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The grinch that stole pi...
Mar. 12th, 2009 03:43 pmPardon me for raining on everyone's parade, but am I the only one who thinks that having the US House of Representatives declare March 14 to be "Pi Day" as a way to draw attention to math and science is a little... off?
I mean, I should count my blessings. Declaring March 14 to be "Pi Day" is nowhere nearly as harmful to the country as the earmark-riddled wet-dream spending bills passed recently, true, but still...
The concept behind "Pi Day" is to call attention to the fact that March 14 (which is written here in the US as 3/14 - and 14/3 just about everywhere else) uses the same digits in the same order as "3.14" which - get ready now - are the first three digits of π (π being the ratio of a 2-dimensional circle's circumference to its diameter, or about 3.1415926535897932384626433832795... and so on, forever, without ever repeating).
So I wonder, to make this ersatz observance more... precise, will 26 seconds after 1:59 am on March 14 become designated as "pi time"? I mean:
To put that into perspective in terms of accuracy, if you were to aim a laser at a spot on the moon and miss by that much of an error (one part in ten million), your laser would light up a spot less than 200 feet from your aiming point (which for this post, I've assumed to lie 250,000 miles away)!
The thing that gets me, though, is this attempt to tie the values for month and day to that of π in the name of education! Maybe it's me, but if you do this, you may as well establish Intelligent Design as a scientific discipline, too.
Ye gods.
Cheers...
I mean, I should count my blessings. Declaring March 14 to be "Pi Day" is nowhere nearly as harmful to the country as the earmark-riddled wet-dream spending bills passed recently, true, but still...
The concept behind "Pi Day" is to call attention to the fact that March 14 (which is written here in the US as 3/14 - and 14/3 just about everywhere else) uses the same digits in the same order as "3.14" which - get ready now - are the first three digits of π (π being the ratio of a 2-dimensional circle's circumference to its diameter, or about 3.1415926535897932384626433832795... and so on, forever, without ever repeating).
So I wonder, to make this ersatz observance more... precise, will 26 seconds after 1:59 am on March 14 become designated as "pi time"? I mean:
3/14, 1:59:26expresses π to 8 digits, which is within one-ten-millionth of the "actual" value of π.
To put that into perspective in terms of accuracy, if you were to aim a laser at a spot on the moon and miss by that much of an error (one part in ten million), your laser would light up a spot less than 200 feet from your aiming point (which for this post, I've assumed to lie 250,000 miles away)!
The thing that gets me, though, is this attempt to tie the values for month and day to that of π in the name of education! Maybe it's me, but if you do this, you may as well establish Intelligent Design as a scientific discipline, too.
Ye gods.
Cheers...
