Pi and Summercore

My old friend, Steve Bergen, creator and director of Summercore (which I highly recommend), sends me this, and rather than email it to all my friends, I share it with you here:

Steve Bergen
2:54 PM (16 hours ago)
To all friends, family, colleagues and Summercore alums,

In the spirit of "Anything is Possible" as made popular by Kevin Garnett from the Boston Celtics, one of my first grade students at The Children's Storefront in Harlem yesterday totally shocked me by reciting the first 121 digits of PI as part of my annual PI DAY contest.

You can see her remarkable accomplishment (having studied for the last two weeks) by going to the YouTube video at http://tinyurl.com/PIDAY129

Please consider three favors:
1) watch the 2 minute video of this 6 year old reciting 121 places of PI and it will make you feel happy on a horribly rainy, windy day (at least in NYC) ... hopefully, it will make you say "anything is possible" ... in this video, you can see her pause and think several times as she digs into her head for the next 20 or 30 digits 2) send this email or a modified one to at least 10 of your own friends or family members or colleagues 3) donate 1 dollar ("that's just 100 pennies") by going to http://www.billionpennyproject.org

If I can get this email circulated to 1 million people who do these three favors, I will be able to raise 100 million pennies by the time this horrible rain stops. The Children's Storefront is a tuition-free independent school and we need to constantly raise money to help students like this 6 year old get a good education and become successful adults.

Thanks for reading and hopefully helping ... Steve

p.s. and yes, this student will win 1 of the 11 pies that I am baking tomorrow on PI Day, 3/14 but she doesn't know it yet so please don't tell her ;-)

NECC09 for the Visually Needy!

NECC09 is dead. Long live NECC09!

I'll be reflecting over the next couple of days from Washington DC and adding pics to my necc09scottmerrick flickr set. I hope you enjoy the pics and if you have any to add, feel free to point us to 'em in a comment here. The pic at left might just need to become my profile pic for a while--taken right after the final keynote speech for NECC09--sitting in the Old Dominion Brew Pub right up the street from the Convention Center.

The next couple days will be spent with Cathy and John, getting us all on the same page with MUVErs LLC and enjoying one another's company. We'll not be glued at the hip, but we will be able to take advantage of synchronous communication, a rarity since we're so geographically dispersed.

There is a growing body of pictures tagged "necc09" that you can accesss at the necc09 flickr stream. Note from flicker, 8:58 a.m. July 2:

We found 4,610 results matching necc09.