Take the distance around a circle and divide it by the distance across the circle and you get an irrational and transcendental number called pi. Irrational numbers don’t have nice neat ends, but go on as long as you can stand to do the math. Pi starts out as 3.14159265…. and just keeps on going. Since today is 3-14, someone thought it would be good to celebrate irrational, transcendental pi.
Carl Sagan’s novel Contact has only one good chapter: the last chapter in which he suggests numbers like pi are the fingerprints of god. In the book, they just kept wading past all the decimal places until unmistakable patterns emerged; “The signature of the Artist” to quote Sagan.
I like to think that irrational numbers are a philosophical warning sign of how bad we are at recognizing inappropriate comparisons between things. The word used to describe this notion of incomparable entities is “incommensurable.” I’m pretty sure there are other non-Euclidian mathematical spaces in which pi is rational, which goes back to the idea of how you compare, and not what you compare.
Anyway, happy pi day, go eat pie. And for all you chronics, April 20 only happens once a year, but 4:20 comes twice a day. Huzzah!
Finding god in pi is only a short step from finding the Virgin Mary on a tortilla chip.
Finally a blog post that makes sense! I’ll break it down into simple terms that girls educated by our public school system can understand.
Take all 22 members of the new New Kids on the Block, Nsync, Backstreet Boys, Jonas Brothers and The Fray and stand them in a circle. Now, take the 7 members of the Brady Bunch (including Alice but not the parents) and stand them in a line across the center of that circle (make sure that Marsha isn’t on the end of the line, I’m not sure how she’ll get along with the boy bands).
If you take the Boy Bands and divide them by the Brady Bunch (remember, Alice only counts as one) you’ll get a rough approximation of Pi (3.142857142857142857 – note the repeating last six digits, they’ll repeat forever). This is an interesting anomoly because while the Brady Bunch six (now we’re removeing Alice because she actually added very little to the entertainment value of the show) will be in repeats forever, the boy band crap shouldn’t be repeating, at all, ever.
Happy Pi Day!
P – Did you see the This American Life piece about the town that saw the Virgin in their photos of the sun? Dozens of people standing in the desert, pointing their polaroid cameras at the sky.
J – And the moral of your story is: God has really bad taste in music and television shows.
Find an anthropologist and ask about the Kuna Indians of San Blas. I think it is them who have a tribal member whose job it is to watch the sun until they go blind, at which time another picks up the task. Maybe modern Kuna have given this up.
The Virgin Mary sees Chuck Norris in her tortilla chip. Just thought you’d like to know…