NP Alabama Pi

[Henry Musikar]

That's excactly what they would say....

BTW, how do you "contact a legislature?" I would think that it would be more 
effective to contact the office of the legistlator who is supposed to have 
proposed the legislation.

AssB4,

HenryMu

>From: "rwan" <r.wank at cable.a2000.nl>
>To: "jporter" <jp4321 at IDT.NET>, <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: NP Alabama Pi
>Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2000 16:49:15 +0200
>
>Re: NP Alabama PiI've actually contacted the Alabama State Legislature to
>check whether any such bill was ever proposed and/or passed. The 
>information
>I received was emphatically negative, even though rumours of such being the
>case have been popping up regularly during the last appr. 2 years.
>Pi is - and remains - as yet undifined (beyond the 210 billion digits after
>the decimal point). Amen.
>Richard
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: jporter
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Sent: Monday, July 03, 2000 4:03 PM
>Subject: Re: NP Alabama Pi
>
>
>
>
>
>From Vaska:
>
>
>
>
>Can anyone confirm or otherwise that the deliciously/eerily bizarre Alabama
>law proposal on pi ever got passed?  I found this posted from AGITPROP NEWS
>(5.20.98) on the Roy Bhaskar list.
>
>
>[snip, to the biblical justification]
>
>"...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."
>
>Can't confirm or deny the veracity of the AGITPROP story, however,
>
>between the Biblical literalists and Platonic Idealists (PI) there would
>definitely seem to be a lost middle ground. Your post reminded me of a NY
>Times article from Feb 10, 1998, that's been lying around on my bedroom
>floor: *Useful Invention or AbsoluteTruth: What is Math?* by George 
>Johnson.
>At last, an excuse to pick it up.
>
>I won't reproduce it here, but the gist: There seems to be growing support,
>among those who think about such things, that Pi (and other versions of
>Platonic Idealism) ain't so absolute, after all. Not that Math is a
>"relativistic free-for-all," but it may very well be a human invention- a
>manifestation not just of our brains but of our bodies, and the "grounding
>metaphors" [George Lakoff- quoted in the art.] that link them.
>
>Bottom line: Math works, but that doesn't mean it's the absolute truth, 
>even
>though many scientists (crypto-Platonists, no doubt!) appear to operate as
>such.
>
>
>cheers,
>jody
>

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