The Life (And Death) Of Pi

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley

NMSR reports:

Huntsville-- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law Friday [March 30, 2012] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to its so-called "Biblical Value" of exactly three was introduced without fanfare by State Senator Shadrack McGill (R-8th District, Jackson County), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Robert Bentley, who emphasized the Biblical reasons for the change in value, says he will sign it into law on Thursday.

The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from the University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate".

"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it," said McGill. "The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass."

McGill, the article reports, called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing an exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."

Governor Bentley is expected to have a signing ceremony for the bill on Thursday in Montgomery at which former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is expected to give an invocation. Moore's office today stated that the change in the value of pi to the Biblical value was a good, first, legislative step toward the Rapture, toward making the crooked straight and rough places plane.

Haven't these people done enough already? Is nothing sacrosanct? Who will stand up for the missing .14159+?

Alabama Devalues Pi

Alabama Governor Robert Bentley

NMSR reports:

Huntsville-- NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law Friday [March 30, 2012] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to its so-called "Biblical Value" of exactly three was introduced without fanfare by State Senator Shadrack McGill (R-8th District, Jackson County), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Robert Bentley, who emphasized the Biblical reasons for the change in value, says he will sign it into law on Thursday.

The law took the state's engineering community by surprise. "It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi," said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from the University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be "3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate".

"I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it," said McGill. "The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon's Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass."

McGill, the article reports, called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing an exact answer could harm students' self-esteem. "We need to return to some absolutes in our society," he said, "the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period."

Governor Bentley is expected to have a signing ceremony for the bill on Thursday in Montgomery at which former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is expected to give an invocation. Moore's office today stated that the change in the value of pi to the Biblical value was a good, first, legislative step toward the Rapture, toward making the crooked straight and rough places plane.

Haven't these people done enough already? Is nothing sacrosanct? Who will stand up for the missing .14159+?

Good bye, Saab, good bye.

A Classic 1993 900-T Convertible

Permit me to fulminate. I loved the Swedish Saabs. I was a "Saab guy." For years. I had a 1984 900, a 1988 900-S, at 1990 900-T convertible, and a 2000 9-3. The 9-3, in comparison with the others, was a plastic coated joke show. It was a constant problem. It had electrical issues. It had temperament issues. It had intermittent wiring. It wasn't a real, Swedish Saab. And it didn't act like one. It didn't maintain Saab's legendary quality, the quality that kept me alive in a serious accident I had in the 1984 Saab. The 9-3 replaced steel with plastic, and every year, the more plastic added, the higher the price. It replaced design with copying American road hogs. There was no way the GM Saab could ever compete with BMW, with Audi, with Volvo, with Infiniti, with Lexus.

And now, to no one's particular surprise, General Motors has finally killed Saab dead:

GM has been looking for a buyer for Saab, and said on Wednesday "given the urgency of stemming sizeable cash demands associated with Saab operations" it would need support from the Swedish government prior to any sale.

But the country's Enterprise and Energy Minister Maud Olofsson told Swedish public radio that "voters picked me because they wanted nursery schools, police and nurses, and not to buy loss-making car factories".

So there will be no support from Sweden. And the geniuses at General Motors will have finally succeeded in killing the brand. Saab is the new Rambler, the new Fraser, the new Nash, the new Oldsmobile, the new Edsel. First they devalued the brand, then their stupidity killed it dead.

In practical terms, the news probably means that Saab, which rapacious General Motors gobbled only to devalue and undermine, is going unceremoniously to go bankrupt or die along with the other GM dinosaurs, Saturn and Hummer, two of General Motors' other brilliant ideas.

I know that the US automobile industry needs to be bailed out for macroeconomic reasons. I accept that. But if there were such a thing as free market capitalism, which there obviously isn't, I can't think of a company more deserving than GM to die an ignominious, debt ridden death, one in which its shareholders' stock is worth absolutely nothing. In a just world, there'd be an independent Swedish Saab, and GM would be shredded into tiny shards of the glossy plastic they used to make imitation wood.