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Happy PI DAY!
Did you know?
NASA only uses 15 digits of ? for calculating interplanetary travel.
At 40 digits, you could calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the visible universe with an accuracy that’d fall off by less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.
? Day 2026 pic.twitter.com/NTH3eurif7
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) March 14, 2026
Old orders can go dormant and then be revived later by fresh blood!
In 1949, North Korean intelligence raided a Benedictine monastery and arrested 70 monks in a single night
The abbot died in prison
The monastery became an agricultural university
Yet… the Vatican never recognised the suppressionIt still lists Tokwon as an active territorial… pic.twitter.com/F8UgfT1EbI
— Robbert Leusink (@robbertleusink) March 14, 2026
White to move and mate in 4. HERE
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White to move and mate in 4.
[NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.]
1. Qe8+ Rf8
2. Bxh7+ Kh8
3. QxR+ Ng8
4. QxN++
The mnemonic for pi to seven places:
May I have a large container of coffee, please?
QE8+ RF8
BxP+ KH8
QxR+ KnG8
QxKn++
White to move and mate in 4.
1) Qe8+ Rf8 forced
2) Bxh7+ Kh8 forced
3) Qxf8+ Ng8 forced
4) Qxg8# mate
Tokwon:
Ostpolitik with (as the saying goes) “a vengeance”!
How little I know… for what it’s worth, Wikipedia tells me that after the death of Luigi Maglione in 1944, Pope Pius XII left the position of Cardinal Secretary of State vacant and named Dominico Tardini head of its foreign section and in November 1952, he was named Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs continuing in that position until the death of Pius XII: or, for the first nine years and more after the seizure of the abbey.
Under its “Waegwan Abbey” article I read that twenty-six surviving Korean monks of the Benedictine Congregation of Sankt Ottilien fled to South Korea and on the orders of Archabbot Chrysostomus Schmid were aided by Fr. Timothy Bitterli to found a monastery which, on 17 February 1964, became the Saint Maurus and Saint Placidus Abbey with Fr. Odo Haas elected as its first abbot.
Its “Territorial Abbey of Tokwon” article includes “In May 2007 the process began for the beatification of the 36 North Koreans from the Abbey of Tokwon martyred during the wave of anti-Christian persecution under the rule of Kim Il Sung. Now titled Servants of God, the group is known as ‘Abbot Bishop Boniface Sauer (O.S.B.), Fr. Benedict Kim (O.S.B.) and companions’.”
Lots of things to attempt to follow up!
Following up some details in Wikipedia, I encountered a range situations with the Church being confronted with various totalitarian states. First and vaguest (to me, so far) the possibilities the Church still had in Imperial Japan – and in Korea after the 1910 “Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty”. Second, to cite the title of its article, “Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in Germany” – which notes “From 1940, the Gestapo launched an intense persecution of the monasteries” and that in Bishop Clemens von Galen’s “famous 1941 anti-euthanasia sermons, he denounced the confiscations of church properties. He attacked the Gestapo for converting church properties to their own purposes – including use as cinemas and brothels He protested the mistreatment of Catholics in Germany: the arrests and imprisonment without legal process, the suppression of the monasteries and the expulsion of religious orders.”
These included (another article title) “St. Ottilien Archabbey”: “In 1941 the abbey was suppressed by the Gestapo. The monks returned in 1945.” So by 1952 Archabbot Chrysostomus Schmid and Fr. Timothy Bitterli were helping the Korean refugee monks – seven years after the help given in Bavaria from “April 1945 until May 1948” when “the abbey served as a Displaced Persons (DP) camp to some 5,000 concentration camp survivors.”
Meanwhile, its “History of Korea” article reports, “On August 14, 1945, Soviet forces entered Korea by amphibious landings, enabling them to secure control in the north.” This included (another article title) the “Territorial Abbey of Tokwon” falling “under the control of Soviet occupying forces. Though the monastery was for a time used to quarter soldiers, eventually monastic life was permitted to resume. By the time Soviet forces withdrew in 1949, there were around 60 monks at the Abbey of Tokwon (25 of them Korean) and around 20 sisters of the Tutzing Congregation in a monastery in nearby Wonsan.”
Then came the murderous Kim Il Sung: “From 1949 to 1952 14 monks and two sisters were executed after harsh imprisonment and torture. During the same period, 17 monks and two sisters died of starvation, illness, hard physical labour and bad living conditions in the camps. Abbot-Bishop Boniface Sauer died on 1 February 1950, in a prison in Pyongyang, ahead of the execution of all senior monks in October 1950. In January 1954, the surviving 42 German monks and sisters were repatriated to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway.”
This article further says “Today the abbot of Waegwan is the apostolic administrator of Tokwon Territorial Abbey, but he is not allowed to visit North Korea. Since the 1950s, there have been no priests or Catholic communities in Tokwon Territorial Abbacy or any other diocese in North Korea.”
In light of your observation that “Old orders can go dormant and then be revived later by fresh blood!” it is perhaps worth noting the Wikipedia article,“Persecutions of the Catholic Church and Pius XII”, reporting “The Pope allowed national hierarchies to assess and respond to their local situations, but established the Vatican Information Service to provide aid to thousands of war refugees, and saved further thousands of lives by instructing the church to provide discreet aid to Jews.” Allowing others in orders – say Priestly Fraternities – “to assess and respond” to urgent situations: an excellent Papal idea inviting imitation.
The accuracy of the circumference of the universe to less than the width of a hydrogen atom presupposes a similar degree of precision (4o significant digits) in the measurement of the radius (assuming a circle). When multiplying numbers (pi*r*r) the number of significant digits of the product is the smallest of the significant digits of the multiplicands. For example, 3.14159 * 2.0 * 2.0 will only have two significant digits in the answer. That is why (IMHO) NASA feels no need to use more than 15 digits – which is probably already excessive – given few other measurements are known that accurately.
The circumference of a spiral has a more complicated formula, but the same principle holds.
Vivat Jesus!
An omniscient being doesn’t need approximations and would know it exactly!