What is This Blog About? (and why pi?)

I started this blog in early 2010 primarily to discuss web strategies and social media issues. As a webmaster with 10+ years of experience, I wanted to talk about best practices, worst failures, and everything in between.

More specifically, I will cover personal website strategies, integrating with social media and APIs, mass emailing, mobile sites, alumni relations, and fundraising... with occasional (relevant) tangents. I try to keep posts short, pertinent, and (intermittently) amusing.  I hope to provide information that you can learn from, but also that will encourage discussion / feedback so I can learn as well.

Most of my topics will approach subject matter at the strategic / 50,000 foot level so it can be used to develop / modify your own web strategy.  For the most part, I will refrain from going too far in depth about specific methods or code.  I do this because the concepts I discuss will usually not be tool/code dependent , and I also want the content to be applicable to both coder and manager alike.  If you want me to explain something more in depth (methods, coding), just let me know and I'll be happy to do so.

Why pi?

If you've noticed the placement of pi throughout the site, there is a reason. In fact, there are two:

In Historical Context: it was the quest to establish a truth

For thousands of years pi represented a quest for knowledge – to establish that elusive ratio of perfection.  It affected cultures around the world, and the results  and methods varied immensely – a fact that  I think is well represented by the 5th century Chinese mathematicians Tsu Chung-Chih and his son Tsu Keng-Chih, who found that 3.1415926 < pi < 3.1415927… an accuracy not attained in Europe until the 16th century.¹

In Modern Context: it is the pursuit of knowledge beyond all logic

From what I can tell, the accepted record for decimal digits of pi is 1,241,100,000,000, which is amazing considering anything beyond 39 digits is pretty much useless, since with that degree of accuracy you can compute the radius of anything to a precision comparable to that of an atom.²
 

Sources

1. A History of Pi by Petr Beckman. No. I’m not going to quote a source in the official format.
2. I thought it was 38 digits, but I’m quoting Wikipedia here, and since their degree of accuracy is even more specific than mine, I’ll go ahead and quote them instead of asking you to trust me. Unfortunately, off hand I usually only know pi to 33 places. So don’t ask me to calculate anything.  If you really want to have your pants blown off, read Hermann Schubert’s point from 1889 about calculating pi to 100 decimal places.

So there you have it, please enjoy. And please contribute.