Here are some interesting facts about pi (3.14)

1. The symbol for Pi has been in use for over 250 years. The symbol was introduced by William Jones, a Welsh mathematician, in 1706. The symbol was made popular by the mathematician Leonhard Euler.

2. Since the exact value of pi can never be calculated, we can never find the accurate area or circumference of a circle.

3. March 14 or 3/14 is celebrated as pi day because 3.14 are the first digits of pi. Math nerds around the world love celebrating this infinitely long, never-ending number.

4. The record for reciting the most number of decimal places of Pi was achieved by Rajveer Meena at VIT University, Vellore, India on 21 March 2015. He was able to recite 70,000 decimal places. To maintain the sanctity of the record, Rajveer wore a blindfold throughout the duration of his recall, which took an astonishing 10 hours! Can’t believe it? Well, here is the evidence.

5. Pi is actually a part of Egyptian mythology. People in Egypt believed that the pyramids of Giza were built on the principles of pi. The vertical height of the pyramids have the same relationship with the perimeter of their base as the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference. The pyramids are phenomenal structures and are one of the seven wonders of the world.

6. Physicist Larry Shaw started celebrating 14 March as Pi day at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum. There he is known as the Prince of Pi.

7. There is an entire language made from the number Pi. But how is that possible? Well, some people loved pi enough to invent a dialect based on it. In “Pi-lish” the number of letters in each word match the corresponding digit of pi. This first word has three letters, the second has one letter, the third has four letters, and so on. This language is more popular than you might think. Software engineer Michael Keith wrote an entire book, called Not a Wake in this language.

8. Pi wasn’t always known as pi. Before the 1700s, people referred to the number we know as pi as “the quantity which when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference”. Not surprisingly, people got tired of saying so much whenever they wanted to talk about Pi. The Welsh mathematician William Jones, a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, began using the symbol for pi in 1706.

9. We will never be able to find all the digits of pi because of its very definition as an irrational number. Babylonian civilization used the fraction 3 ⅛, the Chinese used the integer 3. By 1665, Isaac Newton calculated pi to 16 decimal places. Computers hadn’t been invented yet, so this was a pretty big deal. In the early 1700s Thomas Lagney calculated 127 decimal places of pi, reaching a new record. In the second half of the twentieth century, the number of digits of pi increased from about 2000 to 500,000 on the CDC 6600, one of the first computers ever made. This record was broken again in 2017 when a Swiss scientist computed more than 22 trillion digits of pi. The calculation took over a hundred days.

10. The usefulness of pi has been a matter of debate, although it is loved by a lot of math enthusiasts. Some believe that tau (which amounts to 2π) is a better suited to circle calculations. For instance, you can multiply tau with the radius of a to calculate its circumference more intuitively. Tau/4 also represents the angle of a quarter of a circle.

POTUS did not call upon them; it was Bernie Sanders who called them out. Give credit where it is due, Mr. Chairman.

— Benny🌹 (@Benny06) March 14, 2023

"The estimated prevalence of corporate fraud is much larger than what is currently being reported," writes Gleb Tsipursky, "with an average of 10% of large publicly traded firms committing securities fraud every year.​" https://t.co/lDolzVQyOZ

— Common Dreams (@commondreams) March 14, 2023

North Korea Fires Missiles as U.S. Holds New Round of War Games with South Korea https://t.co/eDezVaWJh8

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BREAKING: Today, we held a press conference in front of the SVB offices in Tempe.

The SVB collapse is a direct result of Kyrsten Sinema’s choice to side with big banks over everyday Arizonans. pic.twitter.com/gqstkseiut

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) March 14, 2023

It’s almost the Ides of March, and TOP has been down most of today. Guess Markos is trying to figure out how to operate again without extra techs.

‘Indentured servitude’: Nurses hit with hefty debt when trying to leave hospitals

When Jacqui Rum quit her nursing job at Los Robles Regional Medical Center last fall over the heavy workload and low staffing levels, it came with a high price — a $2,000 bill from her former employer for training costs.

The payment was related to a contract Rum was required to sign when she took the job at the Thousand Oaks, California, hospital owned by HCA Healthcare, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain. Under the agreement, which is standard for entry-level nurses working at HCA hospitals and becoming increasingly standard for other health systems, Rum agreed to pay back the hospital for training if she quit or was fired before her two-year contract expired.

Despite the agreement, Rum said she quit after 13 months because of the physical and mental strain, citing staffing that was so thin she was often unable to take even a 30-minute break during her 12-hour shifts. As a result of leaving, she has received seven letters since October from a collection agency working for HCA demanding payment for the remaining $2,000 in training costs the hospital says she owes, and threatening to charge her interest and legal fees.

“We’re being preyed on by someone in power. We’re desperate for a job, we just got out of school, we don’t know any better,” said Rum, 38, who lives in Westlake Village, California. “I didn’t even have time to take a lunch break, my hair was falling out, the level of stress just wasn’t sustainable.”

While Rum said she did receive about 10 weeks of training and mentorship, it fell short of what she’d expected given the $4,000 value the hospital placed on it. Some of the in-person classes covered material she’d already gone over in nursing school or that wasn’t relevant to her specialty, and she had limited time to spend shadowing a more experienced nurse.

The practice of requiring repayment for training programs aimed at recent nursing school graduates has become increasingly common in recent years, with some hospitals requiring nurses to pay back as much as $15,000 if they quit or are fired before their contract is up, according to more than a dozen nursing contracts reviewed by NBC News and interviews with nurses, educators, hospital administrators and labor organizers.

Hospitals say the repayment requirement is necessary to help them recoup the investment they make in training recent nursing school graduates and to incentivize them to stay amid a tight labor market. But some nurses say the system has left them feeling trapped in jobs and afraid to speak out about unsafe working conditions for fear of being fired and having to face thousands of dollars in debt.

“These training programs do not provide nurses with any sort of new qualification. Rather, employers are passing on to nurses the cost of basic on the job training that’s required for any RN position at any hospital, and then they’re using these contracts to lock nurses into their jobs or risk this devastating financial penalty,” said Brynne O’Neal, a regulatory policy specialist with National Nurses United, a labor group with more than 200,000 members. “Having that debt hanging over them means that nurses have a harder time advocating for safe conditions for themselves and their patients.”

HCA said in a statement that its programs were developed by nurse educators as “an important investment in our colleagues and demonstrate our commitment to advancing the nursing profession.” The hospital system, which has 184 hospitals, said the program also allows nurses to receive training across a wide range of specialties such as oncology, surgical services, critical care and pediatrics. It also gives nurses the option to transfer to its other facilities.

“Given our substantial investment in this professional development program, we ask participants to commit to stay with us for a certain period of time after completing the training. During the course of their commitment, nurses are eligible for promotion and have the flexibility to pursue opportunities at any of our more than 2,300 sites of care across the country,” the HCA statement said.

The practice has caught the attention of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which in September began investigating forms of debt created by employers for their employees through training programs. The agency is in the process of reviewing the training repayment programs as a type of debt product being offered to workers, similar to a student loan, and assessing whether the agency should take additional oversight actions, said a CFPB official.

‘Undoubtedly to trap you’

Labor experts say that employers in a growing number of industries have been using similar training repayment requirements as forms of debt to keep workers from leaving their jobs in a tight labor market. Along with nurses, workers in the trucking, retail and pet grooming industries have also raised concerns with the CFPB over onerous debts they have incurred through employer training programs.

“We’re seeing these expand exponentially, especially in sectors where there’s a huge demand for workers that predated the pandemic,” said Jonathan Harris, an associate professor at Loyola Law School and a fellow at the Student Borrower Protection Center. “The main purpose is not to provide real useful training to workers and simply to just recoup the cost of that. The main purpose has, in many instances, been simply as a mechanism to keep workers from leaving their job through debt and using the training part of it as basically a pretext to make it try to appear justifiable.”

California passed a law in 2020 that would prevent hospitals from charging employees for job-related training required by the employer that isn’t related to getting a state-mandated license or certification. Still, HCA has continued to send letters to former nurses there, including Rum, seeking to collect payment for the training costs, according to collection letters shared with NBC News. Harris said that practice appears to be in violation of the California law.

Hospital training programs for recent nursing school graduates aren’t uncommon, but not all hospitals have a reimbursement requirement. A survey by National Nurses United found about half of nurses said they were required to participate in a training or residency program at some point in their career, and among hospital nurses who participated, 55% said they were required to repay their employer for the cost of that training if they left before their contract expired.

The practice has become increasingly common for recent graduates, with nurses who finished school in the past five years being twice as likely to say they had been in a job with a training repayment requirement compared with more veteran nurses who started their careers 11 to 20 years ago, according to the same survey.

Cassie Pennings said she thought she had no choice but to sign a two-year contract and agree to repay her employers as much as $7,500 for training if she wanted a job out of nursing school at the major health center in the Denver area, UCHealth.

Unmentioned: @RepBlaine is the #3 recipient of bank cash in the U.S. House & recently joined with Silicon Valley Bank's lobby group to pressure federal regulators to abandon their proposal to shore up the government's depositor insurance fund.

Receipts: https://t.co/MUypZu4QNb https://t.co/ITqBXENcfZ

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) March 14, 2023