... without resolution, useful for flushing Jack the Ripper out of the ship's computer.
Posted on 12/06/2006 6:19:42 PM PST by NonZeroSum
WASHINGTON (APUPI) The media and political pundits lauded the preliminary results of the months-long commission to determine the true ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle today.
"This has been a troubling national issue, since the nation's founding. Several legislatures have attempted to proclaim the value of pi, in order to simplify mathematics for our students, but the effort has always been viewed as partisan and controversial," stated the introduction to the initial report, released today.
It was a long-standing controversy, viewed by many as a policy quagmire, that has been finally almost been laid to rest by a compromise report from a panel of distinguished experts from all sides of the political spectrum. Because the blue-ribbon commission had equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, no one can any longer claim that the recommendations provided are partisan in any way.
"Obviously, there has been a lot of dispute over this issue over the years," said the commission leader, Lincoln Chafee. "We wanted to ensure that we could generate a report and recommendations that most could accept, regardless of their self-contradictory and pablatory nature."
Many had argued for a value of 3, claiming that this was the simplest number to use in calculations, and one that most students would have a prayer of remembering. Others thought that this was a laudatory goal, but that it would be too incongruent with the actual ratio to be useful, arguing instead that the number should be determined to be 3.142, which would be close enough to usually generate actual useful results, but not too difficult to recall. Another group thought that the value should be 4, to ensure that the number would not suffer from self esteem issues from being too low.
One extremist radical contingent, dismissed by the mainstream members of the panel, insisted that it was an irrational number, computable only by adding an infinite series, and unable to be completely memorized by any human being. This was obviously an unacceptable solution, politically, since given its infinite nature, it wouldn't have been able to even be printed in the report in its entirety, let alone made statutory law.
Everyone was pleased when the determination was made to take an average of all of the members' positions, arriving at the value 3.45 (after throwing out the suggestions of those favoring the irrational solution, since adding it in would have made the final solution unprintable and unmemorizable as well).
"We expect that the president and Congress will quickly act on our recommendation once we finalize it, since it was made on a bipartisan basis, and based on months of discussion between washed-up diplomats, spongy former Supreme Court justices, and also-ran wishy-washy politicians," said a spokesman for the group.
"Of course, there is one more key step to determining the final number," she added.
"We have to ensure that this will be an acceptable decision to the world community. Therefore, before we finalize our report, we want to sit down and get the opinions of Iran and Syria, and incorporate their thoughts into the results. We'd like to include Israel as well, but we fear that, like those on the panel familiar with actual mathematics, they'll be too irrational."
Prosper.
I don't know, but I'm willing to give it a try.
Hmmm.
Circles which are ow defined by their circumference will fin their radiuses (radii) shrunken, while circles which are defined by their radius will find their circumferences enlarged.
Have they contemplated the dicriminatory aspects of this action?
When I was a teenager, we had a name for this, but I can't repeat it in mixed company. I will say the first word is circle, and the second word begins with j.
Problem solved for all future grajewettes uv umerkan skuuls.
(Me? I'm outta here!)
"Have they contemplated the dicriminatory aspects of this action? "
Of course! Circles described by their circumference will be offered additional support by the Federal Government, under the Anti-Discrimination statutes.
While circles described by their radii will be criticized as being overtly and aggressively Masculine, and they will be forced to accept second-class circleship.
(If your calculator has no π key, just use 355/113.)
Predictably, the greatest negative impact has been in female and minority circles, with children's circles taking the brunt in both subcategories.
I'm probably being picky, but the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey had an exhibit with Pi = 22/7.
Note that Chuck Norris knows the last digit of Pi.
Bump...
LOL!
But technically, pi is a transcendental number.
... without resolution, useful for flushing Jack the Ripper out of the ship's computer.
Irrational numbers like square root of two are also without resolution, but not transcendental.
Irrational numbers can be defined in terms of algebraic equations, transcendental numbers can't.
Thanks for the refresher -- I used to know this stuff when in Math Honors way back in the "dim time".
Perhaps it's time to re-engage in some transcendental meditation.
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