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I thought this stupidity was just in the United States. A transcendental number is merely one which cannot be expressed as the ratio of two whole numbers. Therefore it has an infinite number of digits. You can click on a web site which will give you the first million of them. The greater the number of digits, the closer you get to the actual value.

I think it was the state of Indiana which once passed a law that the value of pi would be three. The universe refused to comply.

So when does "e" another transcendental number which is the base of natural logarithms get its own holiday or do we now have transcendental number discrimination? If you think pi is important, you don't know anything about "e." Sounds like a good enough cause for a war to me....or at the very least a bar rooom brawl....especially in NI :-)

I might invoke Carl Sagan, whose Contact imagines that Pi is a message written by the entities who occupied (and designed?) this universe before heading on 'somewhere else'; we simply need to calculate it out to a sufficient decimal place to see the message:

"Hiding in the alternating patterns of digits, deep inside the transcendental number, was a perfect circle, its form traced out by unities in a field of noughts.

"The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle -- another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

"The circle had closed.

"She found what she had been searching for."

"As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything."

A circle is a purely mathematical abstraction. As far as we can tell, no such thing exists in nature.

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Interesting philosophical issue. Can god change Pi? No? Then there is no god. :-)

How did I spend Pi day? I tried to work something out, but found myself going around in circles the whole time.

Me no understand - so Pi is 14.3 now?

We commercialise everything, don't we? Now we'll even sell pi!

Oh noes - does that mean that 9/11 was actually on the 11/9?

This is a particular issue with a lot of medical software that has been written Stateside, and then needs fixed to make it comply with international standards. Personally for dates I prefer the reverse hierarchical structure YYYY-MM-DD, but in the absence of that the international DD-MM-YYYY is workable. The American MM-DD-YYYY is utterly illogical, captain.

Re #5;

No sense of humor at all Mr. Crawley, none whatsoever, not even a trace. Small wonder you're always at each others throats over there.

The one plus with the American usage is that it's much shorter in speaking as you can say "it's March 15th, 2010" where we have to say "it's the 15th of March, 2010". All those extra words, the time wasted.

Incidentally, I think a far better Pi day would be the 22nd of July. Anyone agree?

JW

that sounds perilously close to you offering a scientific proof for the existence of God.

:)

OT

Haha OT! Well, were the pattern found, we would have to conclude that a designer put it there. But maybe a better question is this: even without such a pattern, does the very existence of Pi and the order of the universe make a designer more likely than not? I happen to think the answer is, "not necessarily." But it depends on the day.

(By the way, given that Pi is infinite, we should expect to see - eventually - any message we want to. Here's my scientific prediction: somewhere in the number Pi exists a string, right now universally, baked into the space-time continuum, in English, which says, "OT IS RIGHT." You may be vindicated after all!)

JW

What is American for U-turn?

:)