curate.

But I chose to keep it up. I knew that it wouldn’t mean anything one way or another to anyone else, but I left it there as a reminder to myself.

To this day, I keep the lesson of Pi Day in mind whenever I create something for the internet, whether it’s a newsletter, video, etc. I don’t mind covering a topic that has been covered elsewhere, but I always ask myself:

• Is this something I can do differently than has been done before?

• Is this something I can do better than has been done before?

• Is there something new I have to add to the topic?

If the answer to all three questions is no, then I skip it.

Pi uses the same digits that every other number has to work with, but always comes up with something new. If you look at any part of it, you’re likely to find a unique sequence you wouldn’t find anywhere else.

And that’s the true meaning of Pi Day.

I know what you’re thinking: But David, there are some sequences of Pi that repeat things you can find elsewhere. It can’t be entirely original the whole time it extends to infinity. Okay, sure. The part about Pi always coming up with something new is a bit of an imperfect metaphor, but it seemed like a nice way to wrap up the story.

In truth, you might find any sequence of digits in Pi. There is even a 9.5% chance it contains your social security number in the first 100 million digits. (My newsletter, on the other hand, doesn’t contain your social security number at all).

And that’s it for another newsletter! Thanks as always for reading. Your support means the world to me in coming up with new ideas for things you won’t find in Pi or anywhere else, so if you’re inclined to pitch in, you can become a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation.

Happy Pi Day!

David