[Peace-discuss] À la recherche du temps perdu: Happy Pi-Day!

[C. G. Estabrook]

I got up just before 2am this morning to celebrate it:

3.14 1:59:26.535...

One day log ago, siting in the back of a sunny but tedious math class in high 
school, a friend (Ed Hash) and I memorized the first fifty decimal places of pi.

Over the years I have at divers times committed to memory such things as a good 
bit of (Robert) Browning, the canon of the Latin mass, and the second-longest 
role in Shakespeare - not to mention numerous phone numbers, etc.

No one of those can I recite error-free today: but I know pi to fifty places, 
without spot or wrinkle...

***
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

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