Although geeks have long merrily been celebrating Pi Day by dressing-up as ancient mathematicians, marching around in circles, and eating fruit pies since 1988, this year’s Silicon Valley festivities were hijacked to protest President Trump.
Physicist Larry Shaw is a legend for being at the epicenter of the disruptive and scientific and cultural experiences in Silicon Valley. The quintessential bushy bearded geek holds numerous patents, is the “Godfather” of the Robotics Society of America, and was the first technical curator of the San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum.
To call attention to the wonders of science, Shaw named as March 14 as Pi Day in 1988. As numerically represented by 3/14, the day serves as a representation of the first three digits of the Greek “π”, which is the constant ratio of a circle of any size’s circumference to its diameter. Although Pi Day was started to encourage youth interest in the sciences, it has devolved into the one day each year on college campuses that the usually socially reserved math crowd gets to “party hard.”
There is absolutely nothing remotely political about the formulas and theorems of geometry, but Silicon Valley’s hard left Tech Stands Up decided to hijacked Pi Day to obtain visibility for their partisan objectives by gathering a hundred protestors, and then inviting hundreds of members of the media.
Tech Stands Up claims to be “grassroots movement giving a voice to the rapidly growing concerns of the tech community about women, environment, education, immigration reform, people of color, LGBTQ, and the homeless that are threatened by the Trump Administration “policies affecting the tech community and its users” with the following goals:
- “Urge our tech leaders to stand up and speak out for our users when the current administration enacts policies that negatively affect our community.
- “Connect technologists to organizations that are being directly impacted, through hackathons, fundraising, mentoring programs, and donating skills/time;
- “Work together with other organizations to bridge the divide between the tech industry and people that technology has disrupted.”
One of the group’s founders and featured speakers at the Pi Day protest was Dex Torricke-Barton, former speechwriter for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to the Bay Area News Group.
Breitbart News reported that during the time Torricke-Barton was working for Zuckerberg, the multi-billionaire spent $50 million to fund FWD.us. The political action group allied with other business groups to push for rules allowing U.S. companies to hire more cheap foreign white-collar professionals.
FWD.us claims that it is pushing for higher immigration rates to help the United States by increasing the total number of consumers in the economy. But Breitbart News recently reported that analysts at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s top tech investment banker, estimate that already there are almost 1 million H-1B and other foreign guest-workers holding university-level jobs in the U.S.
Torricke-Barton, who actively campaigned for Hillary Clinton, told Quartz eight days after Donald Trump won the presidency that he was quitting his tech job to focus “exclusively on social change.” Interestingly, he announced his future plans on Facebook.
The San Jose Mercury News commented that Tech Stands Up demonstrators wore Dump Trump buttons and held signs that read “First the Muslims. Are You Next?”; “Global warming is not fake news”; and “Love Trumps Hate.”
There were no reports of Tech Stands Up protestors or their media followers marching around in circles and eating pie.