Now Mike, that’s going a just a LITTLE too far, don’t you think?
[font color=“red”>Sounds like a conspiracy to me!</font]
I’ve just read the snopes pi=3 story. Funny stuff. One thought-provoking “quote,” however did provoke me to thinking. One of the arguers in favor of the legislation mentioned that the ratio of the circumference of a circle (when that circle is formed by slicing off a chunk of sphere) to its “diameter” (I assume, determined by measuring the parabolic side of the slice, rather than the flat side) is clearly not equal to 3.14159. Another arguer quoted the verse in Kings which brought up the original issue. This verse is describing an altar font, which I would tend to think of as being basin-shaped, as being ten cubits across and thirty cubits around, and round in the compass (actually, the quote in the snopes story was “ten cubits across, and thirty cubits in diameter, and round in the compass,” a pretty good trick, but let’s assume a careless error in transcription on someone’s part, and that 1 Kings 7:23 is basically as I described). If you measure the interior surface of a basin for your diameter, instead of through space across the top, it is eacy to see that the ratio of circumference to “diameter” is <3.14159:1.
I’m not mathematician enough to design such a basin, except through trial and error, but if someone wanted to , I suppose he could manage a pi of 3.0, if he was willing to cheat as to what a “diameter” is