[The Sleepy Crow]

• Search where a certain number first appears in pi
• A neat demonstration of pi using pizza crusts
• some rhymes about pi day by @icecolbeveridge
• Numberphile's 'mile of pi'
• Matt Parker calculating pi by weighing a square
• How much of pi is needed to calculate physical things?

"Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand.
Everything is a self-portrait.
Everything is a diary."

"Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life."

"In three words, I can sum up everything I know about life: it goes on."

"You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."

"If you’re going to climb, make it a tall mountain. The view will be so much better."

"I know your days are precious
on this earth. But what are you trying
to be free of? The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work."

• Magpie - The Mountain Goats. A great song; I <3 TMG.
• Lahore pigeons. A breed of fancy pigeon from Pakistan and Iran; i think they look cool
  
• Physics For The Birds. A YouTube channel that talks about physics, maths etc.
• The random robin that has been visiting my garden for years
• Huey Duck
• The cygnus constellation (it's a swan)
• Fable the Raven. Wings and Wildlands' Raven that can sing and speak (yeah, they can do that).
• The penguins from Madagascar
• This raven on YouTube saying 'nevermore'. It sounds like Microsoft Sam.

• NAND Logic: You can make every logic gate out of NAND gates.
• English as She Is Spoke: A hilarious but terrible Portuguese-English phrase book. For example, "This lake looks full of fish. Let's have some fun fishing" was translated as "That pond it seems me many multiplied of fishes. Let us amuse rather to the fishing". The writer of this book could not speak English, but still decided to make a guide to speaking it.
• Rebracketing: An interesting linguistic phenomenon where the divisions between words get blurred. Reading this reminded me of the confusion we had in my Computer Architecture class between the lecturer saying 'a NAND gate' and 'an AND gate'.
• Ig Nobel Prize Winners: The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes, and are awarded for achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think". For example, the 2024 prize for Biology was awarded to Ely and Petersen for "repeatedly exploding paper bags next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow and finding that it caused the cow to produce less milk".
• List of Common Misconceptions: Because goldfish don't have short memories, Einstein never failed maths and allspice is not a mixture of spices.

• The first vending machine was created in the 1st century AD. It dispensed holy water.
• You can tell the age of a horse from its teeth. This is what the phrase 'don't look a gift horse in the mouth' is referring to (basically, 'don't question the value of a gift').
• Morphine was named after Morpheus, a Greek god of sleep and dreams.
• Pigeons were the first domesticated bird.
• The Guinness Book of World Records has stopped recognizing attempts to break the sleep deprivation world record as they deem it too dangerous.
• The optic nerves route optical data to the limbic system as well as the conscious mind, so some blind people can respond to facial expressions without seeing them. They can even catch yawns this way.
• In the German tradition, the letter labelling of musical notes went up to 'h'. This meant that Bach could spell his name in notes, which he actually did, using B-A-C-H as a motif in some of his music. The number zero used to be called 'cipher'.
• The type O blood type was supposed to be called type zero, but it was misread when written down.
• The symbol for the letter 'A' is an upside-down ox's head. It can be traced back to the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, aleph.
• We don't know whether the first language was spoken or signed.

• Bugged: In the 18th century, the word 'bugaboo' became thieves' slang for a police officer. When people started putting up burglar alarms in the 1920s, burglars began calling these 'bugs' because they acted like an automated policeman. It a home had a burglar alarm, it was 'bugged'.
• Alcohol: The word 'alcohol' comes from Arabic 'al kuhul', a kind of make-up (which we still sometimes call kohl). As kohl is an extract, the word 'alcohol' started to be used to refer to the pure essence of something. In the 1600s, someone tried to find the pure essence of wine, which they called 'wine-alcohol', later shortened to 'alcohol'.
• Hocus Pocus: Thought to be a comedic mispronunciation of 'hoc est corpus meum' (this is my body) by people making fun of Catholic priests.
• Guy: The word 'guy' (as in a man) comes from Guy Fawkes, who planned to execute the king of England. In celebration of the king escaping assassination, people burn effigies of him, usually made of rags. A man who looked scruffy/disheveled would sometimes be compared to these effigies, and be called a 'guy'. From there, the word eventually lost its negative connotation and now can refer to any man (and in the plural form - 'you guys' - to people of any gender).
• Malaria: 'Malaria' comes from Italian 'mal aria' (bad air) as it was once thought that malaria was caused by poisonous air coming from bogs and marshes.
• Ampersand: An ampersand is the 'and' symbol (&), and was once considered part of the alphabet. People would say 'and per say and' (and by itself) to distinguish the character from the word. 'And per se and' later morphed into 'ampersand'.
• Sinister - Sinister comes from a Latin word that means 'on the left side', as left-handed people were once associated with wickedness and other negative traits.
• Vaccine - The word vaccine comes from the Latin word 'vaccus', meaning 'cow', as the first vaccine used a dose of cowpox to prevent smallpox.