Happy Pi Day 2018!

Happy Pi Day 2018

OK, I'll be the first to admit I am not smart enough for this joke.

It's a mash-up of two things I really don't participate in: Video Games and Math.  Video games I gave up for the most part cold turkey almost 20 years ago.  I had burned myself out on a combination of pumping every spare quarter I had into arcade games (remember those?), Atari 2600, Nintendo NES and the next gen Super NES, and any other game systems I could get my hands on right up to 1999, when I realized I was wasting too much time on video games and basically quit.  Granted, I was (and am) still wasting time on a LOT of other things, but video games wasn't one of them.

And Math, well... Math and I don't see eye to (i).  That's another joke I'm not smart enough to make.  I think.

So, "the cake is a lie" is from the video game, "Portal", which I have never played.  However, I have seen enough of it referred to in the nerd culture I swim in that I was aware of both "Portal" and "the cake is a lie" meme.  Heck, it even has a really great ending song in which the insane computer, GLaDOS, taunts the survivors that she is "Still Alive" (written by Jonathan Coulton, no less).  I listened to it again a few weeks ago, which is why it was semi-fresh in my mind.  Here it is for those interested:

There is even a symphonic version which also makes me smile, since I appreciate seeing low-brow and high-brow cultures mix it up.  Lest this go from a Pi Day post to a "Portal" end song "Still Alive" post, it's probably in the "Suggested Videos".  Go look, I'll wait...

As for the formula Pi^(e) = 22.459157718...  Well, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole about  calculus, graphing imaginary numbers, and Euler's Constant.  Not much of it really stuck because of what I said above about Math and me.  But, I did remember (e) was something in math.  I guess that means it wasn't completely wasted on me.  Close, but not completely.

With that as the background, my chain of thought went something like this: Pi Day... If the cake is a lie, Pi is something else.  If the cake is a lie, maybe Pi is the truth?  Nah, that's obvious.  Bleh.  I need a pun--the worse the better!  (Which is how puns work, after all.)  So, then I tried to think of a pun from cake to Pi...  Oh, wait, with Pi being mathematical, and (e) also having to do with math, well there we go!  I Googled the formula "Pi^(e)" and it turned out to give an actual answer--No one was more surprised than me!  And, even better, it could be plotted on a line.  LINE!  Of course, that pun is almost bad enough to work!  If the cake is a lie, the Pi^(e) is a line!  Ta da!

Who says explaining jokes isn't fun?  :-P

For my amusement, I posted this as close to 3/14/15 at 9:26:53 (CST) as possible.  Y'know, 'cuz Pi.

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Done in Photoshop.

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