NP Alabama Pi

[Vaska Tumir]

Absolutely right.  And silly me.  I checked on the thing in the meantime,
and the hoax seems to have spread from Yale.  But, and this is both genuine
and quite as delicious, the Indiana House of Representatives once tried to
legislate the value of pi (in 1897, for some reason settling on 4), but the
Senate let the bill die after Purdue math Professor C.A. Waldo explained the
idiocy of putting pi into Indiana law.

Vaska

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at hotmail.com>
To: <vaska at geocities.com>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, July 03, 2000 8:35 AM
Subject: Re: NP Alabama Pi


>
> I can neither confirm nor deny, but this sounds like typical internet
> satire-news.  Funny, and half-beleivable, but phoney.
>
> DM
>
> >From: "Vaska Tumir" Governor Fob James says he will sign it into law on
> >Wednesday.
> >
> >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,"
> SNIP
> >Lawson called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot
> >be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the 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."
> ________________________________________________________________________
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