Talk of the Nation, March 14, 2008 · On Friday, math enthusiasts celebrate pi, the infinite number representing the relationship between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. Represented by the Greek letter pi, the number is usually shortened to 3.14, so festivities take place on March 14 or 3/14.
Across the country, math aficionados trade pi recipes, hold pizza parties, and recite as many digits of the never-ending number as they can remember. (Listen to a recitation by Mark Umile, North American record-holder for memorizing pi.)
Physicist Ron Hipschman talks with host Ira Flatow about the all-day pi celebration taking place at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
A lot of people are excited about the power of pi. But not everyone knows it has an official celebration — Pi Day, on the fourteenth day of the third month, 3.14. Those are the first three digits of pi, that transcendental number, the icon with the digits after the decimal point that go on forever.
Strictly speaking, pi represents the constant ratio of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. There is no pattern to pi. But it’s a cool number with real-life applications. Today, as Dan Hellerich of PiDay.org reports, numbers geeks all over the world bake pies, write “pi-kus” and recite pi to as many decimal points as possible. “I know 15,” he says. “Some people know 10 times that, but you really only need about 10 to do accurate math in geometry or physics.”

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Unless the world ends or President Bush’s neural lobes finally connect, chances are, we’ll still be at war in Iraq on Thursday. That’ll be five years, folks — a long time. We’ve been at it for so long that it’s hard to even remember what the rationale was for dragging us in there in the first place. It almost doesn’t even matter anymore. Except that it should.
President Bush tied Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11 attacks and al-Qaida.
After five years of this unconscionable war, a Pentagon-sponsored study tells us that (SURPRISE!) there was no link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden.
They come out with this paper now? Really?
Shouldn’t an exhaustive study have been done, oh, five or six years ago, before we rolled into Iraq? You may recall that in 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that evidence linking the two was “bulletproof” — hmm, that must’ve been one of the 935 “false statements” the Bush administration made in building the case for the Iraq war.
The other trumped-up reason for the war, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, has also been proved false. For all the claims of a sophisticated weapons system, all we found was mustard gas stashed at a turkey farm — oh, no, wait. That was in Libya. In Iraq we found munitions with corroded chemicals from the ’80s (which the U.S. might’ve helped Saddam buy) and the country’s former leader, a deranged criminal hiding in a spider hole. But it wasn’t until 18 months after our invasion of Iraq that the CIA told us that there were no WMD there. But, hey, at least we knew where to find the oil fields.

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These are the good times, people.
Just ask Seattle band The Presidents of the United States of America, those fun-loving cutups who added mirth to Seattle’s gloomy grunge scene in the early 1990s with such bouncy songs as “Kitty,” “Peaches” and “Lump” — until creative pressures took all the fun away and forced the musical statesmen out of office in the late ’90s.
The Presidents fully re-formed in 2004, and now they’re back on the campaign trail with their strongest, most diverse album in years, “These Are the Good Times People.” It features a bushel of “joy pop” tunes that defy gravity, among them “Ladybug,” “Sharpen Up Those Fangs,” “More Bad Times” and “Truckstop Butterfly.”
The album’s first single, “Mixed Up S.O.B.,” is featured in a clever new video directed by longtime friend “Weird Al” Yankovic. It’s currently the top video on YouTube’s indie/alternative chart, No. 2 on YouTube’s Rock chart and the No. 4 music video overall on YouTube, with more than 40,000 plays.
The band is happier now because things just feel right. Indeed, times are good.
“There’s no getting back to that time, that was weird,” drummer Jason Finn said of the craziness of late ’90s, when singer, songwriter and “basitarist” Chris Ballew — burned out by the madcap pace of touring and the pressures of being on a major label — quit the band, essentially putting the trio on hiatus.

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The Burt Norville Trial Part I
By Christine Larbey
The circumstances surrounding the death of Wilberforce ‘Burt’ Norville made local headlines for weeks in 2003. The 24-year-old who belonged to a prominent local family was stabbed at a birthday party held at the Bonne Terre home of Omar Boyea on November 9. He later died at hospital. Since his death a young man has been on remand at Bordelais charged with his murder.
(Meanwhile the Norville family two years ago brought a civil suit against the state for negligence stemming from the events at Victoria Hospital before Norville died. Justice Sandra Mason is yet to rule on that matter.). Nearly five years since Burt Norville’s death, the nation has obviously shifted to other issues. But in the local courts Norville’s death has been the focus for the past three weeks as the now thirty-year-old accused went on trial for murder. The case which had some shocking revelations was heard before presiding Judge Kenneth Benjamin. The STAR brings you segments of the trial in a two part series.
During the lengthy trial described by Justice Benjamin as ” no ordinary one” twelve witnesses gave evidence. Six voir dires (trials within a trial) were held. The Acting Commissioner of Police John Broughton was summoned to appear before the judge. Likewise a representative from the Attorney’s General’s Chambers. The Victoria Hospital record keeper was also called in.

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Just because it’s “noncommercial” doesn’t mean public radio doesn’t have the same concerns about how to attract and retain listeners, and how to use rather than be run over by new technology, as its commercial brethren.
And when there are disagreements about strategies to address those concerns, they can result in executive changes that are as public and messy as those on the commercial side of the business.
Such was the case last week when National Public Radio announced the departure of its chief executive officer, Ken Stern, “by mutual agreement.”
The appearance of that phrase in a news release is rarely a sign of a happy parting.
What Stern’s exit does mean is the appointment as CEO, on an interim basis, of a Northwesterner and someone who has worked for years on the affiliate side of the business — Dennis Haarsager.
Until last week, Haarsager was associate vice president and general manager of educational and public media at Washington State University. In that capacity, he ran Northwest Public Radio, which operates two networks of NPR programming and classical music heard on stations and translators across the region.
Haarsager, who has been on NPR’s board for 2 1/2 years and chairman since November, wasn’t specific about the reasons for Stern’s departure. The Washington Post, however, said the issue was unhappiness of affiliates over NPR’s initiatives into new technologies and delivery channels.

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The Burt Norville Trial Part I
By Christine Larbey
The circumstances surrounding the death of Wilberforce ‘Burt’ Norville made local headlines for weeks in 2003. The 24-year-old who belonged to a prominent local family was stabbed at a birthday party held at the Bonne Terre home of Omar Boyea on November 9. He later died at hospital. Since his death a young man has been on remand at Bordelais charged with his murder.
(Meanwhile the Norville family two years ago brought a civil suit against the state for negligence stemming from the events at Victoria Hospital before Norville died. Justice Sandra Mason is yet to rule on that matter.). Nearly five years since Burt Norville’s death, the nation has obviously shifted to other issues. But in the local courts Norville’s death has been the focus for the past three weeks as the now thirty-year-old accused went on trial for murder. The case which had some shocking revelations was heard before presiding Judge Kenneth Benjamin. The STAR brings you segments of the trial in a two part series.
During the lengthy trial described by Justice Benjamin as ” no ordinary one” twelve witnesses gave evidence. Six voir dires (trials within a trial) were held. The Acting Commissioner of Police John Broughton was summoned to appear before the judge. Likewise a representative from the Attorney’s General’s Chambers. The Victoria Hospital record keeper was also called in.

read_more