In the U.S., today is 3.14. The rest of the world will celebrate Pi Day when we have 14 months in a year, because most places write dates "14/3". So we'll just have to wait until International Pi Month in March 2014.

Too bad most of us slept through 3.14 1:59:26...and then lost an hour of sleep 34 seconds later.

Yes, I'm a nerd.

Via Freakonomics, the City of Edmonton noticed some unusual water-use patterns during the U.S.-Canada hockey game February 27th:

The end result, of course, is that Canadians were flushed with pride.

NPR ran a story this morning on gender-bending chickens:

Michael Clinton of the University of Edinburgh studies these peculiar chickens, called "gynandromorphs." They're split down the middle: One side looks male; the other side, female. Clinton wanted to know how this happened.

When he started studying the half-and-half birds, Clinton figured there would have been some weird chromosomal abnormality so the gonads would send out scrambled hormonal signals.

But that turned out to be wrong. The chickens were a mix of male and female cells. And it was the cells, not the hormones, that seemed to be calling the shots.

What makes this doubly interesting for me is the Threadless T-Shirt Diane is wearing today:

You never need to watch cable news again (NSFW):

The British version:

Via reader AS, Floating Sheep analyzed the relationship between bars and grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada:

We had expected that grocery stores would outnumber bars and for most parts of North America that is the case. But we could also clearly see the "beer belly of America" peeking out through the "t-shirt of data".

Starting in Illinois, the beer belly expands up into Wisconsin and first spreads westward through Iowa/Minnesota and then engulfs Nebraska, and the Dakotas before petering out (like a pair of love handles) in Wyoming and Montana.

On average there are 1.52 bars for every 10,000 people in the U.S. but the states that make up the beer belly of America are highly skewed from this average.

I notice that Chicago has fewer bars than grocery stores, and I am confused. Chicago is the land of bars on every street corner identified only by Old Style signs and dirty windows. Maybe there are gypsy grocers no one sees lurking in the neighborhoods?