3.14 = PIE

Nothing like math you can eat.

Happy Pi Day (March 14th is 3/14 which is the truncated version of the number Pi)!  What's the big deal about this, you say?  Not much really.  It's a day that's dedicated to a mathematical number. A number that is widely used to figure out important things in science.  And science is important, obviously with applications throughout the universe, but specifically to me.  And since it's my blog, I'm celebrating Pi Day!  But I've noticed a few things.  It seems to me that there's a lot of social media talk out there about today. Most of it comes from a few pages that I've found and have come to enjoy and love seeing on Facebook.  The first is a  page called I Fucking Love Science.  Despite the use of language, which I for one, love (but others have apparently taken offense to) this site boasts daily updates on science news.  There is always new and innovative information coming out of this site.  I love getting the info into my news feed on my own Facebook page.  I also enjoy the satirical humor pictures that are often interspersed into the posts.  Most are cerebral pictures that you have to think about in order to get the humor, but some are just sillyness that you can't help but laugh at.  Two other Facebook sites that I've found that are awesome as well are Science is a Verb and Epic Lab Time. All three share their posts with each other and often repeat info, but I'm cool with that because that's how science works.  One person shares their findings with others, who in turn  document and verify the information as accurate.  There's also several great YouTube channels out there dedicated to science experiments and facts (VSauce is one of my favorites). The internet is a wonderful invention that has really helped science explode to people that otherwise wouldn't know about it.

Science is one of those subjects that you either loved or hated when you were growing up.  Your teachers either injected you with the love of the subject or drained the life out of you.  I remember my high school science classes vividly.  I loved my biology classes (I and II) because of the subject matter (the biology I teacher was pregnant and missed half the year), enjoyed my physics class because I had the coolest teacher ever (Here's to you Mr. Ragland) and hated my chemistry class because my teacher couldn't bring the subject matter to life (all I remember from it was that there's something called Avogadro's number which went with something called a mole,not the animal, I enjoyed learning about moles in biology).  But the seed was planted, maybe even long before then (I remember doing my 3rd grade science fair project on "making" dinosaur bones).  And I continued learning science after high school, as I went on to receive a bachelors degree with a major in Geology from the College of William and Mary.  There I did my senior thesis paper on the taxonomy and taphonomy of two fossil cetaceans (whales) I had the privilege to dig up in King and Queen County, Virginia.  Then I also had the privilege of working in the Paleobiology department of the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum in Washington, DC.  After that, I kind of got out of science for a while.  Although I tried using my geology degree for some time, to no avail   Finally, I became a science teacher myself and needed to relearn a lot of the information in order to disseminate it to my students.  I did so with great vigor and enthusiasm in the hopes of becoming the best science teacher I could become.   I only hope that my students find me to be more interesting than I did my chemistry teacher.