Entry 213: It's Not Beginning to Look Much Like Christmas Anywhere I Go

I took a good long look at the calendar yesterday and found out Christmas is next week.  I had a vague notion it was getting close, but I didn't realize it was this close.  Christmas in five days?  And here I am without a single hall decked with holly -- or any other ilex, for that matter.

[One great thing about Christmas: Bing!]

I do believe this is the first Christmas S and I are spending together alone -- well, not alone of course, there's Lil' S -- but without any other extended family members.  I burned through all my vacation days, so going somewhere is off the table, and we just saw both sets of parents within the last few weeks, so that pretty much eliminates the people who might come see us.  I don't even know what we're going to do for Christmas.  Oh wait, yes I do.  Just remembered, we're going over to some friends' house for dinner.  It's for all the DC transplants who aren't leaving town.  Should be fun, even if I do have to work the next day.  I'm actually (somewhat sadly) looking forward to going into the office the day after Christmas.  I know it's going to be super empty and quiet, and I'll be able to get a ton of shit done.

We don't have any decorations or anything like that set up around the house.  I don't know if we will ever "do" Christmas.  I asked S the other day if we're going to get a Christmas tree when Lil' S gets older, and she said, "if you want to".  And therein lies the rub -- I don't really want to.  I don't have anything against Christmas trees (and "O Tannenbaum" is a hell of a song).  I just don't want to get one -- for the same reason I don't want to get a pet: it's work.  Not much payoff either.  Sure, it looks nice and festive, but is it worth the effort it takes to go out and get one and put up and decorate?  Absolutely not.  I believe I've covered this in a different post ... Ah, yes, Christmas three years ago.  Bah Humbug, 2010 me.  Bah Humbug, indeed.




Another thing about Christmas is that I'm an atheist and S is -- well, I actually don't know what she'd call herself -- Atheist?  Agnostic?  Nonpracticing Hindu? -- certainly not a Christian.  I know that Christmas has morphed into something beyond a strictly Christian holiday, but isn't this really weird, if you think about it?  A lot of people who don't believe in Jesus Christ celebrate his birthday in almost the exact same way as those people who do believe in him.  We don't really do this with any other holiday.  Maybe I should start fasting on Yom Kippur, and then when people say, "Oh, I didn't know you were Jewish", I can reply, "Oh, no, I'm not.  I just like the tradition.  It reminds me of those colorful fall days when I'd atone for my sins as a kid."

And I did very much enjoy Christmas as a kid, but it wasn't so much Christmas as it was getting toys (Tecmo Super Bowl, 1991, greatest gift ever), having time off from school, and spending time with my family.  You don't need a tree or tinsel or Chipmunk carols to do any of these things.  Although if you want these things, knock yourself out.  I'm not anti-Christmas, even for non-Christians, by any means.  A Christian friend of mine was grousing to me once about non-Christians "taking away" her holiday.  She was arguing that such people were degrading the holiday for actual believers like herself.  Knowing that she's really pro-gay rights, I said sarcastically, "Yeah, I know, that's how I feel about gay people getting married."  It silenced her, but good.  It was perhaps my finest analogy ever.



OK, enough about Christmas.  Let's talk about pi for a few moments.  As everybody knows (or should know), pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be represent as a fraction of integers (e.g., 1/2), and it's decimal expansion has an infinite number of digits that never repeat in any sort of pattern.  3.1415926, that's as far as I can get off the top of my head.  As you can imagine, there are people who know many more digits.  In fact, memorizing pi is something of a sport, as I realized when I came across this website.  Before you click it, though, take a guess at what you think the record is.  Now click it and have your mind blown.  Not only that, but apparently some other dude has beaten that mark, by a lot.  That is in-fucking-sane.  The record for a computer is pretty impressive also, if only because you have to Google the unit it's measured in, but it's not nearly the same as the human record, because a computer is, you know, not a human.

All this reminds me that I once wrote a limerick about pi for the math department holiday party at UMD.  The emcee botched the reading, though, so it didn't go over well.  I still remember it.

Round a circle to polygons lie,
They asked the old Greek, "why"?
He said with a smirk,
It's not difficult work,
In fact, it's easy as 3.14159 ...

See, it's all about how Archimedes developed the first algorithm for theoretically calculating pi to an arbitrary number of digits by bounding a circle with an inscribed and a circumscribed polygon, and then ... Oh, OK.  Fine.  I'll stop.

Until next time ...