Month: April 2011

Pi Pie Contest Results

Last month I posted about a Pi Day Pie Contest. Well the results are in, you can see the finalists here. I made an unadorned (although yummy) apple pie in my Pi pie plate. See the winners here and all the entries here. Below are some of my favorite entries:

Pies Are Round? No, Pi(es) Are Squared!
Pies Are Round? No, Pi(es) Are Squared! 		Pi and math
This pie is pi by mass along with pi by count. 		Pi-rat pie
Pi-Rat pie
Compass Pi on Looseleaf
Compass Pi on Looseleaf 		Riemann Zeta Key Lime Pie
Riemann Zeta Key Lime Pie: I asked my nerd friend what pi-related thing I should make into a pie form. The answer I got: “You should use the Riemann zeta function with power 2. i.e. 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + … + 1/n^2 + … = (pi^2)/6.” I was totally lost at this, but made a polar plot of the function for him. 		18 Digit Blueberry Cheesecake Pi Pie18 Digit Blueberry Cheesecake Pi Pie: The ingredients list puts the first 18 digits of pi in pie form.

Lyrics as Poetry

Book of RhymesToday is the first day of National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate, as well as where I encounter poetry in my every day life. I remembered a recent book review I read about Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop that starts

Are you a hip-hop fan who can’t tell assonance from alliteration? An English major who doesn’t know Biggie from Tupac? Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes” is the crash course for you. The book — essentially English 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101 — is an analysis of what Bradley calls “the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”: rap, which he rightly says “is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such.”

Song lyrics as poetry isn’t a new idea — probably originated before Shakespeare. That review reminded me how I first got interested in poetry — in high school I wrote a paper on lyrics as poetry. I don’t remember the songs, or how, in the pre-web era, I found the words. But I do remember that my Mom was curious about the songs I was considering, and we talked at some length about many of them. One in particular piqued her interest, Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles:

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?