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Pi Day, VoiceXML And Albert Einstein
Eve Andersson writes: "Happy Pi Day to all. Out here in Boston, ArsDigitans are celebrating in
style with what is believed to be the longest Pi bead chain in the world -- 5000 digits, all strung by hand by people passionate about Pi. On a seemingly unrelated note, I've recently published an
ArsDigita Systems Journal article on VoiceXML: letting people talk to your HTTP server through the telephone.
In addition to a tutorial and reusable source code, you'll find a
Pi Reciter that you can access through the telephone. Just in time for Pi Day!" Reader Gyrate pipes in as well with the thought that "some people might be interested in knowing that today is Albert Einstein's birthday."
Fundamental problem with that idea...on that graph not all points are equidistant from the center. The second you move so much as a millimeter along that line the point at which it is at changes by it's slope. ie you move 1 unit to the left you've just moved .5 units down. In eucliden geometry ONLY a circle as all points the same distance from the center.
:)
Might want to rethink your theory
I memorized pi to 250 digits because I thought it would be a cool bar trick. When I'm really drunk I try and recite it. Unfortunately last time I did this the bartender doubled me and recited it to 500!
There was a young man from Trisk, whose lovemaking was unusually brisk. So quick was his action, that Lorentz contraction shortened his willy to a disk.
Now I, even I, would celebrate
In rhymes unapt, the great
Immortal Syracusan, rivalled nevermore
Who, in his wondrous lore
Passed on before
Left men his guidance
How to circles mensurate.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
The number of characters in each word corresponds to a base-10 digit of pi, and the comma even serves to mark the decimal place. If nine digits of precision isn't enough to calculate pretty much whatever you want, you might as well look it up anyway...
(Oh, I get it -- I thought your .sig was a pi-mnemonic device, no wonder I was confused... :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Because it's there.
Pi just seems to hold a fascination for many people -- partially because it seems to show up in just about every scientific discipline (except maybe computer science, where we ignore all numbers that aren't powers of two), and because it has resisted all attempts of mathematicians to determine its exact value or discover any sort of pattern.
I think scientists, just like anybody else, like a little challenge, even if it has no practical use. And it's a whole lot safer than climbing mountains.
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"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
I think it's 'Eon' by Greg Bear where they have a Pi measuring machine, just to check the value of Pi in weird spaces.
Beads huh? I know that mathematicians were anal about numbers, but I never would have guessed...
Is it accessible to the public? Which Ars Digita office is it at? The web site has no pertinent information I could see.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Zero
22/7 is a common approximation of Pi.
-no broken link
If you want to take your app commercial, you can purchase time on an 800 number. Number are available in the Bay Area, New Jersey and Chicago. These are cool guys -- I met them when they "left stealth mode" at the Pulver Voice Over Network developers conference in January.
(this isn't mine, I read it online, but thought it very fitting today. Enjoy.)
.. remember, that, friends? They put up all of those speed limit signs with metric measurements on them (kilowatt-hours? hectares? who knows!) Of course, God's good Christians responded warmly by shooting them down. Therefore, I am glad to report that the Metric system has not caught on in decent society, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line ofthirty cubits to measure around it. -- 1 Kings 7:23
Friends, I'd like to take a moment or two to discuss with you the biggest whopper in the whole liberal lie of mathematics. The liberals like to tell us that pi is what they call a "transcendental number." This is, of course, shameless liberal jargon that has no meaning whatsoever. They are teaching our children that pi goes on and on forever without repeating itself, and that it is not representable by any polynomial with integer coefficients. This, my friends, represents only the latest in a long string of liberal lies meant to undermine God and his Creation.
The true value of pi is exactly three, as evidence by the Scripture quote above. It is universally agreed by all honest mathematicians that there is no evidence for a transcendental pi. Not one iota. Friends, you and I know that the Bible is the wholly inerrant word of God, and that the liberals are barking up the wrong tree. That doesn't stop them from spreading their socialist "transcendental number" propaganda. See, the liberals like stuff like this. They like anything that makes mankind think of itself as small and insignificant. This makes it easier for them to control the minds of our children. After all, why not listen to some liberal, if you are not capable of fully representing a single number?
This is an out-and-out lie.
The whole mathematical system has been invented by communists so that they can gain a foothold in decent society. Along with this comes the damnable "Metric" system, which was invented in the socialist Mecca of Europe. The liberals want us all to use this "Metric" system. They want to force us into conformity so that they can run our lives. They tried it once in the 1970s
Really, friends, the only unit of measure that we need is the cubit. This is a Biblical, Godly unit of measure that can be used for everything that the socialist Metric system is supposed to be used for. You can say "The Johnson baby was one tenth of a cubit long" or "It is 78.8 quintillion cubits to Alpha Centauri" (though the latter is a lie, of course; the stars are simply fixed points on a celestial sphere that lies somewhere beyond our planet Earth, which is the center of the Universe.) My swimming pool holds forty cubic cubits of water.
So let's fight the fight, friends. Let's fight transcendental numbers. Let's fight the Metric system. Let's wage a war against the liberals that intend to enslave our minds through obfuscated mathematics and anti-God systems of measurement. Write your congressman and school board and insist that they use books that teach that pi == 3 and transcendental numbers don't exist. We can do it, my friends. We can do it if we all stick together.
The Good Reverend
I'm different, just like everybody else.
"Just when I thought you couldn't be any geekier,
you go, . . . and TOTALLY redeem yourself!"
...but I've always wanted to make a shell command called 'iam' with weird command line options, just so people would type in 'iam --help|less'. But then I've always had a sadistic sense of humour ;-)
Picture, if you will my friends, an alternate universe: where local phone numbers can begin with the digit known as the 1 ...
***
Ben Filchim opened his eyes, startled by the sound. It took only seconds for him to realize that it was his telephone. But it wasn't until he picked up the phone -- looking at his watch, wondering who would call at this ungodly hour -- that he realized why.
A strange melody floated over the phone. Singing. Drunken engineering students, it sounded like. The third, tonic, the fourth, tonic, the fifth, the ninth. He'd heard it the year before, about a month after he moved to Missouri. Probably a dozen times before he simply took the phone off the hook, then figured it must be over, then was called by several members of the Modern Disciples of Pythagoras and asked random personal questions -- his birthday, his height, annual income, and if his middle name happened to be Archimedes. No? Any siblings with that name? Then he'd had several more phone calls with the melody. The second, the sixths, the fifth, the third, the fifth. There had also been several solo guitar performances, and an adaptation that might have been done by Vince Clarke.
Finally, he had gotten one of the Mystics of Fermat to tell him what this was about. His phone number. His bloody phone number. The Fermatian seemed hurt when he laughed out loud after a stunned silence. After a short pause, Ben hung up and laughed again. He took his phone off the hook, until he forgot, anyway, and then received the series of phone calls which he decided where the drunk engineering students. He went into work early that day.
So it was March 14th again. Apparently every year was going to be the same. Ben paused to miss spring break before reaching over and unplugging the phone. Maybe he'd put something special on his answering machine in the morning... but in the meanwhile, he was going to get some sleep.
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Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
learn pi with the patent-pending PI TRAINER(tm)
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.
i was 1 2 4 foe i 3 it not 4 5 did grow
It is very easy to program, and well, just plain fun. The possibilities are endless. You should all try it?
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75844 - (PLUGH) - old-fashioned Adventure
There was a young lady from Wight
Who could travel much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And arrived on the previous night.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
But what of the human cost? Think of the people who have been driven mad by Pi. Gaerdoluxa, and ancient Greek philosopher King, became entranced by the ratio, and committed suicide after unsuccesfully trying to square the circle for the 3141st time.
Hyppomineon, a Roman, did go on a killing rampage after he failed to convert Pi into Roman numerals.
I think the legacy of Pi is clear. Like many women, it hypnotises right thinking men, sucks them in and chews them up, before spitting out a wreck. Pi is a feminine number because it is like a cunt - it encloses and enfolds it's beholder, before destroying him.
I think our duty is clear. We must ban Pi completely, and declare that Pi=4. It is the only way to protect the innocent masses.
Think of the children. Think of the millions slaughtered by bombs whose trajectories were calculated using - yes - Pi.
All these lives could be saved. Lets abolish Pi today.
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I just came up with a wicked idea, though hardly have the time to implement it.... Infocom text-based games through VoiceXML, would make the ride to work far less boring. can't see any reason why it wouldn't work, and actually should be fairly easy to do....
Walter H. Trent "Muad'Dib"
Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe, IMHO
My first son was born on January 8 (1999)--Stephen Hawking's birthday. My second on March 14 (2001...yes, today!)--Albert Einstein's birthday.
I can hardly wait until 2040 when the Nobel Prizes start rolling in...
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324006
"The guy who runs that page, Martin Rebas, offers other number treats, including the -2 club for people who can't even remember 2 digits of pi."
Look carefully at the names on the list. One of them is Simon Plouffe. Here's his web page: http://www.lacim.uqam.ca/plouffe/. Yep, with Bailey (who I just saw on a *random* mailing list) and Borwein, he created an algorithm to compute arbitrary hexadecimal digits of pi (without computing the previous digits). I wonder if there's anyone else famous on there.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Except that the Fahrenheit system is based on the freezing point of water. Zero degrees F is the lowest temperature at which water is liquid when saturated with sea salt.
And human body temperature is 100 degrees warmer than 0. Now that we have better and more exact calibration methods we've defined the scale with freezing and boiling of distilled water at one atmosphere with 32 degrees and 212 degrees being defined as 180 degrees apart (180 degrees means the exact opposite in plane geometry). The recalibration has resulted in human body temperaure being inconveniently adjusted to only 99 degrees F.
-Brian@all.your.base.mesaurements.are.belong.to. na ture
The 1-800 number doesn't work in Canada or I suspect overseas.
So maybe we should call it American Pi.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Why not celebrate Pi approximation day instead? It's on an easier to remember day: 22/7.
The guy who runs that page, Martin Rebas, offers other number treats, including the -2 club for people who can't even remember 2 digits of pi.
Does my bum look big in this?
Dmoz has a bewildering array of links on the topic of Pi. If ever there was an argument for people having *way* too much free time on their hands, this is it.
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Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
I hope that's clearer now :-)
And if you scroll to the bottom of the TellMe Extensions site, you'll see their slogan: "Hack the Phone". I'm waiting until someone creates an interface to a Kevin Mitnick site. *g* There's something wonderfully self-referential about that....
Hmm. Webster's says that either rivalled or rivaled is correct. Bummer.
:-(
The rhyme came from one of Martin Gardner's most excellent Scientific American Books of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. I'll have to look and see what spelling he used.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Here's hoping you, Galileo Galilei, Alan Turing, and Enrico Fermi are enjoying a quiet informal gathering on this, your birthday. You may have had a funky haircut, but you changed our view of the universe beyond belief.
-drin
With TellMe, you have to listen to two ads before you get to an extension, or anything else useful. How many on Voxeo?
I would prefer to be stringing together empty beer bottles.. If I drank 5k bottles of beer, *that* would be a party :)