For those of you who have been losing sleep ever since the puzzle was posted just over a month ago in "What Comes Next on the Prairie?", https://www.friendsoftheblufflands.org/post/what-comes-next-on-the-blufflands , here is the answer.
The puzzle was, what is the next line in this sequence of numbers:
1
11
21
1211
111221
312211
13112221
The clue was to remember the song "Maria" in West Side Story with the line "Say it loud and...". That's how to find the next line- "say" the previous line! So, the first line is "1". Say what this line is, and it will be "One one". That's the next line, 11. Do it again and you would say "two ones" giving the third line 21. Keep going and the next line would be "one two, one one" or 1211. So the next line after 13112221 would be "one one, one three, two ones, three two's, one one", or 1113213211. Pretty tricky, eh? Just like on the prairie when what comes next can be kind of tricky.
Now on to the next topic- Pi Day which is coming up in one week on March 14th. Pi Day is celebrated on 3/14, the day corresponding to Pi, or 3.14159...., which we all know is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. If you take the diameter of a circle and wrap it around its corresponding circle, it will always go around 3.14159... times, no matter the size of the circle. Pretty cool! "Pi" comes from the greek letter which means "periphery". Pi is an "irrational number" meaning it can't be expressed as a fraction and therefore its decimal representation goes on forever without repeating itself. The world record for memorizing the decimal places of Pi is 100,000 by a Japanese fellow named Akira Haraguchi. Whew... I have trouble remembering a new phone number! Someone else ran a computer program and calculated it out to 31.4 trillion places...just for the fun of it!
Why bring up Pi in this blog? Well, I tap maple trees, and the rules say to only tap trees over 10 inches in diameter and allows two taps in trees over 18 inches. For a while, I estimated the diameter of trees by eyeballing them. When I finally did it more accurately by using a rope with marks every 6.25 inches, or about twice Pi, representing trees every 2 inches in diameter, I found out that my eyeballing technique was wildly inaccurate! So, if you would like to know the diameter of that bur oak on your prairie or savanna, just wrap a rope around it to measure its circumference and divide that by good old Pi and there you have it! Or, if you're out hiking on the paths near the La Crosse County Landfill on highway 16 north of Woodman's and you see this big bur oak...
and then you see this sign...
..., bring along a rope so you can find out the diameter of this majestic tree!
And one more thing. When you celebrate Pi Day in one week by baking and eating your favorite pie, think of the ancient roots that this number has and that the great physicist Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day on March 14, 1879. If you would like to read a fun book about Einstein and his miraculous year in 1905 when he revolutionized physics, here is an excellent book by John S Rigden, my father- https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-1905-Greatness-John-Rigden/dp/0674015444
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